My first WoW character was a Rogue.  Asmiroth was created 15 minutes after the first servers went up and was my main all through Cataclysm.  I saw the highs of Lich King and the lows of Vanilla/BC.  The playstyle was a direct rip from the Assassin in D3 and one of the first classes the game made available in beta.  It was so set in stone that it had the same talent tree from beta to BC.  All that to say the following.

The Rogue’s time is over.  Monks are the way forward.

WoW Insider covers some of the points for me.

Right now, Rogues have increased group stealth going for them for Challenge Modes.   Other than that, there’s next to no reason to play them.

• Monks have better mobility
• Monks have a more fluid combat style (see the Insider article)
• Monks deal better burst damage
• Monks can swap targets (points are per monk, not target)
• Monks have better defensive options
• Monks can heal themselves and others
• Monks have an AE rotation
• Monks can spec to Healer or Tank or DPS

I remember hearing about the monk a whole while ago and thinking “I hope they address Rogue issues”.  The difference between a Cataclysm launch Rogue and a MoP Rogue is next to nothing.  Still use poisons, still use auto-attack, still energy starved, still need to ramp up damage, still stuck on single targets.

It’s a sad day but today, I hang up my daggers and put on my claws.

People say the BC expansion was the best.  Well, player pops say that wasn’t the case  -Vanilla saw the largest growth, peak pop was well after LK.  To add fuel to the fire, Outland can be summed up in one picture.

I’ve leveled a monk to 61 now and there’s something to be said about the entire leveling experience being streamlined. Cataclysm updated the old world quest system and that’s still pretty solid.  Outland is a shock once you get back to it.  I rather enjoyed the hand holding for quests in the old world, some sections being phased, and the cross-realm zones allowing you to seemingly always have a few other people in the zone with you.  The experience itself is great.  There’s no real challenge in it mind you, which is quite a bit different than the game 60+, but still.  For a new person to the game and genre, it’s a solid game.

The concern I have is in the actual levels and rewards.  Cata had streamlined a lot but MoP further does so by completely removing skill ranks and trainers.  You ding 10, you automatically get new skills, talent choices and unlocked dungeons.  That’s all fine and dandy but there’s no real choice anymore.  At level 60, I have 4 talents chosen.  Those 4 choices are the only thing separating me from every other monk out there, playing a Windwalker.  That just feels weird.

Second, there are levels where you don’t get anything new.  A solid 3/4 of them from what I can tell.  This kind of makes the levels feel arbitrary.  You don’t really get stronger from any direct choice, the system simply says “here’s a couple points for you”.  I rather enjoyed the skill increases, it made each level meaningful.  Now you can go from 60-90 and only unlock 5 skills.  Odd.

I do understand they want to make it as simple as possible for people to be able to jump in but who a) hasn’t already played WoW and will start now and b) who hasn’t already played an MMO that will start WoW now?  I am thinking they have a saturated market presence, where there are simply no new customers possible.  Even the bitterest of MMO players, or the hardest of the hardcore PvP have played WoW at some point.  The entire push to casualize (and essentially trivialize) their game makes me scratch my head.

So I decided to give WoW another go this week, what with some extra time on my hands.  I’m always interested in what Blizzard does and the path they are taking.  Let’s be honest, they could sell dirty socks and people would line up.

MoP is an interesting beast.  On one hand, you have the “hardcore” options: raids and challenges.  On the other, the “casual” options: scenarios, LFG, LFR, pet battles.  The simplified talent structure (heck, class structure) is pushing towards the more casual crowd as the min-maxers are having less variables to tweak.  It took only a few hours for the first raid to be cleared, mind you they had two weeks to gear up for it.

Then you have to look at the new player perspective.  If you roll a Monk, then you get a daily 50% exp buff to help you level.  You don’t get it for other classes, so you’re stuck with the Cataclysm leveling model.  Old world is great, Outland is horrible, LK is decent and Cata works great that no one is around anymore.  The MoP model is a sort of hub structure rather than a linear path and the story telling is pretty decent.  Finishing a quest gives you a piece of gear related to your spec, which in my mind is a bad move.  No one levels as a healer or a tank and the stat allocation between DPS and those roles is massive.  That basically means that if you’re about to turn something in, your best bet is to swap talent roles, collect, then swap back.

