It's not hate, it's how folks see the game.

 I know Naxx is supposed to be an entry lvl raid dungeon like Ubrs/Lbrs and Kara before it. The difference is, those instances were actually hard when they first came out. They had to tone down the difficulty of those dungeons to make it more accessible to people and what did it lead to? Nerfing content that had previously taken a good bit of skill to get through. The main reason I left was the big content nerf to raid bosses in TBC. I was pissed that all the time and effort I put in on fights was wasted and anyone could breeze through it.

It pains me even opening this thread in the first place but..people,the content put in northrend up to this point is yes-just the begining.How i know this?One i know a guy who works at blizzard and can tell me up coming info before anyone else gets it *that means you guys/girls*.Go ahead rage all you want about (yeah right thats just a bunch of bull %#$@)(why dont you tell us whats coming up next after the big release of Uldar).

Well its because i dont have to,so stop complaining so much on the threads because a blizzard employee will never ever take the time to look at this site and pop open this god forsaken FAIL topic about northrend difficulty.Because you want to know why?Blizzard doesnt want you blowing through this expansion so easliy and just willy nilly getting the SHINEY PURPLE weapons and gear (giggedy).They want you to all wait till uldar sets in and the more upcoming content to come.

ULDAR HAS NEW GEAR FOR YOU TO GET SO YOU CAN GET ON WITH YOUR LIVES AND EASLY***(not really easly for everyone because nothings easy right now)COMPLETE TASKS WITHIN THE GAME.After all you most of you are at 77+ by now and it is just a game.Remember that golden rule-the better gear and weapons you got the more EPIC and POWERFUL you become.

Makes complete sience so no more kids come on this thread and range on.Go tell you mom's to buy you a new time card and play the game rather than post crap and acting like you know what your talking about.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From someone who knows what hes talking about.

Not only is your post badly spelt and poorly constructed, it actually reads as gibberish and fails to make any point whatsoever.

Originally posted by geekgamer

 i know a guy who works at blizzard and can tell me up coming info before anyone else gets it *that means you guys/girls*

Sure you do, none of us have ever heard that before. Comical at best, nice try champ.

From someone who has no idea what hes talking about.

Fixed

Great job,you noticed a couple of errors.Want a certificate for good student of the month?

And anyway like i said,can you prove that..champ?

Originally posted by geekgamer

Great job,you noticed a couple of errors.Want a certificate for good student of the month?

And anyway like i said,can you prove that..champ?

I wasn't the one pointing out errors, learn to read.

Besides, the burden of proof isn't on my shoulders, champ, it's on yours. You made the ridiculous claim about knowing a Blizzard employee, it is your responsibility to prove it, period.

It is obvious that you are lying anyways. What a poor attempt at grabbing attention, typical teenage behavior at it's very best, so predictable.

As if the ramblings of a fifteen year old child hold any merit regardless, you are trying way too hard, you need to accept your age and grow up. Instead of trying to fake being an adult, when you clearly are anything but.

I liked WOW. I recently cancelled. WOTLK was severely dissappointing. 3 pocket raids and a reused dungeon from vanilla (dont give me that tired excuse no one saw it as I know for a fact 90% of all major guilds on my server at least killed a few bosses before BC), heroics that only add more numbers, a new battle that results in an offensive win 100% due to lag and completely overused item models

3.1 isnt anything special, a new raid with every boss having a "hard mode". Great so we get to grind easy mode to gear up for hard mode, I cant believe fanboys can stick up for this. Seems to me they are just trying to keep you busy and milk your subs as long as possible with only providing the bare minimal return.

 You know, everyone cites the nerfing of Kara.  It's legendary.  What no one notices is that what they 'nerfed' were ERRORS.

Lets look at the hideous 'nerfs' 

Opera

- BUFFED Big Bad Wolf, increasing damage, health, difficulty.

- NERFED Romeo.  Pre-nerf, Romeo was the hardest hitting boss in the instance (harder than prince or nightbane) which made it nearly impossible to do without grinding tank loots (as he could quickly crush non-epicced tanks)

NET: Made 3 encounters have equal difficulty instead of an easy encounter, a moderate encounter, and a nearly impossible cock-block.  

