I think they're simplifying things for DPS more than anything. Increasing cast timers so interrupts can occur more often, allowing AoE attacks to not break CC. More than anything, I think it's an attempt to get rid of the "oops" moments, but we all know that there will be people purposely taking advantage of this. I can see Warriors that want to continuously cleave, doing this fully knowing there is a sap or poly near them, instead of waiting for the tank to move it away. But on the other hand, (the argument I made in the other patch notes thread) I think it's better for rogues then anyone else since it means that their sap is of more value. Knowing I can ask a rogue to sap a target and still do a shield pull is a great asset to having a rogue around, where in the past all they brought was dps, and interrupts. Now to me, they can CC too! It would be like giving Ret Pallies a 30sec Repentence (currently 6sec).

However yes, even I've noticed things getting easier to an extent, more than anything the removal of attunement quests. That's just a blatant attempt to get more people into end-game content earlier. Good if you aren't there yet, bad if you've already done them. It's kinda a slap in the face for alot of people that did these encounters the normal way, just to see it got easier had they waited a little bit.

It's not the number of buttons, and honestly those 40 buttons you see are probably sorted and are used situationally. Probably using only 12 or so at a time.

What i mean though is the gameplay mechanics they keep changing. The latest being that AOE attacks not breaking CC spells. I've posted a few times before that i believe that Blizzard are lowering the standards of the game so they can get more people reaching the end game content. The more people they have that are playing the end game content the more buy-in they'll have into WotLK.

I also think the large alt population is another finger pointing at the problems with WoW's end game content.

Those that want an adventure that pushes your gameplay skills would more likely still be playing Everquest Classic with its tip-top-end raiding insanity than WoW's much less challenging system.

"Flame on!"

Seriously though, from the beginning, WoW has been about streamlining out the inane crap from other mmo's as much as possible and making the gameplay far more user-friendly, especially for people new to the genre. Alaysha would HATE Everquest, with its obtuse UI and very player-unfriendly conventions (and downtime, in particular). WoW was great to introduce her, and she's continuing to improve with group content the more she plays.

I agree that I don't want the game to eliminate skill from the equation, as I think skill is more important than gear overall (not in all situations, but in most) and is what makes the game challenging and fun, but I'm not averse to working through issues in the game design that are arguably unnecessarily difficult to overcome due to either UI limitations, or feedback limitations, etc. I think that encounters that virtually require you to study Wowwiki or use mods to be able to overcome are poorly designed (especially if they require mods) in terms of the average user working with the game as-is out of the box. However, the devs design these encounters so intricately because otherwise the hardcore types like us that DO read up on them and work them out need a challenge. It's a hard line to walk, balancing the play of the truly casual mass market (i.e. the ones that make even me look hardcore) that make up the majority of the game population along with the play of the rest of us to keep everyone happy with enough of the game to keep them subscribed.

Aside from "mistakes being minimized", everything else listed simply reduces the time investment needed. There's nothing "dumber" about it, unless you think only idiots stop playing rather than grind for days. As a very casual player - having played a "mere" week of gametime - I think these should have been there day one.

Just for the record, when I un-subscribed I think WoW got smarter by my absence. I did my part!

As I've said in the other thread, I'm VERY happy about removing grind. But I'm very unhappy about removing skill.

So I've probably typed and then deleted about a dozen responses to this thread, and I'll probably wish I had deleted this one as well, but here it goes anyway.

This is sort of the core of the sentiment I was trying to express. I typically don't play MMOs and I didn't play WoW for the first three years because excessively drawn out grinding for little reward is not fun to me. I don't mind a bit of it (I love my JRPGs, after all, and they are often very much about grinding) but the effort/reward balance in most MMOs has never seemed appealing to me. What I read about patch 2.3 made me interested, though, and indeed it turned out that from 1 to 60, the balance was perfect for me, and so thanks to that bit of "dumbing down" you now have one more semi-hardcore player on his way to 70. Of course, some of the sentiments expressed in this thread and in the 2.4 patch notes thread sort of make me feel like the people waiting for me at 70 might not really want a player like me to join them. Rather than feel insulted, though, I'm just going to chalk a lot of that up to people feeling slighted that new players don't have to experience the same kind of hardships that they once did.

