There are folks who don’t do BGs or Arena… plenty of raiders who don’t PvP… and folks who do dungeons and raids only a couple of times a week…
This is a bs troll post. Vanilla players were the players that created the min max crap you are referring to. They brought it over from thier private servers with thier nonsense gear lists bis and speed clearing.
1 Like
Says the lvl 10 hunter
1 Like
I predicted this when Ulduar released. You are confirming my predictions. Casuals are leaving the game and it’s going to die. You can’t have a big video game without a lot of casual players.
The WOW dev team has forgotten this and they deserve to reap the ramifications of it. They deserve to lose players and profits.
That is why Classic WOW (vanilla) is the best version of the game and will never be eclipsed by anything the WOW dev team ever does. They don’t understand how MMOs work anymore because the people who designed WOW vanilla who did understand have left.
Retail WOW is an action RPG now with raids like Lost Ark. The only difference is it doesn’t have the top down view. It’s too complicated and difficult for most people. It started with TBC and got way worse with Ulduar in WOTLK.
The game is effectively dead unless they re-release Classic Fresh again or do Classic +.
That is why I’m moving on to Diablo IV where the Devs seem to understand how to make a decent game.
The Diablo IV devs have done an amazing job with the game. The beta was fantastic. I suggest if you are bored with WOW to try Diablo IV when it comes out. It is very different from prior Diablo games and VERY good.
So long WOTLK. You won’t be missed much. I’ll be back for Fresh Classic if that ever happens but WOTLK is just abysmal compared to even the beta experience of Diablo IV.
I could easily play the beta for Diablo IV for the rest of the year and be happy.
3 Likes
This was an interesting post for me to read. This is the longest post I have ever made on this forums, but I think it explain you what’s going on.
It’s actually quite the opposite of what you think it is. WOTLK is a way more casual friendly expansion than Vanilla or BC. But the philosophy of WOTLK is totally different that Vanilla.
An MMORPG is a style of game that very loosely mocks real life in a fantasy way. Dedication (amount of time you spend), gameplay skills, communication skills are among the most important factors that separate people in a true MMORPG. More time you spend, higher skills you have or more friends you have, more you can achieve in an MMORPG.
The original wow’s philosophy, that lasted up to mid BC, was a way more complete design of an MMORPG. In an MMORPG you want to have different layers of difficulty, so different people based on amount of time they want to spend, talent they have, communication skills and etc can earn what they deserve to earn.
In WOTLK in order to make the game more casual friendly and create the feeling of everybody gets a trophy, they removed many of the bottom layers of difficulty or nerfed them to the point of non-existence. Let’s have a simple break down of these layers of difficulty and their difficulty comparison between Vanilla/BC and WOTLK.
Layer 1) Leveling:
Vanilla/BC: 5/10
WOTLK: 1/10
Leveling: Vanilla wow leveling was way more difficult than WOTLK. Damage done was lower, damage taken was higher, mana, threat and etc were much more difficult to manage. There were less green/blue items thrown at you. There was no heirloom. All in all it was way more challenging and fun to level in Vanilla while leveling in WOTLK just feels like a some routine chore you must do.
Layer 2) 5 man dungeons:
Vanilla/BC 5mans:: 5/10
WOTLK 5mans: 0/10
I soloed most dungeons from 15-80 with different toons. 1 man run. They are absolute jokes for a 5 man groups.
Layer 3) Attunements
Vanilla/BC 5mans:: 4/10
WOTLK 5mans: 0/10
Attunements were removed in patch 2.4. One the biggest mistake in history of wow.
Layer 4) Heroic dungeons
BC: 5/10
WOTLK: 0/10
I soloed a couple of normal heroic dungeons on my prot paladin in P1. They are absolutely jokes. The H+ added some difficulty level to it though but that’s still out of place.
Layer 5) Professions
Vanilla/BC Professions: 4/10
WOTLK Professions: 1/10
It’s way way easier to skill a profession to WOTLK. Doesn’t need much explanation.