Shade of Aran

- NERFED Flame Wreath.  Flame Wreath used to trigger off a number of abilities and hunter pets, making it virtually impossible to do the fight consistently (it would randomly detonate even in no pet, no movement environments)

NET:  Made the boss possible to learn, instead of a random-ass murder spree that rewarded you for reading forums to learn the random abilities that would trigger it (totally unrelated to movement), kicking your hunters and warlocks from the raid, and made the fight fair, instead of a punishment to casual raiders.

Nightbane

NERFED: Skeletons, raid damage.

NET: A 15 minute hell encounter that was nearly impossible for raids that had priest/druid healers as only shammies and holy pallies (mainly pallies) could take the skeleton hits when it spawned on them.  That created an encounter that could only reliably be beaten by guilds with holy pallies, thanks to spell knockback mechanics.   Preferably two of them.  

So the legendary kara 'nerf' was a bugfix.  

Originally posted by protoroc

I liked WOW. I recently cancelled. WOTLK was severely dissappointing. 3 pocket raids and a reused dungeon from vanilla (dont give me that tired excuse no one saw it as I know for a fact 90% of all major guilds on my server at least killed a few bosses before BC), heroics that only add more numbers, a new battle that results in an offensive win 100% due to lag and completely overused item models

3.1 isnt anything special, a new raid with every boss having a "hard mode". Great so we get to grind easy mode to gear up for hard mode, I cant believe fanboys can stick up for this. Seems to me they are just trying to keep you busy and milk your subs as long as possible with only providing the bare minimal return.

About original Naxx - Well I guess you didn't have that many major guilds on your server. I can tell you that we had so few guilds on our server step foot in there. Maybe 1 or 2 at the most and this was a launch server. Again, you are using the "everyone plays the game like me so it must be true" argument and it just doesn't work in this case. Blizzard has said that like 5% or so the entire playerbase ever saw Naxx.

As to 3.1 being nothing special..... what more can you expect in a patch? One of the largest raids ever in the game. Another VoA boss. Argent Tournament. Dual Specs. And tons more little things here and there. The patch for me was a 749 pre-download file! That's incredible for a patch. It is comparable and even larger than some of the patches of the past - like the ZA patch or Sunwell patch. If you do not think this patch isn't "special" then please tell me what you expect from a content patch.

Originally posted by Zorndorf

Originally posted by protoroc

I liked WOW. I recently cancelled. WOTLK was severely dissappointing. 3 pocket raids and a reused dungeon from vanilla (dont give me that tired excuse no one saw it as I know for a fact 90% of all major guilds on my server at least killed a few bosses before BC), heroics that only add more numbers, a new battle that results in an offensive win 100% due to lag and completely overused item models

3.1 isnt anything special, a new raid with every boss having a "hard mode". Great so we get to grind easy mode to gear up for hard mode, I cant believe fanboys can stick up for this. Seems to me they are just trying to keep you busy and milk your subs as long as possible with only providing the bare minimal return.

Fail: No one saw Nax before (if you count 1% as "all" you are silly).

Furthermore there is one complete open world PvP zone AND a new BG: Strand 

Since you didn't know that it is PROOF you didn't even play.
 

In the new patch you are not even aware of the content also:

You forgot the new Colloseum construction (with the aid of the complete server).

The Arena PVE Colleseum mounted fights.

A 14 (!)boss Raid.

A complete revamped Arena rating

And of course the new exciting dual specs for every class.

Go whine somewhere else and don't forget to play the crappy competition.

If you CITE something, why even ignore 80% of the new patch content.-----> pure proof of trolling  ----> that ways pls.

And using the word "fanboy" shows very much you are trolling in our forums (so better "read" the features of Wotlk better because you just stood in your underpants by not knowing even obvious things of WotLK).

 

You don't have to get so upset just because someone doesn't like WoW or WotLK. It's ok, really, they are allowed not to like it.

