"What went wrong" -- Why one druid leaves WoW

Having taken at least two exteeeeennnnnndddddded breaks from WoW myself, I'm always suspicious when I hear someone's stepping away, but here's another one (thanks for the link, Revelart).

Of Teeth and Claws: Hanging up my claws:

1. Change in end game target audience. One of the key design goals of Wrath of the Lich King was to make the raiding end game 'more accessible' to the player base. This involved removing attunements, creating intentionally easy encounters, and nerfing anything that came across as too difficult. As I have been told repeatedly when I complained about this shift in focus, I'm living in the past when I state that I want the TBC end game back - WoW has moved past that model and is now something different. Fair enough, I guess, but this new game is not the World of Warcraft that I loved."
...

After [completing end game content], all that is left is the hard modes, and I simply cannot get excited about those encounters because they present nothing new. In many cases it's just "kill faster", "heal harder", and "screw up less". Unique encounters suck me in.... rehashed encounters push me away.

...

3. Removal of attunements. In the past content has been gated by a series of attunements, which represented plateaus that players had to achieve in order to enter certain content. While not a perfect system by any stretch of the imagination, this forced players to experience one tier of content before moving on to the next and had the effect of slowing down progression.

From the view of bettering your character, the complete disappearance of attunements means that there is literally no valid reason to run any pre-raid content. If you're a good player the gear you gain from questing is sufficent to get you through Naxxramas, and loot upgrades fall like rain in that instance. This speeds the game up, and leads to faster burn out of raid-minded players.

I'd like to include more, but I think that's enough of a steal for now. Honestly, head on over and give it a read if you haven't already. I do agree with #3 there in a big way, even though I never attuned in TBC! I enjoyed the pre-raid content quite a bit. Part of the attunement hit my favorite zones and quests list. I've also posted on it here (Attunements made you do your homework) and a little on the quest chain I enjoyed most here.

Karthis might really stay away, at least for a while. There's another post where he talks about the other games he's playing. Those that, like me, tend to break "for RL" usually come back, I believe, but I've also noticed that I can fill in the WoW craving fairly well playing a number of other games, particularly Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I don't have the muscle in my system for GTA4 yet, but doing that would probably keep me away even longer than RL is right now. If you can find another MMO that works, well, sayonara. Can't say I've played Ultima Online more than a month or two the last three or four years, knowhutuhmean, Vern?

Edit:
Looks like Part-Time Druid is having the same feelings (and he's the author of the blog I link to in a link in this post; he's been complaining about removing attunements as long as I have)...

At some point I exposed the gears and wires of WoW, it’s inner machinations. I used that knowledge to manipulate the leveling game, to get powerful fast. Now I just wish I could put the old machine back together again.

I guess the real question is whether opening raids to more players is financially beneficial, and if it's financially beneficial for the long run? If your top-tier guys all bolt for Conan or LotR or whatever it is we haven't seen yet, don't they take the cachet with them, making others eventually follow? Part-Time has another great phrase... With LK, we have: "Welcome to World of Twinkcraft. Leveling is distilled, processed, and the quickest paths are easy to find." The "exposed the gears and wires" is particularly apt. Everyone knows how to play now. WoWHead and Thottbot and WoWWiki get consulted nearly every day of play. Mathes (now "theorycrafting") can be done more thoroughly by players than devvers, it seems.

I just want to play. And I want to remember what I did -- and have a reason why. Look, once players are able to make MMO content as well as developers, we've got a problem. As I plug over on Curmudgeon Gamer, "We've obviously gotten to the point where quest creation is a franchiseable process, easy to reproduce by almost any french frying knucklehead."

Attunements made you do your homework

Here's a longish quote from Part-time Druid (huh? Sounds familiar; luckily I think I predate the blog) called "Removing Attunements BAD!", posted in Feb, quite a while before I started ranting that the new, advancement-friendly WoW is a bad idea. Here, the Part Timer shows there are practical reasons to keep things as difficult to attain -- self-training.

So, Black Temple will be open for anyone who wants to enter come patch 2.4. Surely there are hardcore raiding guilds everywhere bemoaning this development, angry that basically anyone with an account can now tread on “their” turf. Well, I can’t evade that argument. It’s true. I can now get together with 24 other guildies and hit Black Temple. It should be fun for us when we wipe in about five seconds, and the fun will surely continue as we wipe over and over and over again. You see, the point of the attunements to these major league instances was twofold. One, it required a good deal of coordination and determination to complete the necessary steps. Two, the “hoops” you had to jump through FORCED you to prepare yourself for what was to come gear-wise.

