Ol' grey mare, she ain't what she used to be...Follow

TL:DR = Another "the game is easy now" nostalgic rambling.

Yeah, so anyway I'm pretty late with this revelation, but I though I'd share it anyway.

I've just been to Outland for the first time in a year. I was kind of looking forward to a return to the way things were for a bit. Don't get me wrong I've been having a blast leveling through Azeroth, I was just ready for a break from it. At first I was a little excited. I was questing around Zeth'gor and got ambushed from behind by a patrol; something that was noticeably absent during my time in Azeroth. It got the blood rushing, and in a small way I felt at home again.

Anyway, one of the things I'd always tried to do on my other characters was solo the 2-3 man quests. Arazzius was one that usually flattened me. Between the hunter, druid, and warlock I don't remember ever getting him much past 50%, but that was okay, it was a fun challenge. After trying a couple times I'd just hit general chat and ask if anyone else needed to kill him.

Things were different this time though. I ran up on my mage and pulled the two demon gals defending him, then got to work on Arazzius. I was running around, throwing up shields, blinking, all sorts of stuff. Eventually he silenced me as my shield went down and I died. I looked up and realized I had him down to like 18%.

"Heck I got this no problem" I said to myself. I ran back to my corpse, re-cleared some trash, re-arranged some things on my toolbar, put on those health restoration trinkets, and tried again. This time it went smoothly. I killed him with full health and half a bar of mana left, and even managed to handle some of the respawns I'd aggro'd during the fight. "Wow, woot!" and all that. I was excited, told my wife about it, and was in my little nerdy happy zone for a minute or two.

Then I sat down and thought about it. Part of me never remembered him being nearly that easy, and the plethora of unused CDs on my action bars was evidence of this as much as anything else. Ol' Arazzius didn't seem to have quite have the bite he used to have. Not sure what to make of it all, I put on my new trinket and headed around to do the some of the other quests. Over the next day or so they were all falling. Raging Colossus quest line? No problem. Boglash? He was easy (okay he was always easy). Rajah Haghazed? No sweat. Rajis Fyashe? Didn't touch me.

At this point I felt compelled to go online and looks this stuff up. It was feeling like I missed a massive nerf or something. I know Frost Mages are awesome and all, but this was getting ridiculous. Not the fact some of these 2-3 man mini-bosses were falling, but they were falling without me even needing to touch anything with more than a 20-ish second cooldown. So upon examination there didn't seem to be a nerf pre-se, the player characters are that much stronger then they used to be. I guess I always knew that to some degree. However, having been so long since I'd done any older content, I guess I'd never really appreciated the difference.

So in the end I'm still enjoying my nostalgic romp through Outland, but there's definitely something missing. The NPCs seem a bit long in the tooth. I wasn't planning on hitting Nagrand this time through, but now I'm sorely tempted to see how easy Tusker and the Ring of Blood are.

Thoughts anyone?

Yeah...Itemization changes + talents changes + heirloom make a lot of a difference.

I remember thinking I could solo Arazzius on my rogue, and I probably could have if I took the time to learn how to actually play a rogue. The first attempt was going really well, I was keeping up, uh...that HoT they have, and I'd use a potion if I got dangerously low. I ended up getting him down to like 5-10% and ran out of cooldowns and died.

Next attempt, rng wasn't in my favor and I died quickly, so I gave up.

I really wouldn't mind if they revamped Outland. I don't know what would cause it. They could definitely tie it into a storyline though along with the next expansion.

Disclaimer: China is still stuck in WotLK.

For unrevised content, Maz and Brisin probably have it right. Those Hellboar in HFP were designed to be a pain for players who were hitting Outland in gear that was substantially worse than what we have now. That started to be very noticeable with Death Knights.

Even when TBC was the current expansion, one was advised to either skip straight to Outland at 58 because of better XP and rewards or to grab a few upgrades from Outland before finishing the grind in Azeroth. That pattern continued when WotLK was released and I now skip to Northrend at 68 because the gear and XP are better.

I would guess that from a design perspective the same thing happened with Cata; however, because the new content largely replaced Vanilla it was harder to see. The new quest rewards and drops kick in well before TBC and WotLK content is encountered and there is probably more of a sense that the game has been nerfed because of that. Arazzius was designed for TBC, someproteinguy was hitting him with a toon boasting completely redesigned talents and gear that is two expansions ahead of what he was meant to challenge.



That raises a second point. Today, Outland isn't even close to current content and Northrend isn't much better situated. They are awkward interludes that get blitzed on the way to the second phase of Cata and for all the nostalgia they might hold there isn't much purpose to attempting to resurrect the grinds that they once held when they were the end of the line in progression. It will be nice to see them get a make-over, but much like the reworked Vanilla content they are unlikely to be much more than stepping stones along the rush to endgame.

Exactly. Just like a lot of old games haven't aged well, nether has the older WoW content. Things evolve and change and just because it's easier now doesn't make it worse. Less fun maybe, but there's not much blizz can do about that without reworking all the content.

It's kind of like using cheat codes. They make things easier but they also kill the challenge. These days we're coming at the older content with gear, spells, stats, and mechanics it wasn't designed for. It's not surprising that everything feels so easy.

