Sup

Wrath has been a pretty sizable disappointment to most serious players. PvE is trivial to the point that no decent guild can take it seriously, and it requires less than 4 hours to do all of the game's current content, not exactly enough to keep a guild busy for a week. PvP has improved little from TBC. Arena is more of the same with generally worse balance and less skill, frustrating new maps, and permanent nerdrage amongst the hardcore over the increased, instead of decreased, RNG.

While I call the above reaction typical, I'm not sure what my own feelings on the game are -- I guess just ambivalence. The big changes that I felt the game "needed" didn't come in WotLK. Mainly, rated BGs, no racials in arenas, more complex DPS rotations in PvE that require sensitive timing, generally more sensitive and timing dependent play in PvP, and a way to bring the game back into the non-instanced world and thereby recreate server identify.

RNG continues to be a large problem especially as Blue's stance is that "it isn't a problem." I'm not so obsessed that I think the game needs NO randomness, but I think the game would improve with a bit less -- hopefully, the dispel resist changes are indicative that Blue is willing to compromise a bit on this topic of debate.

Ultimately, I'm not sure I'll ever love the game again as the game is so clunky when it comes to actually playing. I don't want to do 3s or 5s really -- I'd rather just run lots of stupid 2s comps so I can fraps. (Which I can't really do in 3s or 5s because they are terrible to watch. Yes, even 3s. Yes, terrible) My compromise is just playing a bunch of characters across a bunch of accounts but this involves the huge pain of keeping gear up to date on a handful of characters. Why is team hopping not allowed again? To prevent bad kids from getting gear? Seems to prevent a lot of players from just PLAYING the game. endrant I swear.

I'm really not one to glorify vanilla wow although I get that ranting like this makes me sound that way, a bit. Balance wasn't great and the game was quite simplistic and pretty goddamn boring. Rivalry keeps you coming back though.

I'm certainly not going to say anything stupid like "WoW is dead" or any such crap because honestly the game is probably only going to get more popular in the coming year and is weirdly improving (though not to the point where we'd like considering wrath was supposed to be a big step forwards) -- I hope that more depth becomes apparent as metagame starts to play a bigger role in arena gameplay and strategies and mixups begin to emerge.

It's been my opinion since the beginning of the season that damage has been greatly overestimated and that the scaling of healing is truly the scary part of wrath arena. It's a bit unclear if this will turn up true or not, but my experiences thus far leave me still believing it.

For the very select few who know who my priest is, I'm leveling him right now, and I'll hopefully be running the same team as last season. ^^