Infraction for Camaris: Failed to follow instructions

Juice · 11/03/08, 10:45 AM

Post: The Burning Crusade: Scoreboard
User: Camaris
Infraction: Failed to follow instructions
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Thanks for the list - after Kaubel said to stop.

Original Post:

Zones and Quests
Zones and questing were an amazing improvement over what they were in 1.0. That being said however, there are two major issues I found with questing in general: Lack of an overarching story, and lack of quests leading into raiding. My personal favorite remains Hellfire Peninsula, with a tangible sense of urgency in the quests, and a very clear focus on the enemy in Burning Legion and the Fel Orcs in their citadel. However, and this illustrates my point of an overarching story, the quests lose their urgency around the time you start dealing with the Cenarion druids. Zangarmarsh in particular seems very disconnected from what was going on in HFP, and the whole naga story is not entirely satisfactory. It gets 'worse' after that, with the arrakoa being an underdeveloped enemy, and Nagrand being very pretty, but not all that interesting to Alliance at least.

I quite liked the last two zones. Although the manaforges do get a bit repetitive, the twist in the story where you discover Kael is allied to the demons was a nice moment. SMV really felt dangerous as a new level 70, and is probably my second favorite zone of the lot.

5-men content
The new small dungeons were a good change. However, I don't think all instances should've had a rep faction attached to it. Especially the CoT instances are not that suitable for farming, since they are so linear. They are best suited for 1-2 runs to complete quests or maybe get that one piece of loot, but not to farm for reputation. The Championing system is a very welcome change to this, I think.

Heroics were a good addition too, although the heroic versions of the normal level 70 instances should really have had improved gear.

Raids
Raids in themselves were quite good, I think. Black Temple and SWP are the best examples of raids with lore, interesting bosses and immersive design. The attunements were horrible, however, and so was the "Karazhan hoop" all guilds had to jump through. But enough has been said about the 40->10->25 bottleneck.

PvP
I'm not a PvPer, so I can't really comment on this. My only worry is that PvP (and Arena in particular) seems to have inevitably become the primary balancing criterium for classes.

Professions
Jewelcrafting gave me quite a bit of income, so no complaining there. While annoying and expensive at times, having the blue designs be world drops was an interesting choice, and made JCers a bit more competitive.

Misc
The Aldor/Scryer thing, and possibly Shattrath in general, didn't really work for me. Shattrath, with its overcast skies and rather simplistic design, has never felt like a city to me. It's a bit too obvious that it's almost entirely a load balancing trick based around the 2 banks.

Best and Worst
Best: Improved levelling through questing and making it easier and more enjoyable to make money.
Worst: The complete mess they made of early raiding, with attunements no accesible early 25-man instance.

Random comments
Re: art direction. I agree that in retrospect, zones like Netherstorm and stuff like Exodar probably went a bit too far. I don't really agree that its ugly, but I'm glad we're going back to Azeroth in the new expansion. That being said, Hellfire Peninsula was a piece of quintessential Warcraft, IMO. It was the essence of Draenor as seen in the RTS games, and it had all the old orc clans running around.