Personally I think Blizz has a ***** for making it hard for us to get bracer upgrades. It's really aggravating. I can't speak for other armor classes, but leather and cloth wearers get screwed in this department. There are no blue quest upgrades in Twilight Highlands, nor Uldum from what I remember. And there's only 3 leather bracers (1 caster, 2 agil) and 4 cloth bracers in any of the regular heroic dungeons, all of which seem to have abysmally ****** drop rates. Nor do either LW or Tailoring make any non-pvp blue bracers for people to get out of being stuck in greens until they manage to get lucky in either a heroic or raiding. I just end up equipping the pvp blue because it's less embarrassing.

That brings me to another point. Why are there VP relics but not wands or the sling shot thingies that melee types use? That seems rather unfair to me, especially considering the difficulty of upgrading the ranged slot as well. I don't necessarily want Blizz to make gearing up easy, just don't make it so damn frustrating.

They really need to make bracers available either through rep, quests, professions or points. It doesn't have to be all of them, just one would suffice.

Trust me, Plate feels your pain too.

I guess it is Everyone, then.... Blizz seems to think "Thou Shall Not Have Thy Bracers!" or something.

I mean, go ahead, look up 333-359 plate strength bracers...

318s, quest rewards from Twilight Highlands
333? Only dungeon drops.
346? Only dungeon drops.
359? Raid Drop and Ramkahen *Exalted*. Not Revered. Exalted.

And yes, Relics need buffed, badly. Sure, there's crafted ones, 346 even. But they take 36 Volatile Life and 12 Inferno Ink + vendor item each. And that's only after you've gotten what, 515+ Inscription?

Meanwhile, there's 316s, sure... but again, they take some decent number of materials... I honestly wonder why these weren't at least 325... pretty sad when Twilight Highlands quest rewards beat the blue 316 crafted Relics. Those relics should have been 325-333.

And like I said above.... Strength guns/thrown/xbow. The one-and-only non-BoP dungeon drop 333+ is the BoE 359... that sells for 20k+ on the AH.

Edit: In case someone else doesn't believe us about wrists:

http://www.wowhead.com/items=4?filter=sl=9;ty=1:2:3:4;minle=333;maxle=359

All wrists, 333-359.

Summary:

BoE:

353 Troll dungeon Tank Plate
346 STR (Tank/DPS) Plate from Rare Mob in Stonecore
359 DPS Cloth
333 Caster Leather
339 PvP of all types, crafted

Rep Vendors:

359 Tank Plate (Ramkahen Exalted)

That's it. Everything else is boss-drop or PvP (Honor/Valor Points)

Edited, May 24th 2011 3:52pm by Lyrailis

That's assuming you're a Plate Tank.

Plate DPS could, maybe, get away with reforging the Dodge rating into something else, but what if you're a Holy Paladin, or if you're not even a Plate-Wearer? Then you got nuthin'.

Heck, Plate Tanks already have the 353 they can buy from the AH...IMO, the Amani Bracers should have been given to someone else, as Plate Tanks already had an easy purple wrist.

Kinda funny that str plate ALSO gets a 346 BoE Dungeon Drop, that is good for Tanks -and- DPS.

Edited, May 24th 2011 4:07pm by Lyrailis

Blizz has always sucked at drops. You would think that thousands of quests with multiple reward options would be, well, rewarding. It's not.

Because the classes tend to look for different things in relics, and it's easier to make them all VP items than have spirit caster, normal caster, agi, strength dps and strength tank relics on boss loot tables. It'd be almost worse than spellpower plate. There are two kinds of wands and 2-3 kinds of bows so it's easier to manage. Particularly since the bow's a hunter's dps slot it'd be unbalanced to put those on the vendor and not everyone's weapons.

What I'm saying, is that gearing up is *better*, but not perfect, or solved, or best.

Remember Pre-4.0 Vanilla? You'd do a quest and get rewarded with a Shield or a Wand... what if you're not a caster or a tank? You get absolutely nothing. Then you'd turn in another quest and they'd give you Cloth bracers and.... that's it. Whut? What if I'm one of the 7 classes that don't wear cloth? Then you turn in your third quest, praying for a usable item and they give you a choice between caster dagger, a gun, or a cloth robe. Then it is like "uh... okay I still didn't get anything useful".

I remember getting 5+ quests, coming back to town and getting no useful pieces of equipment at all. I could clear an entire town of quests out and only get 1-3 upgrades from it, and even those were barely upgrades at all!

I remember one of my last "Vanilla" leveled character... I leveled from 1 to 58, a Paladin. When he got to Outland, he was wearing...

~Lv25 Cape
~Lv30 Bracers
~Lv40 Helm
~Lv35 Shoulders

And so on and so forth.

Heck some of them were _mail_ pieces, they were that outdated. And I followed a logical questing path.

Fast-forward to my newest character I leveled 1-58, Post-4.0, and the worst piece of equipment she had, was a Lv51 plate belt from Felwood. Well that, and Relics were still a bit too few, but relics early-level barely give you anything as it is, so that's a moot point.

Agi mail says Hey. Our epic shoulders, well pre 4.1 we either Nefarian or getting lucky on a token drop from Cho'gall. Anyone from Wrath probably knows how crappy "protector" drops are. Hell we didn't even get the benefit of a slot in our crafted items until 4.1 instead of 4.0.6.

Everyone probably has that one item that's a huge PITA to get. I finally just bought the pvp shoulder and returned it just to finally get my epic achievement.