I like WoW, played it during BC. Quit over summer before WotLK because I found that I was soo bored in game, I would just fly around in circles in Shatt chatting with people. WoW had basically become a chat room for me that cost $15 a month.

I came back when WotLK came out, bought it, but didn't get very far in it. I couldn't stand the terribly redundant and boring quests they force you to do to level. I didn't really care what things were awaiting at endgame because I knew they were mostly things I had already seen or done before - Unbalanced Arenas, Raids that you have to run over and over again until you get enough good gear to move onto the next raid, rinse and repeat. Daily quests that extend the boredom and redundancy of the leveling quests. Rep grinds, Grinding BG's, not because they are fun(they are the first few times a day), but because you have to in order to get better PvP gear so that you can hold your own anywhere in PvP.

Sure, I missed out on Lake Wintergrasp, which I was looking forward to. But I wasn't about to make myself plow through that sea of boredom just so that I could be max level again. 

So yes, I didn't like WotLK either. It's ok. You love it, thats fine too. Arguing over facts is one thing, but telling people their opinion is wrong is futile.

Well said my friend.Thats the perfect post to end this thread,its been up for a while.

Originally posted by Antipathy

Originally posted by Zorndorf 

We downed Onyxia with 2 - nice fight btw -  (for another guy who didn't even see the dragon before) and got me a nice 18 slot bag for the bank and 30 gold each.

Tomorrow I do the solo Alliance fishing in Ogrimmar :)) and just had my my Thrall head achievement in Ogrimmar. All tx to achievements.

 

 

When the OP was talking about the previously poor soloing capability of his priest, I couldn't help remembering - wasn't it a pair of shadow priests who were the first to 2-man Onxyia at 70?

The OP said he was a holy Priest. One of the best played holy Priests I ever knew soloed without difficulty and he soloed things that pretty much no one else could solo unless they had uber gear and really knew what they were doing. He knew what he was doing of course too, but he wasn't epic'ed out. And this was before TBC was even released so no help from +spell. His gear was primarily +healing though I think he kept a few items with +holy damage as well on them.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that the OP can do a 3 character group quest on a holy Priest. In fact, I'd say that holy Priest would be one of the best characters to do something like that on especially if he has some purples and blues from TBC. But even that isn't necessary. The changes to +spell have really helped healers out, which is also why resto Druids are now good at soloing too. He said yellow so it's hard to tell if that means exactly at his level or just a little under, since some yellow quests do have green elites.

Since they designed the expansion to be heavily "user friendly" like this if they made the slightest change and this caused quests to be more time consuming or "challenging" you would have millions of people protesting about that than the quests being too easy.

Originally posted by Zorndorf

My brother phoned me tonight. He is leveling his warlock as a level 69 in Northrend.

He finds it hard. Mobs come in groups of 5 and ... his clothy is much more fragile than his older epic lvl 70 fully geared plate Paladin 5 months ago.

I didn't find much difference with my rogue (but we have far more tools to vanish etc and I was dressed in season 5 gear)...

Other friends also said the cloth classes that are NOT fully dressed in epic gear have a much more difficult  time in Northrend.

---

I don't care much about open world difficulty as I always look up PvP in those level ups and so they are extremely fun - but - it shows your "average" level up avatar can't be compared with a fully geared epic level 70.

----

Guys saying above the quests in Wotlk are "boring" are the real laugh in this thread, because WotlK has hundreds of mini games which are much more varied than standard quests (and like I said in the PvP process it is even far more fun).

These guys show up here suddenly - without even the basic playing of LW or ANY dungeon or WotlK Raid experience or ANY arena play these last few weeks - and  they STILL come bumping in to spit complete meaningless opinions of gaming content they didn't even touch .

The latest arena results show how things already changed since patch 3.08 and they still cite these things of 4 months ago. Pure and utterly trolling.

Their egos simply are just too big to play a Blizzard game. Perhaps they deserve a Mark Jacobs. :))))

I'm often curious too, when people say WOW quests are boring, what game do they consider to have exciting quests?

