January 06, 2011

My Time Sink Peeves With Cataclysm

I have several peeves right now with the design of Cataclysm.  Most of them are glaringly obvious timesinks that were put in just to purposefully slow down the player.  Most people, I would guess, only allot about 3 hours to WoW playing a night, and that's being generous. 

Issue  #1:  Fishing.  Sharptooth and Murglesnout. Really?  One cooks into a mage-food equivalent food. Okay, fine, 1 fairly useless fish is acceptable.  But a trash fish that I catch 50% of the time when trying to catch my healing and caster fish?  Seriously?  AND you don't give the casters and healers a pool, but the tanks and melee do?  AND, WHERE is my strength fish?  Did you guys just forget to put one in?  Sorry melee, you have to go farm crocolisk tails.  I'm really sorry.

Remedy:  Turn Murglesnouth into the strength fish, stat.  

Issue #2:  Heroics.  I enjoy the difficulty, I really do.  But even with perfect CC, perfect pulls, and perfect bosses, I still have to sit in a dungeon for at least 45 minutes (Vortex Pinnacle) or an hour and a half (Grim Batol).  Most of the time, the dungeon isn't perfect.  45 minutes to an hour is about all the time I want to spend in a dungeon, especially when I'm not getting at least a CHANCE at a piece of epic gear at the end.

Remember BC heroics?  Yeah, that's the kind of effort/reward balance I wish Cataclysm had. In Cata, it was overshot.  I don't mind working hard, but at least make the last boss give a CHANCE at a special loot table. The effort/reward balance...I just don't see it right now.  I would like to get something that looks nice...at least once a week or every 1.5 weeksThat's at least 16 or 24 weeks to make my character look nice again, or about 2/3 the length of a content patch. Right now, it feels like the developers want us to flounder along until the VERY end of the tier..when we may complete our set, but now it's just useless again because the next tier comes out a week later.  You have little to no time to enjoy being "done" for a while.

Remedy:  Either add an epic drop to the end of each heroic boss, or a small chest with a flask inside for our class.  There doesn't need to be an item for every slot, but at least give us SOMEthing to look forward to.  Even a small chest with a flask inside off the end boss in each heroic would be greatly appreciated.

Issue #3:  Node Spawn Rates.  Northrend had 9 potential zones for herbs, ores, and skinning.  Cataclysm has 5.  I don't know about your server, but mine is a medium population and we have terrible competition for nodes and farming areas during prime time.  There is always at least 15-20 people per zone during the dead of day.  Prices are astronomical, mainly because of the limited supply.  In order to get anything done, you have to, yet again, devote weeks to farming if you cannot farm in large stretches.  I don't understand why the developers think that people sit and play every day for more than three hours a day.  Weekends, maybe.  I feel like I have to choose between farming flasks for myself and my raid team or making myself gold.  No matter what I do, it's either overfarmed or full of trash fish.

Remedy:  Just up the spawn rate so the prices will go down.  You know we need flasks for raiding content, so please stop being dicks and just up the spawn rates.

 These three issues really, really annoy me and feel like a glaringly obvious "we want to force you to slow down, you need to go through content at OUR pace that WE dictate for you."  My fishing for food for my raid is no longer efficient thanks to the worthless fish that drops 50% of the time.  Farming herbs and holding a job? Haha. Farming during the evening barely nets you any herbs or ore on a normal population server. Gold doesn't buy much of anything anymore.

The majority of my guild works and has about enough time for one heroic a night, with a little bit of farming (perhaps 1 hour).  All in all, say, 2.5 or 3 hours tops.  In the end, it feels like Blizzard is attempting to drag their content out because they don't have enough manpower to produce it at the previous rates.

2 comments:

  1. I love this post. It is totally spot on. Which I wish it wasn't. I wish Blizzard had better ways of increasing the longevity of their content than just withholding stuff from us :( The flasks are a great example. The mats for one flask are extremely high and you get ONE flask. For ONE hour (unless you're alche). I mean 300-400g per flask? That's insane. Maybe they want us to really think of it as a bonus rather than something mandatory but then they've made them too good. Bah

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  2. I don't think heroics should have epics at the end. There's really no need for that. Just think of heroics as the first tier of the expansion. That's where you go to get your initial gear. When you're done with that, you move on to raids. It's not like Wrath where you didn't really care about heroic gear and just ran straight to Naxx.

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