As for the matter of making some (emphasis on some) multi-target and AOE attacks not break crowd control, I can definitely understand the outrage there. However, this does increase the number of party compositions that can handle many types of encounters, which will in turn reduce the difficulty of finding an appropriate party to take on those encounters. And that means that I'll have a greater chance of being able to play those encounters without growing frustrated with the game and deciding it's not worth my time to bother. So while I certainly feel the sadness of removing some of the nuance of those battles, I'm happy that I might be able to experience those battles, nuance present or not.

Well, I certainly don't have the amount of experience with the game to make any kind of truly informed judgement on that, so I'm more than willing to be wrong there.

Again, though, it doesn't give me a huge pleasure to see skill removed from the game. I just won't cry too loudly if in the end it results in me being able to play more of the game than I would have without the change being made.

Let's give two scenerios here.

Scenerio A
First, you're a raider who jumps through all the hoops Blizzard puts in your way so you get beat the daylights out of Illidan, Archimonde and all the other major bosses the game has been about defeating. It took alot of time and effort, and you vaguely remember your time in Karazhan when you first started getting good purples that got you strong enough to the point where you could say you "Beat the game".

Now, you find out that Blizzard has decided to remove several of those hoops, and people spend 1/2 the time you did to do the same thing. Yay for them, but they didn't have to kill Magtheridon or Gruul, and instead just ran a few extra heroics to bypass that step, and didn't need attunement at all. You're still glad you did it first, but it does seem to cheapen what you completed.

Scenerio B
You've heard about WoW and finally broke down to come on board. You hear certain things have been tough in the past, and you seem to breeze through it like no tomorrow. "It ain't so bad, these guys aren't so tough".

You do a couple of runs through Kara, somewhat oblivious to half the skills your character has, but don't actually ever use them because they are no longer needed. You get into BT/MH because you found websites that tell you your gear is good enough to be at that level. And you get completely massacred on the trash - don't even make it to the first boss. "WTH?"

This second person has no idea about using things like Amplify/Dampen Magic, resistance gear collection/offsets, what curses or buffs different classes use on different bosses, and people now think less of them because they need to "L2P". It's not the player's fault, he's been able to get there without using any of those tricks. Unfortunately, the high steps are going to do you in, since you skipped alot of the checks along the way to get there, and the game tells you it's not a problem.

Truth is, it is a problem. There are fights where there oddest classes need good resistance gear, and where classes need to use those tricks they never thought they would ever use. I remember the first time Krindle used Turn Undead - it was in Kara, and used to be a somewhat good way to CC on that fight. Like using Amplify Magic on tanks in non-magic based fights, since it allows your healers to keep the tanks up longer. It's little things like that that make the tough encounters interesting, finding new ways to beat the odds for the first time. Without knowing about them, you really don't know what your character is capable of, and new "easier mode WoW" is the one that causes it.

I can see alot of the new changes leading down that road, and it makes it that much more difficult later on, because people won't know what they can actually do, since they've never had to do it on the "test" encounters they skipped.

TLDR
Basically, less checks on characters like these make it more plausible you don't learn all your character has to offer, and you get destroyed when you finally have to re-learn your character in the process.

zero, I hear what you're saying (about balance being perfect now in 1-60 range), but I feel you're overlooking an important facet. pre-BC there were a lot of people in the old world zones. You could always get a group or help from people around you. So, as much as tasks were more difficult you could always get a group for some quest, or an instance. These days the old worlds are utterly deserted. When was the last time you heard of someone running Uldaman or Scholomance? If they do, it's usually to knock off a bunch of quests, and even then usually with a help of some level 70 guildies. In other words, even though they made gaining XP easier, I do not believe it's faster than it was 2 years ago.

Well, my experience was almost certainly atypical, but I did quite a few at level instance runs up to about 50, which was when I really started to pull ahead of the folks I was playing with (see the "Green Team" thread).

Chatting anecdotally with the guys I was playing with at the time, though, from their experience 1-60 was much faster, even without as many grouping opportunities as the last time they had leveled a character in the pre-2.3 days.

Sure! 4k a trip! They were doing that for BWL before BC.

Yea, but gold is gold... on a side note anyone know the guys now in Transcended? All the ones i knew when they started up dont seem to be there anymore.

Thanks, DeepSea, I appreciate your perspective.