While WOW does have some 'kill 15 of x' type quests in Northrend, there really aren't that many.  Most of the quests have unique twists.  Then they throw in crazy quests every once in awhile, like where you ride onthe back of the huge guy in Zul drak, or fly on a dragon in Dragonblight.. not to mention the crazy dk quests.

But the question is.. if northrend quests are boring.. what game has more exciting quests?

If northrend pvp is boring ( SotA and WG), what game has exciting pvp?  Both AOC and Warhammer have dumbed down versions of Wintergrasp.  In Warhammer, you can't move seige weapons and only the front door is desctructable.... in AOC.. well.. LOL.. everything is inferior to WG.

If WOW raids are boring... what game has better raids?   Warhammer has very few dungeons and they are very lame.  AOC has a few endgame raids, most of which are broken.. and the ones that do work have bosses that are just tank/spank with no phases or special abilities.  The bosses in Wrath's heroic dungeons have more AI by far than anything in any other game.  Those games are still in the 'more hps, more damage' mode when trying to create difficult encounters.  Mentally go through the heroic dungeons in wrath and think about the cool abilities and AI that are going on.  Then imagine playing AOC and Warhammer where every single boss is like a mini-patchwerk.

EVE is the only game that has pvp better than WOW's, and it has almost no real quests, no real pve and no raids. 

Again, if WOW is boring in Raiding, Questing and PVP.. what games are better?

Originally posted by bryan1980

Originally posted by Zorndorf

My brother phoned me tonight. He is leveling his warlock as a level 69 in Northrend.

He finds it hard. Mobs come in groups of 5 and ... his clothy is much more fragile than his older epic lvl 70 fully geared plate Paladin 5 months ago.

I didn't find much difference with my rogue (but we have far more tools to vanish etc and I was dressed in season 5 gear)...

Other friends also said the cloth classes that are NOT fully dressed in epic gear have a much more difficult  time in Northrend.

---

I don't care much about open world difficulty as I always look up PvP in those level ups and so they are extremely fun - but - it shows your "average" level up avatar can't be compared with a fully geared epic level 70.

----

Guys saying above the quests in Wotlk are "boring" are the real laugh in this thread, because WotlK has hundreds of mini games which are much more varied than standard quests (and like I said in the PvP process it is even far more fun).

These guys show up here suddenly - without even the basic playing of LW or ANY dungeon or WotlK Raid experience or ANY arena play these last few weeks - and  they STILL come bumping in to spit complete meaningless opinions of gaming content they didn't even touch .

The latest arena results show how things already changed since patch 3.08 and they still cite these things of 4 months ago. Pure and utterly trolling.

Their egos simply are just too big to play a Blizzard game. Perhaps they deserve a Mark Jacobs. :))))

 

I'm often curious too, when people say WOW quests are boring, what game do they consider to have exciting quests?

While WOW does have some 'kill 15 of x' type quests in Northrend, there really aren't that many.  Most of the quests have unique twists.  Then they throw in crazy quests every once in awhile, like where you ride onthe back of the huge guy in Zul drak, or fly on a dragon in Dragonblight.. not to mention the crazy dk quests.

But the question is.. if northrend quests are boring.. what game has more exciting quests?

If northrend pvp is boring ( SotA and WG), what game has exciting pvp?  Both AOC and Warhammer have dumbed down versions of Wintergrasp.  In Warhammer, you can't move seige weapons and only the front door is desctructable.... in AOC.. well.. LOL.. everything is inferior to WG.

If WOW raids are boring... what game has better raids?   Warhammer has very few dungeons and they are very lame.  AOC has a few endgame raids, most of which are broken.. and the ones that do work have bosses that are just tank/spank with no phases or special abilities.  The bosses in Wrath's heroic dungeons have more AI by far than anything in any other game.  Those games are still in the 'more hps, more damage' mode when trying to create difficult encounters.  Mentally go through the heroic dungeons in wrath and think about the cool abilities and AI that are going on.  Then imagine playing AOC and Warhammer where every single boss is like a mini-patchwerk.

EVE is the only game that has pvp better than WOW's, and it has almost no real quests, no real pve and no raids. 

