The changes that have been announced for Cataclysm seem to be a good choices in the right direction. I played a brief stint in Wrath of the Lich King, and all the people spamming with their "gear score" only confused me as to what was required to start raiding; so, I passed raiding altogether. Also, the badge system was an undesirable method of obtaining gear, and I am interested in the announcement Blizzard has given on the changes to that system.

I always love when people whine that raiding is being "casualized". Trust me, running even a 10-man raid is anything but casual.

Worst part is, most of the time these same raiders say they want the old version of WoW back because it "wasn't for casuals" when, in fact, the bosses were much easier to defeat in terms of mechanics and execution than now.

As is often said by Blizzard, just because someone beat Hard Mode Lich King doesn't mean you have.

@Daniel Your point is incredibly muddled. If you're saying the people that enjoyed 25's and wanted the better gear to show for their efforts, only wanted such to stroke their ego, you're then implying people that could only do / choose to do 10's were the opposite. If this is the case the content has always been the same, it was only the gear that differed. So if indeed they only cared about content why would they be so concerned that your gear was different?



I usually find it's the opposite that the people that can't or don't want to do 25's are more concerned with gear and feel they are being cheated. Where as people doing 25's simply want better loot because it requires a magnitude more effort and logistics to accomplish. Not to mention in general 25's are easily harder because of such.



Anyone who doesn't agree that WoW is becoming overly simplified has either not played the game much, for very long, or with any effort or curiosity when it comes to TC. Easily the most horrid changes coming in Cataclysm are the melding down of stats.



Gone will be the days of having a plethora of stats to choose from and actually trying to decide which piece of gear was better for what situation. Now it will be a simple matter of which item has higher numbers with the words coming after the numbers being completely irrelevant. According to Blizzard it was too "complicated" to determine the value of items. Which is complete BS for anyone that was willing to put in the minuscule amount of effort it took to find a site such as EJ and find the thread for their class and then the post that talked about gear.



Also now with any class being able to be near any race. The obvious acts of laziness from some of the previous raids with tier reusing models between classes and the PvP gear, only differing by skin. The future of WoW is easily becoming generic class of generic race has 5 pieces of generic gear and generic skills 1 through 5 maxed.



Patch by patch Blizzard continues to remove layers and layers of depth that once made the game so enjoyable and interesting. I quit just before TotC and quit miss what the game once was. They did a lot of great things in Wrath, and are looking to do some great things in Cataclysm, but the at the rate they are melding and generalizing things down quickly overtake any good they did.





@Mike the game has been incredibly casualized. I'll assume you never played a leading role in anything 25 man before Wrath. 10 mans are a joke compared to 25 mans, hence why all the top guilds will end up finishing 10 mans before the 25.. and no it has nothing to do with 10 mans being easier to run. Most top teir guilds will run 2 10 man groups and put in way more hours on 25 mans than 10.



@Guillaume "Much easier" is such an over statement. Bosses being hard or easy isn't the only thing that factors in making a game casual. Things such as badges being handed out like candy, and top tier guilds being forced to wait to progress while other guilds play catch-up, are among the things that have made this game immensely more casual. Not saying it was a better system, but looking back at vanilla when you could stack every buff in the game and it took hours to farm mats for consumables easily prove my point.

@Andrew - That's why I mentioned mechanics and execution as opposed to outright saying bosses were harder (that would be a lie precisely for what you mentioned). As far as the rest is concerned, the top-end guilds would have been blocked by Blizzard's system regardless, only the block wouldn't be as artificial as it is now (Lack of content would block them, as opposed to gated content). They mentioned that one of their design goals in WotLK was to make raiding accessible to most. They did, and now they can work on adding more content, possibly content requiring more dediation that seems suited to your tastes.

Can Blizzard win this one? No, and I'm not sure they want to.

Andrew - You sound like exactly the type of person my post is aimed at. We're probably never going to agree, but here's some of my responses.



"Your point is incredibly muddled... because of such."



