It was very hard to balance it for PvP. I used to do BGs with a friend, and he’d throw his core hound against anything from Arathi’s blacksmith, and we’d watch the victim melt as it tried to run through the roads away from the relentless beast.
Are you high? You must be high.
Let me remind you what Beastmaster Hunter was in Vanilla and TBC:
Delegated to ‘solo gameplay.’ As in getting turned down invites for regular dungeons if you told the group you were Beastmaster.
Do you know where it was in Wrath? Well, i don’t know about yours, but mine was raiding in Naxx and ICC 25 mans. And no one complained about a BM hunter being in their Heroics either, for the first time in WoW’s history.
Even in Cataclysm I was happily chewing through heroic dungeons before they nerfed them. Which tells me it would’ve been perfectly acceptable in Cataclysm raids since my BM DPS was hot on the heels of my Marksmanship DPS.
Now if they dropped the ball in MoP or later in Cataclysm, that’s someone else’s problem. I quit after the Heroic Dungeon nerf that made it clear the people calling the shots weren’t listening to players like me (that enjoyed the difficulty) or developers like Greg that properly identified the issue with Heroics as a Learn to Play problem.
What an infinitely more honest summation of GC. Took the words right outta my mouth except put them much more eloquently. Well done. That’s about right…
I do miss that design direction. Everyone that ran TBC Heroics knew full well difficulty was turned down for Wrath. We asked them to tune them back up, and in Cataclysm we got our wish - briefly. Until the GD bads ganged up and labeled them ‘impossible.’ Well, yea…if you go in undergeared, ignore the mechanics, and don’t even know your DPS rotation like the bog standard LFD player, I guess they were. Me, the players on my friendslist I met through Heroics, and my guild had no problem with them.
Greg was literally the only developer I’ve seen before or since defend the difficulty level of a piece of content. The fact that some people don’t like hearing that they aren’t good enough at the game and need to practice instead of calling for difficulty nerfs doesn’t mean they need to be shielded from reality, molly coddled, and handed their nerfs on a silver platter beside their binkies. It really was a L2P problem. And there’s really no nice way to say, “Look - the players we designed heroics for are completing them fine. You guys that are struggling need to get better at the game.”
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I agree and disagree a little, at the same time. I think, in typical Blizzard fashion, that in up-tuning them, they were a little heavy handed (especially considering how faceroll Wrath dungeons ended up). So, while they absolutely needed to require a little more brain power, they may have over done it (certain boss abilities, maybe certain trash pulls, I mean it more on a case by case thing as opposed to “They were all hard on every boss and every trash pull” kinda thing).
Blizzard devs are really bad at finding happy mediums, and I feel like this was one of those “It needs to be harder than 2, but you went up to 11” sort of things. It was a pretty long time ago, but I recall having more issues in Cata heroics than I did in TBC heroics, and I did run both with guildies used to and properly geared for organised dungeon/raid content. (We also may have just let ourselves get soft during Wrath, some player responsibility should be taken into account. Just felt a lot stronger than strictly us getting soft.)
While I share your sentiment concerning the group you’re referring to, I don’t think you can say it’s millennials as a whole. I was born in 1984 and none of that stuff you mentioned existed until I was exiting high school in 02’. Most of the college kids in love with those ideas were raised by people born in the 70’s. There are people born in the 50’s and 60’s that taught this stuff to them. It’s a horrible direction, but it’s hard to put it on one age group or generation. It starts with the rich wanting to keep the poor weak or just being so out of touch that they think they need to do something about underperforming humans rather than just letting human nature and free will dictate their outcomes.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but this doesn’t have much to do with the OP.
I liked Greg too and I totally get why he said screw it and went to riot.
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It’s possible they were a bit harder than TBC. But to me that just felt like the proper progression. Vanilla we have regular dungeons. In TBC regulars got a little tougher, Heroics were introduced. In Wrath, both backslid a hair, and that felt wrong - I didnt complain about regular dungeon difficulty though.
I actually agree with casuals that say, ‘I paid for this, there should be a way for me to experience these things too!’
So to me seeing the difficulty turned to 11 in some places was just proper order. I figured it should be harder than TBC. I might not have been so against it had they dialed it back to 9 either, but as you say they always over-correct things.