Again, if WOW is boring in Raiding, Questing and PVP.. what games are better?

I can name one game that has MUCH better quests than WoW: Guild Wars. Guild Wars has a continuing story arc of fun and engaging quests that I actually enjoy doing. I feel I'd rather chew broken glass than level another character in WoW.

Beyond that, I don't enjoy questing much. I don't enjoy being forced to run boring quests either. I would much rather get a group together and just go kill things, its basically the same thing as WoW quests with the exception that you don't waste time running back and forward to quest givers, and you actually get to socialize with other people. But hey, that is just my opinion.

WoW's PvP can be fun at times, but the emphasis on Arenas is a bit of a downer. I enjoyed Eve's and SWG PvP more than WoW's. But WoW's is still fun.

There are multiple things discussed at once in this thread and Zorn et al seems to misunderstand what I mean so I will summarize it as follows:

- Blizzard has made dungeons (5-man, heroics and raid content) easier across the board

- Blizzard has released much less content for people that raid actively in the last two years (and seems to in the coming year as well) - please look below for facts (only raid content):

7 Nov 2004 - Molten Core, Onyxia

7 March 2005 - Azuregos, Kazzak

12 July 2005 - BWL

13 Sep 2005 - Zul'Gurub

3 Jan 2006 - AQ20/40

30 June 2006 - Naxxramas

9 January 2007 - Kara, SSC, TK, Gruul, Magtheridon, Doomwalker (Kazzak is a revamp so does not count)

22 May 2007 - BT/Mt Hyjal

13 Nov 2008 - Zul'Aman

25 May 2008 - Sunwell

14 Oct 2008 - Sarth, Malygos, Archavon

May 2009? - Ulduar 

At a first glance this might look good. Using a metric such as bosses per month show a drastic reduction though: 

2004/2005: 2.14 raid encounters per month

2006: 3.00 raid encounters per month

2007: 4.58 raid encounters per month (the year of the raider!)

2008: 1.33 raid encounters per month

2009:  (assuming Ulduar plus one more 'Ulduar' during the year will result in ~2 raid encounters per month which is back to 2004/2005 standard)

If you then add that encounters are becoming much easier than before (which means that the content does not last as long) you understand why raiders are less than happy - and at least on my server that includes basically all guilds from straight casual/friend guilds to the hard-core. If you like to raid WoW is not up to its former standard right now.

Once again we can argue whether this is a good business decision or not, but looking at arena stats for this season (40% less players this season compared to the last) I believe that Blizzard is either spending more time on other projects (my hypothesis) and letting 'go' of WoW a bit, or they do not have their eyes on the ball (which I doubt).

Originally posted by Sikhander

Once again we can argue whether this is a good business decision or not, but looking at arena stats for this season (40% less players this season compared to the last) I believe that Blizzard is either spending more time on other projects (my hypothesis) and letting 'go' of WoW a bit, or they do not have their eyes on the ball (which I doubt).

Actually, using the arena stats as proof for your argument is not accurate. With the changes Blizzard has made to the arena, it is much more time consuming and "hardcore" than it use to be. In other words, to be successful and the top of the arena, you need to invest more time and energy than ever before. Read the interviews with the top players and see how much time they put in.

If anything a decrease in arena stats further proves that the game is more casual focused with fewer and fewer "hardcore" players (or players fed up with PVP/arena too). Blizzard does not need to release as much content now because the playerbase (the majority of the playerbase that is) isn't going through it as fast.

An example: 10 man Ulduar will give Emblems of Valor, the same as 25 man Naxx. Why do you think this is the case? People have their theories but mine is that it should say something about the playerbase. It should tell you that not as many players have made it through 25 man Naxx as people would like to think and Blizzard knows this; and it should also tell you that Blizzard is concerned with the ability of the playerbase to conquer 25 man Ulduar. In other words, if you do not have the equilvelent of 25 man Naxx gear, you do not stand a chance in Ulduar.

Blizzard knows this and as much as people want to complain about it, the game isn't as easy for the majority of players as many people think it is.