This point came to me originally from a thread on my guild's forums - people (and there were quite a few) complaining that there was no point doing 25 mans anymore if the loot was the same. If that doesn't say they're in it for the loot, what does it say?



Speaking only for my guild, the only reason I find 25 mans harder is because of logistics - waiting for people to log on to fill the raid, dealing with a few sub-par players (even still) that can be filtered out in 10 mans. A 10 man is usually a tighter group, and smaller raids generally require each individual to do more (at least in variety of actions). I certainly find that I do less individually in a 25 man.



"Anyone who doesn't agree that WoW is becoming overly simplified has either not played the game much...talked about gear."



Disagree, and I've played the game plenty. This may be horrid to you, but it's fine for me. I read EJ, I theorycraft, and while I don't think having to know some things, like the hit cap, is so bad, I still think it's ridiculous that I have to know about 'above this number, ArPen works better', 'haste is less useful above this number', not to mention all the not-very transparent mechanics that combine to make the crit cap, etc, etc. IMO, a game like WoW shouldn't require a spreadsheet. I'd like to spend my time playing the game, not doing maths.



"@Mike the game has been incredibly casualized...

@Guillaume "Much easier" is such an over statement. Bosses being hard or easy isn't the only thing that factors in making a game casual..."



You might be nostalgic for hours of farming just to have all the necessary buffs for a raid, I'm not. I've raided from Molten Core on, and if I never have to farm a piece of resistance gear again, I'll be quite content.



I don't think making the game more accessible is a problem. Being able to get badges doesn't invalidate the efforts of the people who got that gear before it was available for badges - they'll be onto the next tier of gear, anyway. It sure makes it far less painful to gear alts or new recruits, rather than having to run old content again and again to get them up to par.



As much as it seems you would like it to be, the game is not built for the tip of the iceberg, it is built for the large section floating underneath. There's always going to be a group who race through content and complain that they're stuck waiting for people to catch up.

Top Tier guilds may make up a disproportionate amount of the forum posts related to raiding, but that doesn't mean they're where the money is, and there is an incredible amount of arrogance in some of the petulance that these guilds display when they don't get their way.

@Andrew Yeah, I only ever raided in Wrath, doing both 10 and 25-mans. The only point I'm trying to make is that while I really enjoyed the experience, it was anything but "casual". Maybe it is a good deal easier than it used to be, I don't know. I certainly would never have been able to play that game. As it is, the reason I stopped playing WoW was because of the difficulites and logistics of getting these raids organized.

I find myself agreeing with Andrew, to a point.  I stopped playing at the last patch right before WotLK was released, and sunwell's difficulty was removed (we almost had Muru w/o help from this patch).  Not to mention my main was an elemental shaman, and they destroyed elemental shaman damage with the reasoning that lavaburst will balance it (an ability not available till WotLK).

I didn't care for the 10 man / 25 man same dungeon focus when it became available for WotLK, and so I'm especially biased against the new changes now.  Having only experienced the relative ease people were able to pug and clear Karazhan and Zul'aman (although never was in a pug that could do the bear mount challenge) compared to never being in a successful pug clearing coilfang resevoir: serpentshrine cavern or tempest keep: the eye (my favorite zones in BC), to say that logistics is the only challenge...well I disagree.  There's a reason there aren't 5 man raid zones. 

As far as loot, I can't speak for WotLK's raiding, but my experiences in BC:  loot *always* matters.  I'm always skeptical of someone who claims (and many do) "I don't care about the loot, I just enjoy the friends, camaraderie, blah, blah, etc. etc."  If you remove all incentives to raid a dungeon, people won't raid it, even if its got a great storyline...and I'll argue TK had an *excellent* finale, with the fight with Kaelthas Sunstrider being one of my favorite fights in the game (although his intro speech did get old, until the finally did change that).  If you think back, when they removed attunement to Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, and improved badge vendor gear, did anyone who previously didn't beat TK or SS raid those zones anymore?  At that time they also nerfed the difficulty of SS and TK, so I think that people "concerned with experiencing the game with friends" would have made more of an effort to experience the storyline...they were empty from that point on.