The measure is the amount of fun you’re having and I am currently having a good time. I am taking it a bit slower than previous attempts, so the burn should take longer.  Who knows how long this boost to player numbers will last.  Advantage to MoP is that there are zero games coming out in the next few months (even a year) that directly compete with their playerbase.  Might work out well.

Mists of Pandaria releases in a day or so and WoW will see it’s 4th expansion sell like hotcakes, without doubt.  It will also see the largest player drop ever by Christmas so that it ends up below where it was pre-expansion.

Today’s MMO landscape if filled with F2P games that offer more, less or the same amount of content as WoW, just with differing levels of polish.  WoW’s major strength is that it was first at the plate with a polished, solo-friendly game and people find solace in that familiarity.  (As an aside, in the IT field it’s often said that launching early, even if there are massive bugs, is worth the hassle if you are first to field.  The money is just too big.)

Where WoW’s major problem occurs is that it cannot compete with the content delivery structure and payment models that F2P offers.  If I can get the same gaming experience (PvE themepark) with a steady stream of content for free (or piecemeal), then that’s a much better deal.  SWTOR will likely make more money in a F2P model that it could ever have in a P2P model.

WoW’s content delivery schedule is notoriously lengthy.  Polish means the world when you’re the only one providing the item.  It is no longer the only one on the field and getting 3 content patches in 2 years (1 of which was a complete rehash of old content) is poor money.  We’re talking about 180$ a year, or 60$ a patch.  I could play Rift for the 180$ a year and get 10 patches, with more content.

People don’t need a new raid every 2 months.  They do need something though!  A patch of social, a patch of dungeons, a patch of raids…break it up.  Find a way to get people wanting to log in for something to do.  MoP will either bring WoW back from a drain with content patches on a 6-8 week schedule or put the F2P machine in gear with 6-12 month patch spans.

I so hope it can do the former.

The Daily Blink has a good description of the hardcore raider mentality.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this applies to all of the so-called “hardcore raiders”but it surely applies to the vocal portion of the bunch.  While not being specific to WoW (the entire Mac culture is based on this), this mentality is certainly most prevalent in that field given both the longevity of the game and the sheer mass player base.

For a very long time, MMOs were designed around these people.  Hardcore players were the only players and raiding was what you did.  This was the essence of late Vanilla and TBC.  WotLK introduced a softer raiding cycle (minus Ulduar) making it available for many more people.  The game also took off like wildfire due to the horizontal gameplay options at 80.  Let’s not kid ourselves, it took 4 years to get to that point.  3.3 introduced the LFD tool, which completely changed the way MMOs were played and gave WoW it’s highest subs ever.

But the vocal minority moaned that LK was too easy, the game had been too simplified.  Not that the players had gotten better, no, never that.  Baron Geddon was technically a harder fight than Synestra….get out of town.  Long time players got better at playing, new players did not.  The skill gap between players increased dramatically as the game progressed and the numbers got bigger on gear and stats.  A 5% difference at level 60 was exponentially increased at level 85.  It’s much easier to balance a game around 500DPS than it is around 50,000.

So Cataclysm launched with a higher difficulty bar.  Hardcore players, with more skill, went through it fairly easily, with the fastest clear times of all time.   They complained that it was still too easy but better than LK.  Regular players hit a wall and after a couple months, quit.  Blizzard even tried lowering the bar with LFR for players to give it a shot.  Some regulars stayed but a lot simply left.  Servers are empty now and the subscriber numbers are artificially boosted due to D3 pre-purchases.  They should drop by about 2 million next spring, unless MoP hits it out of the park.

Do I blame the hardcore for the mess they put the game in?  Absolutely.  They are an extremely small minority (<1%) yet think the entire game should be balanced around them and only them.  You beat the game, you learned all the tricks and mechanics.  There is no challenge in the game that you cannot overcome now, other than an artificial number wall.  That wall is completely impassible for anyone other than you, essentially making the devs spend resources on 1% of the player base.

Get real.