I’m also prone to forget that not everyone in game has been playing since Vanilla, so throwing Heroics turned up to 11 at the newer players might actually have been overkill too. And Cataclysm did a number on the learning curve if you started with a fresh level 1, I could see being unprepared for what Cata Heroics put players through.
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I often think most people are complaining about the generation after ours (I’m an '88 model), and the names are mixed up. Like complaining about a Warrior’s Lay on Hands (for an example) - right ability, wrong class.
I could only like it once but you expanded on that so nicely, I wanted to properly compliment you. compliments everywhere!
He wasn’t my favorite, but I am certain things wouldn’t ended up like this. He’d probably make flying account bound through purchase once max than toxic half year to a year achievement grind just to fly. Ion good moments were I suppose loosing up the transmog stuff and when obtaining them. Ion still have room to improve, but that’s if he’s truly willingly to listen.
As of now I kind of miss GhostCrawler here, but when I log on League of Legends it’s not as much because he’s there.
I’ve come to agree with this sentiment, for sure. I will say- I started in 3.1, I was a pretty dang awful player until…WoD? Now I’m just average. But at the time, Cata was a dramatic left turn, and I haaaaated it, and I was in the group of players that resented Ghostcrawler. It even made my choice to go play other MMOs easier (Rift, Swtor eventually).
In the last few years I’ve looked back at my time in cata and think to myself " I wish I hadn’t given up so easily. I wish I had stuck to it, read guides etc."
Live and learn.
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Greg Street? A cool person, actual scientist and an engaging and witty writer. He catches a lot of hate but the game and community were better for his presence.
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Yet another reason to dislike the limit on those! I can’t like anymore posts for like 5 hours or you and Sprockets would both have one from me as well.
Honestly? Ghostcrawler alone couldn’t have stemmed the tide. I think based on his comments to the playerbase he was against detuning Heroic Dungeons in Cataclysm. But that happened anyway. Too many of the ‘oldschool’ Devs like Tom Chilton had already left, and like Mark Kern he could see the internal tide flowing against the direction he thought things should go. So he stepped aside.
No one’s perfect. I didn’t do much to help, if you guys think what Greg Street said was toxic or abrasive…woo, let me tell you I was probably redefining the term. The things I said then would assuredly get me banned if they were repeated.
And I wasn’t breaking my neck to teach new players having a rough go either. I actively avoided LFD, and had a tight group I ran with. There weren’t a lot of outsiders being taught our ways once we had them figured out. Maybe more people could’ve realized they were doable - and even fun - if we’d extended a helping hand, rather than being elitist jerks and dooming them to LFD Hell?
As you say, live and learn.
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I don’t miss Greg Street. He took away my locks tanking glyph because it was fun to use.
Most of the hate MoP got was due to the over-saturation of dailies that we had to do. Oh and people crying about Pandas for some reason. Even though Pandaren existed in WC3: TFT as actual characters (Chen for example).
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Tom left the WoW dev team during Legion, in 2016 in fact. Not in Cata.
You realize all these things you are complaining about with millennials should be aimed at their boomer parents right?
Who was handing out the participation trophies?
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ummm Millenials didn’t start that. WE WERE THE ONES RECEIVING IT AND WE HATED IT.
I hated getting “prizes” for doing something simply because I participated in it.
There is a reason why the incredibles, a movie set in the 60’s has this whole thing as a major plot line. “They are creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is generally exceptional”
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Do you even meet people? How many people do you physically know are like this? And if they are what did you do to help improve them?
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Part of it is the skill gap in this game is so amazingly wide that having it be “just right” for some players is such a narrow band.
There are guilds that are able to kill 5-6 mythic bosses in absolute crap gear and less than 10 wipes total while the vast majority would never last longer than 30s into boss one even in max gear.
In the Challenge Mode days you would have guild groups fail over and over while others could literally get gold in a 3 man (double sales were common) and gear even scaled!
I can only speak for WoD, because I enjoyed MoP. The reason people have stopped complaining about WoD being the worst xpac is because they have experienced BFA. This does not mean WoD wasn’t terrible, it means there is something worse.
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Basically WoD was the shiniest of two turds, but a shiny turd is a turd.
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