Also, an aside, when you saw that lucky SoB with the phoenix mount, weren't you just the teeniest bit jealous?  I guess we'll see how it plays out....hopefully the content of Cataclysm will be more enticing than the changes to the mechanics.

@Daniel we probably won't but I enjoy a healthy conversation so I'm going to respond to what you said.





My point was simply thus. It seems the argument for 10's and 25's sharing the same loot is that the only reason people don't want it to is so they can get an ego boost. Along with that, that it's only the content that matters and anyone who believes otherwise is only interested in said ego boost.



If indeed it was only the content that matters, why does it matter if they share they same loot? 10's having different loot from 25's doesn't stop people who do 10's from progressing. The 10's are designed as such.



So right there, pretty much the only motivation behind the argument that 10's and 25's should share loot is indeed loot. The motivation is the opposite of the reasoning behind the argument. As such, the only people arguing in favor of 10's and 25's sharing loot, are equally as interested in gear as people in 25's and they just want it to be more accessible.





I think you're in a position where you're somewhat of a perfectionist but don't want to do as much work as it takes to perfect a character in a sense.



You can easily get by in WoW without having to do any of the things you listed. With minimal effort you can generalize every class and figure out what stats to grab and that's that.



Only if you're really striving to squeeze out every ounce of DPS or what have you, do you have to get into the things you stated.



My problem with Blizzard taking this away is that it removes an immense amount of depth that some people, including myself, really enjoy. YOU (and many others) don't HAVE to do those things, and not doing so will still allow you to play your class at a high level. It seems you want to max out the level you play your class at but you don't want to have to do all the things it takes to do so. In essence you want it to be easier.





As I said in that same paragraph, it wasn't necessarily a better system, I don't think it was, but it was just an example of how they just keep boiling down the game. Sure some of the boiling down was done for the better, but a lot of it in my eyes was unnecessarily done for the only purpose of making the game easier. That boiling down easily out weighs any good that came of it in my eyes.



I'm not saying the game should be built for the tip of the iceberg. I'm just asking that tip exists for those that wish to climb it. Currently that ice berg is being obliterated by global warming and is becoming a thin, flat sheet of ice and will soon cease to exist.



I easily understand why Blizzard is doing it. Money is money and a business is a business. I'm just stating how it personally ruined the game for me, even though I'm sure I was in the minority of the people that enjoyed such elements of WoW.





People keep asking for Blizzard to make this game more accessible. It's just going to come to a point where there's no incentive to do anything and no matter your choices you're the exact same as anybody else no matter the amount of time you've put into the game. I also believe this is ultimately what will kill WoW if anything ever does.



People just keep thinking that because the choice exists they have to choose it, and if they can't they're being cheated.

If you're raiding solely to have the best gear in the game, you're doing it wrong. Raiding should be about coming together as a team and using strategy to down bosses, while enjoying the content and scenery along the way. Yes, loot is a bonus and a payoff for your hard work, dedication and persistance, but it shouldn't be the driving motivation for raiding. Far too many people in this game see things from a gearing perspective only.  

Which is why the gearscore addon is tremendously stupid. 

I remember when epic items (aka purples) were truly that, Epic. It took hard work for you and your guild-mates to earn that gear and it showed off that work to all passers-by. Being able to say "I am proud to be a part of a team who has such-and-such gear" is now a part of the past. If you say getting better gear/loot/items isn't the focus of the game, then play your own way.

For those of us who min-maxed our gear and spells, the dilution of end-game gear is a sad, disgusting "solution". I completely understand that Blizzard needs to keep it's subscriber base so I see the need for more "accessibility" at the higher levels of play. It also means I most likely will not be coming back for the latest expansion. Sykoh and Heelir of Frostwolf.