LOL …you’re defending BFA.
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As long as people insist they are the same game, to justify the linked subs, comparisons will and should be made. Want to consider them separate and different games? Separate the subs.
Otherwise, deal with it.
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Yea I mostly agree, yet somehow MoP managed to be surprisingly OK for me and better than cata.
I mean original WoW was dead in my mind, but as a diversion I managed to play MoP a few months and enjoyed exploring the zones and gathering professions/AH. Can’t say I loved the story, but much of the art was stimulating. Simply as an escape it had it’s good points. I could just chill in Krasarang Wilds fishing and gathering herbs.
Yeah, I avoided mentioning MOP because it managed to be a pretty decent expansion. Completely against my own expectations, in fact. I thought it was going to suck.
I wish Blizzard had gone forward with the MOP model and not the Timeless Isle model; the Timeless Isle model is what’s really killed it for me now.
I think you may be confused. When people say, “retail”, they mean BFA. And BFA is an individual expansion.
That’s a multivariate issue which Blizzard absolutely had a hand in fostering.
Item level has always been in the game. Where retail took itemization was in a direction where higher ilvl = better. There can be some exceptions for this, but Wrath featured raid divisions of 10man vs 25man where the loot was just better from the 25man version (even though 10man challenges like 3D Sarth or Algalon were much tighter fights).
This trend was refined further through MoP onward with LFR > Normal > Heroic > Mythic raids providing mostly identical gear but with slightly higher stats from the harder versions.
You also have to look at what type of content players were PUGing in the previous expansions:
Vanilla
A ‘gear score’ addon wouldn’t mean much in the context of PUGs because most players only PUG’d dungeons. Guilds handled the policing of their raiders in their own ways because they wanted to progress and that’s fine.
The Burning Crusade
Well, by design you had to be attuned for a heroic so the mere fact that you could enter the place often meant you ran the normal version countless times (and thus be geared accordingly). The expectation on heroics back then was that you hoped your group could clear it. Some heroics were notoriously difficult for groups who didn’t have at least some gear from raids. The game hadn’t reached the point where participating guaranteed completion/reward.
TBC is also where we first start getting into 10man raids. Kara was fairly entry-level but even gear score didn’t mean much – many of the fights were mechanically-intensive and just doing them correctly was the key to success. Kara was also a long raid and so PUGs usually aimed for partial completion. It was an atmosphere where non-raiders or alts looked to grab some purple gear where they could. ZA was more of a multi-layered difficulty within 1 version of the instance. PUGs were just happy to clear the place while the pro’s sought to get themselves a bear mount.
And then we catch up to Wrath where things changed even more…
Wrath of the Lich King
First thing to point out are the Heroics. WAY easier to get into than TBC by contrast. Also much easier to clear for epics. This is where Blizzard began to extrapolate on the ZA ‘layered difficulty’ via achievements. Those who wanted some extra difficulty to their content could aim to pick up dungeon/raid achievements for mounts and titles but it was kept optional.
As mentioned before, Wrath had raid sizes which were much more conducive for PUGs (both in player count as well as boss count/time to clear). The expansion became very accessible to players in a way the game never had. ‘Gear Score’ became the lowest common denominator tool likely because the design of the game which used to ‘weed out’ players who had not put in the time to develop their character appropriately were no longer there.
I suspect the addon was widely popularized, not because it would tell you who was geared correctly but because it would tell you who was “geared enough” (where “enough” represents an average for a group expecting to clear content. It didn’t concern itself with exceptions or any higher resolution analysis of itemization because by definition such players wouldn’t rely on such an imprecise tool to begin with)
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You’re absolutely right - BFA doesn’t even stand a chance.
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I don’t mean BFA.
I mean literally everything from WoD-onward.
WoD is where I fell out of love with the game.
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Although not great, Legion is better than WoD and BfA. I think Legion barely crosses the line into the “good” category.
BfA and WoD are firmly in the “something you scrap off your shoes” category.
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WoW became a very different game as far back as Wrath of the Lich King.
Blizzard has a fascination with drastically changing the game every expansion. I’ve never known whether to blame the the ambition of the lead developers or the players. Large changes to the game became “features” of the upcoming expansion.
Thinking about it, this goes back as far as The Burning Crusade. I could probably find all the quotes if I looked hard enough, but it was clear that Blizzard had a list of things they wanted to change going into the first expansion. Arena, Flying, eSports, shorter dungeons and raids, etc. If the core game mechanics weren’t nearly identical to Vanilla I think people would have a different opinion about it.
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BFA is better compared to WOD and equal to Legion to me.
It’s fair.
Each expansions changes the expansion before it. That’s how we got to BfA.
I disagree. The only good thing about Legion was the playable demon hunters.
And I hope we get another class next expansion.
My vision of a Tinker (Tank = Mecha, DPS = HOTS Raynor/Tychus, Healer = Terran Medic)
Necromancer (All the Skeleton Spam)
And Dark Ranger (Sylvanas type class)
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I mean it makes sense to compare any of wow to any of wow. People compare current to classic because that is what currently exists to play on, versus “back in my day bla bla bla!”
They are two completely different games though because of the time between them. Think of a CD from your favorite band, and then the CD they make 10 years from now. I doubt it’s the exact same style, because that’s not what people are into anymore. Things change, things evolve. There’s reason to love current things, much like there are reasons to enjoy past things. I might like what a band sounds like now, but I also probably appreciate how they used to sound.
If half the CDs in between aren’t available for people to listen to, making a comparison would be weird. You need tangible things to compare, which is why we use classic vs BFA. Personally I think they’re both great for different reasons. If I had time I would probably play both.
Classic was perfect and amazing, you shouldn’t compare perfection to some thing else. It will always look bad in comparison.
I don’t care.
BFA’s got WoW going in a direction I do not believe in. I didn’t come to play “World of (H.P.) Lovecraft.” I came to play World of Warcraft.
Old Gods as the main villains will never be compelling to me.
LK got WoW going in that direction, and it’s simply grown worse with each xpac that followed to the point where the game is no longer playable.
The whole point of the comparisons is to chart how it has changed, and why they are significantly different while starting from the same point…
If you don’t understand that, every one of those threads is clearly going over your head.
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Disagree.
I blame Crapaclysm for starting this direction. Wrath was the expansion that finally wrapped up Warcraft 3’s story; after that, Blizzard ran out of ideas and decided to cash in on the “2012 is the end of the world” hype that was running rampant at the time.
They’ve been trying to wing it ever since.