One might find the same argument works even for new players who blast through the lower levels too quickly.

Cheaping the WoW experience to entice new players?

I was reading WoW Insider today and was intrigued to hear that lowbies can get mounts at level 30 instead of 40 now.

This prompted a response from Zarhym [a Blizzard forum mod, iirc] 'Allowing players to purchase and ride mounts at level 30 does not at all diminish your prior accomplishments in my eye sockets, Ithnin' This was followed by a post explaining that new players may get their mounts ten levels sooner, but they have ten and soon twenty more levels to go through before they reach the endgame. The majority of responses in this thread are supportive of the change.

I'll disagree, as you might have guessed already from my Take the Nether off the AH post. It's easier to level with a mount. That's why we all buy them. The world contracts when you've got a way of getting places 60% or 100% more quickly, and that means it takes less time to to whatever it is your character needs to do.

To level a new character, you still, generally speaking, have to pass through the same content to get your experience as you did when WoW was first released. Now Duskwood, one of the more memorable zones in my leveling below 40, will have all sorts of folk riding through at breakneck speed. That makes Duskwood easier, and cheapens the time I spent there, and I was there a while.

(And if memory serves (it might not), haven't the experience requirements for leveling already been cut considerably? Certainly attunement's been shut down, which stinks.)

But here's my main gripe: Blizzard had already found a way to make leveling easier for your alt characters. It's called starting your Death Knight at level 55. My highest level alt is level seven. I don't care much for the lower levels. I'll certainly be giving a Death Knight a shot, though, even though they sound like a moonkin-like hybrid (non-squishing magic using tankable) in many respects. A Death Knight is already going to be powerful enough to run the content I remember enjoying. Heck, if you just start me off strong enough to adventure in Duskwood, I'd probably play alts more.

Does the Death Knight cheapen the game? Arguably yes, but in a much different way than making mounts cheaper and more available or reducing XP needed to level. Now experienced players can create a special class of alt char that doesn't have to lowbie grind. We've solved the problem that Blizzard must have seen when BC came out. Sure, Blood Elves and Draenei are k3wl, but I didn't have much fun blasting mana eels or whatever they were for 7 hp a pop. The Blood Elf starting levels looked spectacular, but I couldn't leave them and quickly got tired of snarking around -- and heck, my main saw the same architecture in Outland. Many other veterans must have been similarly unimpressed with the new alt experience. Okay, Death Knight in and problem (hopefully) solved.

So the main reason to make lowbie leveling easier, imo, must be to get new players involved more quickly. This suggests that the endgame (and near endgame) content must be much more enjoyable than the lower level questing to new players. Is the motivation that if you can get players new to WoW to endgame quicker, they're more likely to stay and keep paying?

Instead of cheapening lower levels by playing god with leveling economics, why not do like you did with the Death Knight -- put in the development time and change the game. Put in instances for level 5 characters, perhaps. Have lowbie PvP battlegrounds. Allow people to level in PvP until level 30 or some such. Now traditional leveling is still an option, but you've got the flash that's needed to keep some of your new revenue stre... ur, players.

If you don't simply introduce new routes in the same vein for leveling lowbies but instead starkly change the lowbie game experience, you might find more veterans starting over too.

And there's fragment #2

Last night, the guild leader and I did a stealth run to grab the second key fragment on the way to Kara attunement (horrible picture included, below). Though Amanna says this is pretty easy to do solo in his guide, his notes of when he tried make things sound a little more complicated.

Now here’s where the real strategy comes in. I hate to admit it, but I died about 5 times trying to kill the Guardian to get the key.

Well, we died about 3 times trying to get past the mobs at the start. Amanna and other guides say to bypass the first two guards and time your run through the patrolling mobs that come afterwards on the left. We eventually, after a few aborted attempts to sneak past the stealth-detecting bog lords on the right (aborted as in, "Bog Lord hits you for 3000"), waxed the first two Coilfang Warriors at the entrance (only one death trying, though if you're smart that won't happen -- sap one, then lure the second up to the instance entrance, run and heal outside the entrance once you're done, duh), and then took out one of the wandering patrols to make timing things easier. The Steamvaults is a horribly busy instance, at least at the beginning, and some good [computer] hardware would really come in handy.

After that, grabbing the fragment was pretty easy. I made the same mistake as Amanna, going full-balance moonkin, thinking the damage would bring it down easily. I ended up having to down a Super Healing pot. To continue an already hazy evening, I forgot to bring out my trees too, for some strange reason.