Layer 6) Pre-raid/PVP Gearing
Vanilla/BC: 5/10
WOTLK: 1/10
There are all kinds of BOE items. Badges fall from the sky for free every where. There are too much epic items that you don’t know what to do with. Farming Honor for a starter PVP gear is super easy with WG and honor nerf.
Layer 7) Raids
Layer 8) PVP Ranking
The nerf on Layers 1-6 results in less people being stuck at those levels and also less people finding those layers challenging and fun enough to be happy spending time in. With that being said the only fun layers leftover in WOTLK are raiding and competitive PVP.
Speaking of PVE, raiding has multiple difficulties with Normal raids being super easy even in P2. So that creates 2 issues. Firstly, More people are at a higher level of difficulty than what they deserve to be based on amount of time they spend, technical and social skills they have. And secondly, since there is not much challenge before raiding, that leaves raiding and logging and trying to parse the only real challenge of expansion’s PVE aspect. P2 provided some challenges with introduction of HMs, but think about P1 that can repeat in P3; Super easy raids on top of all those super easy layers I mentioned. So there is really not much to do beside trying to parse. That’s why you see everybody trying to be hardcore with raids, cuz they were pushed up layers quickly by poor game design into the last layer, raiding, and there is not much to do beside that. And if they decide to make an alt to try something new, it quickly falls into the same design flaw.
3 Likes
someone who is computer savvy enough to download an addon and put it in a folder and respects other people’s time enough to watch a 3 minute long tankspot video couldn’t be a casual? what
“Oh i’m a casual fisherman”
“oh nice, what type of rod do you have?”
“rod? pff, that’s for tryhards, that’s the problem with fishermen these days, all of them have a rod, back in my day u could just go to the water’s edge and bob your head in and out like a pelican and catch fish”
3 Likes
I thought I would read the responses before my sub expired and wow I did not anticipate such a response. I want to thank a significant portion of the thread who had some really great insights that hopefully the devs read. To other more snarky posters I want to say that WoW devs listened to players like you and not me and we got retail so, pat yourselves on the back because you all played a massive role in creating current retail 
.
4 Likes
What? There is no way this is true. I have 2 and purchased a full set.
Casuals don’t care about logs, metas, gs/ilvl. They do care about getting that shiny new item hopefully and killing dragons with friends and guildmates.
5 Likes
I guess I still have no idea what a casual is.
I play once a week, im literally a casual.
Since I parse high I’m put in this category of being hardcore which doesn’t make sense, bad players play more than me.
I just don’t get it.
1 Like
I agree with pretty much everything you said except for this. When you use the word flaw, it kind of implies that there was some mistake. But this path of game design was completely intentional. There was an interview that Ion did around Cata launch where he mention that raids like OG Naxx, where only 2% of players saw the raid, were becoming financially unviable because it was hard to justify spending so many resources on such a small amount of players. That’s why everybody started getting funneled into raiding.
2 Likes
Casual can be a measure of time, OR a measure of effort. A guy who plays basketball two hours a week at the local YMCA with his buddies might play more than a pro player, but the pro player is playing way harder.
Seems people think casual is a skill level.
1 Like
You’re playing a 15 year old rerelease of a game for the first time and you’re upset that people are better than you?
What?
1 Like
Well when you’ve failed at everything in your entire life except pressing the same button over and over for 20 years then of course you’re going to want to milk the perceived reverence of parsing 
1 Like
Imagine failing at classic content this bad.
2 Likes
Imagine saving that snip and reproducing it dozens of times on the forums to defend yourself from allegations of being a loser IRL
Didnt need to save it, i just looked up your trash gameplay on the spot and took a quick snip it.
Took a few shots the snip it tool was actually rejecting it due to the parses being so bad.
1 Like
My poor-spirited brother,
I’m much more inclined to believe you fail at everything in life because you can’t even parse in a figured out game, than I am to believe Drinknblink fails at life because he plays the game well.
3 Likes
Imagine making allegations of being a loser IRL when you have absolutely no idea what the person does in real life and thinking the insult might actually be hurtful. 
Some people are good at trolling and some people aren’t. Come on, you can do better.
2 Likes