Infraction for Kjallstrom: General Idiocy

Kaubel · 11/03/08, 10:05 PM

Post: The Burning Crusade: Scoreboard
User: Kjallstrom
Infraction: General Idiocy
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

I'll let you read the thread and figure it out.

Original Post:

Zones and Quests
There were several highlights. I loved Zangarmarsh (pretty AND different zone design), which had plenty of quest areas and a variety of quest types. The idea of bombing runs was fun, but unfortunately started to guild old after the umpteenth rerun of them. In general, zones were massively better laid out. It was much harder to miss a quest, flight points were more convenient, and so on. I also loved both the Draenei and Blood Elf starting areas, compared to the originals - wider variety of quests, and shorter run distances between them. If you haven't ever done the Furbolg totem quest on Azuremyst, I'd recommend it. Some very nifty effects there, that I hope to see similar usage in Northrend.

5-man content
I think the idea of heroics as a bootstrap into raiding was a good one. When I first started them at 70, they were hard. They started to become trivial, at least until Magister's... and now, post-nerf, they're stupid easy. Badge loot is nice, in that it lets you avoid the random number generator's opinion of you/your class. At the same time, it's frustrating to finally down some boss only to discover that some pants anyone can buy at the store are better than what they have. I'm really looking forward to the way Heroic achievements (some of which sound nigh impossible) will be implemented in Wrath.

Raids
The class balance in raiding shifted over the course of TBC. When we first started Gruul, Affliction Warlocks were king; as various patches and tweaks went through, and as itemization from our current raiding drops went up, we saw various rogue, mage, and paladin specs start to grab the top spot. Probably the most frustrating aspect here was when a particular class or ability was nerfed because of its imbalance in Arenas. I'd like to see The Blizz just balance certain abilities completely separately between PvE and PvP.

Karazhan was a beautiful zone... but the compression from 40-man down to 10-man nearly destroyed our raiding alliance. Everyone needed to pull their weight, which was an improvement. It also made our raids more social (you could be chattier during a raid when there wasn't the risk of 40 people yakking at once).

PvP
I don't PvP enough to care about class balance, beyond witnessing nerfs to my PvE effectiveness that were driven by PvP. I think the Arena system is a good choice for some players, but it's frustrating to see gear of a certain quality pretty much guaranteed after N weeks of playing, when it takes potentially much much longer to organize 25-man raids, and get the luck of the RNG, and have sufficient DKP to get the gear through PvE. Obviously, I'm seeing this through a particular lens. I had fun getting a set of S2 daggers with a 5-man team, before resilience became Serious Business.

Professions
The balance of BoP craftable items was broken, particularly with regards to tailoring for casters in preparing for early levels of raiding. The class-specific engineering goggles helped there, but engineering still has a lot of fun items that you never see used because they take up a trinket slot. My sense was that blacksmithing, and to some extent leatherworking, really got the short end of the stick (in part because their materials were harder to farm). I didn't jewelcraft myself, but gear socketing is a fun source of additional customization.

Best and Worst
Best: Karazhan. Fun encounters, many of which were difficult at the time, beautifully designed (much better than the repetitive looks of SSC and TK, in particular), and very loreful.
Worst: Rep grinds. I love exploring new content, so being strongly encouraged to have to do the same thing every day over and over again frustrated me. I only recently got CE to exalted, for example; I just can't bring myself to do super-repetitive tasks.