I also hadn't checked his notes before the run where he suggests to bring the Guardian to the surface, and the guild leader started drowning at the end -- but didn't die even though I cast Regrowth on myself twice instead of him. Nice spaz, Jal. Bring breathing potions/cherries. But things worked out, and, aside from the Bog Lord corpse runs, we got the fragment in no time at all. Much easier than managing a PUG, and it's always fun to spend some time with guildies.

First Fragment Down

I'll plan to follow-up with a more in-depth set of notes on taking down the bosses in Shadow Labs, but this is a quick note to say I've gotten over my whining from last night and have my first key fragment on my way to Kara attunement. Another fun night overall, which is, if you've been reading, sarcastic. Had a guy bail because his parents made him go to bed, if you believe all you're told, then had another drop briefly because his traps were being tripped. Pretty sure it wasn't me, but heck, I don't know a hunter trap from a hole in the ground. Also couldn't convince the remaining party members that I could heal the instance (have over +600 healing with healing gear on and healed the group for a while last night when the pally had trouble), and we sat for quite a while before scaring up a resto (whatever the equiv is) priest, making this the second marathon SL run in as many days for me.

Did I panzer much? Not really. It's a hard sale to get a slot in a SL group when you're balance spec'd as anything other than DPS, in my very limited experience. My gear gives well over +650 nature damage now, so I was usually dealing 1k with 2k crits again, with Moonfire and Insect Swarm doing DoT in parallel. Overall, pretty good tanking tonight, so I was only able to pull aggro a time or two. I'm currently using a cloth chest piece for a little more DPS, and felt a little squishie.

So SL panzering was all stealth tonight. I did quite a bit of swapping from my +dmg weapon and off-hand to Braxxis to get mana reg and to proc Omen of Clarity. Elune's touch is actually a heck of a lot more useful than most make it out to be, and I was never oom for long. When I wanted to try out panzer-ige, I'd put on the feral dmg mitigation gear and simply try my best to pull. Again, the tank was good enough to grab back aggro with, as mera has mentioned, his (later her) snap aggro skills. I only pulled aggro away from squishies a few times with wrath-spams, mostly seeing the tank grab aggro first. If two trash mobs broke towards our squishies, I was useful pulling the threat away, however, feral gear on or no.

Quick comment on snap aggro: In my experience, panzering requires starting up as a panzer; it's not a good role to take mid-way through a fight. When I think someone really needs help (like they're running from the tank -- *sigh*) and I need to grab aggro, I do swap from 'kin to bear to use the snap skills. Panzerking takes some serious planning, not to mention a good starfire lead.

And man, let me say that, with that +nature dmg, Jal is pretty danged powerful. I'll need to find the app that keeps track of who does how much damage in a party, and I do have to give the proverbial props to the warlock and mages for sheeping and CC'ing the mobs in general rather than just DPSing, but even with the poor moonkin's DPS gear "of Nature's Wrath", I was piling it on. Nice that balance specs give you the flexibility to run panzer or DPS.

Kind of a pain to be doing this all on the iBook G4 rather than the new overclocked GeForce 8500GT. Was looking at 4 fps for a while, aka "most of", today. Nice slideshow.

Ah, and finally, for a while we had a feral, resto, and balance druid in the party. Was fun to collect the whole set for a while.

A Kara attunement guide you (aka, "I") can understand!

Looks like our feral druid friend Amanna has a Kara attunement guide you can understand. Apparently he's borrowed these "Karazhan Attunement - Cliff Notes" from WowWiki, but he adds some comments on how he was able to solo a few extra parts with feral druid specific strategies. I'm thinking it'll be a while before I'm doing the same with balance, but the post seems a good place to start.

Setting up to raid

I just hit 68, which means I wasted 30 mins flying around in my new druid flight form. Fun, but not very productive.

It also means I'm close enough to 70 to start sniffing raiding. I bugged a guild recruiter at a raiding guild who said that in addition to mad skillz in my class, I needed to be tuned to Kara. Okay, I knew tuned was "attuned", but what's Kara?

Karazhan is a raid instance that requires a heck of a lot of work to enter. In this case, that work culminates in grabbing something called "The Master Key." Blizzard provides an interactive chart (Kara's in the middle of the "Raid 1" tier) to help you figure out where you need to go to get the key. I've looked; it's still overwhelming complicated. WowWiki tries to make things better, but you're still left with lots of links going all over. Whatever the heck ajs.com is has a Burning Crusade Progression Checklist. Still pretty danged daunting.

I'll start stepping through it all soon enough, and hopefully it'll make more sense.

Looks like we start here, in the old world beside Duskwood (Duskwood which was, I'd say, one of the more enjoyable zones in the old world).