Edit: I just looked it up and about less than 20% of the top raid guilds on my server have downed EoE and Malygos. This means that they haven't gotten enough players through 25 man Naxx to get the key/quest drop.

Edit: bad math

Templarga: I do not get those numbers. Which server are you on?

I just went through the guilds that normally post on our server forums (which is far from all). Out of 49 guilds, 33 has defeated everything (in 10-man and 25-man format). Only 8 guilds had not compleded Naxx. And 10 had not defeated Malygos.

These guilds represent 40% of all level 80s on my server (using armory and warcraftrealms). When going through warcraftrealms and checking on guilds that do not regularly post on our forums (we have alot of russian guilds that obviously have their own forums) out of the 10 first guilds I checked ALL had defeated Naxx and roughly half had defeated EoE and Malygos (another 10% so now we are up to 50% of all level 80s on the server). 

Assuming that not all players are interested in raiding (at all) I would go as far as to say that close to everyone that raids at all has defeated Naxx on my server, 2/3 of those have then also defeated Malygos etc.

Just as a side note: My server is in the EU and is not a crazy raidcentric server. Just an old middle of the road server.

Originally posted by templarga

Originally posted by Sikhander

Zorn - you still need to check what parable means since you so obviously fail at reading comprehension.

However - I will define what I think is easy for you:

- Undergeared level 70 character buys WotLK 2 days after release and are 80 all dressed in level 80 epics, all heroics cleared multiple times and Naxx cleared a few days after Christmas and in addition I had a level 80 DK (not with epic gear) at the same time. And the group of players I played with were not even hard-core anymore. We just casually leveled up and did dungeons together albeit that most of us have played the game since release.

Compare this to the TBC release and you will see a huge difference in difficulty level.

Now...we can argue whether this is the right business decision on behalf of Blizzard or not but the difference in hardship is immense. I am willing to bet that just as Blizzard failed at getting Kara, Gruul, Magtheridon, SSC, TK and heroics right at TBC release (way to many over-tuned bosses) they failed in the other direction this time.

 It is a casual's paradise. That does not make it a bad game or an easy game - it makes it the PERFECT game for casual gamers. Why can't people understand that?

had to chime in here;

you are bang on the mark there mate. I have played so many freaking MMO's I could puke. I canceled WoW a number of times over the years but found myself leap-frogging about 8 games ( WAR, EVE, POTBS etc etc ) the last few months......A mate talked me into subbing WoW again ( not played since Xmas i think ). I am glad he did.

I work...alot. I work 6.5 days a week, 363 days a year, I've not had any holiday since 2001 and I work unsocial hours. This means it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to form any meaningful friendships in an MMO. I simply can not be online the same time each day - I work days one day, nights the next.

In the week since I resubbed I have:

Got 80 on my DK ( yes i made it @ wotlk launch but kept flipping back to other toons )

Started running Heroics

Started to get some nice gear

Got my speedy flying skill

Yes I know to alot of you it is trivial piffle. Infact it is almost pathetic, but the important thing is I have had a blast doing it. I play with 2 RL good mates and we can all just go "afk a min" at the drop of a hat. No fuss.

The point to my rambling? WoW IS casual friendly, and I also apperciate just how good this game is compared to the rest of the market right now. Lots to do, accessable, competitve and polished. Northrend easy? Sure at no point was I stuck, but on the flip side there is so much choice of stuff to do that you shouldn't get stuck.

/end pointless ramblings

Your right about the casual thing.For example on aggramar server,which is one of the best servers on the game compared to illidan,many of the people just seem to have fun.To put it more simple,all i see them ever do is duel outside goldshire and hang out mostly in stormwind talking about real life situations(more of like a chat room)but its like a world reunion.

Horde on illidan (my favirote server) don'ttake things to seriously before you get 75+.You die in any low level dungeon below 75+ is no fuss from any one,just a quick laugh and say rez me back.One wipe out from the whole party and someone might leave due to thinking it might not go as planed,we just invite another from lfm and continue playing till we get the instance done.Not to say its a all casuel game,its just played my natural players no matter how geared or hardcore they are.