Writing a review detailing my experience with wow so far.
When I tried retail, the first thing that I noted is that I could’t skip the tutorial and the amount of handholding and “low level epicness” was insane. The game almost dragged my hand to equip every piece of gear which I got. I also destroyed a freaking Ogre castle and an undead dragon. That is too epic for a low level nobody.
For comparison, I explored mines, killed Kobolds and did things more akin to a low level adventure in the classic/wotlk Elwynn Forest.
While playing as an frost mage, I was AoE farming, took a disconnect, reconnected and still din’t died. And elite mobs? Elite mobs in classic/wotlk are soloable, but risky and fells dangerous. As an frost mage, I have to cosntantly blink and snare them. MAnaging the casting time, distance and mana as even at lv 72, I only have mana to fully cast 4 Blizzard spells.
As an warlock, I need to maintain my pet alive, manage my aggro, my mana, my CCs and so on.
And in retail?
As an affliction warlock can just send my Succubus to the enemy, cast 3 DoTs(unstable affliction, agony and corruption) and shadow bolt him to death, with no need to worry about anything. It din’t took even 5% of my hp
Screenshot bellow :
In classic, mana, spell reagents and so on where huge limitations in how many spells you could cast. In retail, if where not by cooldowns, you could probably spam 80 Blizzards in row. Blizzard where amazing for AoE farming in classic but required channeling which could be interrupted, costed a lot of mana and hence, Aoe farming was possible but not trivial as in retail.
Classic had class quests, if you wanna to have an Succubus, you need to travel to another continent, talk to a guy, find an item from a tree which growed in the blood of lovers, go into a sigil, summon a succubus and defeat her to enslave her.
And this for mid level demons(voidwalker, succubus and felhunter), higher level demons like the infernal and doomguard could only be TEMPORARILY enslaved. Doomguard required a ritual + 4 players and killed one warlock involved. Infernal after 2 or 3 enslave demon starts to resist a lot your spells and there are always the risk of them breaking free
I saw a freaking lv 15 Dwarf Warlock with an felguard + an army of imps. How this makes any sense? Dwarfs are a very “low magical” race. And felguards are always nasty enemies which can only be controlled by quite powerful warlocks.
Body type 1/2, spells renamed from Enslave demon to Subjulgate demon, because when you are conjuring dangerous demons and binding them to your will, Politically correct is a huge concern. Blackwashing of some chars among other things. And worse, even in Classic/TBC/WotLK, blizzard brought this BS into the game.
The game laso has Oblivion style level scaling. Where leveling up makes the game a slog. Enemies which at low level died quickly now at lv 40+ takes an eternity to die. The same enemy which used to die in 3 frost bolts now require about 7. Dungeons? If there are low level players, the dungeon bosses die pretty quickly. That is Oblivion scaling into an mmo.
That said, not everything is bad. there are only two things that I liked in retail wow so far
- Kul Tiras - I really enjoyed exploring and questing there
- The pact that my pets grow up with me as an warlock
Voidwalker start extremely small and grow up to about human size. I like it.
Also din’t liked that your character is nothing and his gear, everything. If every piece of my gear “breaks” in classic/tbc/wotlk, I can still kill stuff. In retail, I can’t. Which if you think a bit, kills the fantasy of being a powerful caster.
--------------------------------------------------------
TL;DR :
- Oblivion enemy scaling
- Diablo 3 awful armor design and gear dependency
- ArcaniA shit handholding and nonsensical story
- Extremely repetitive combat
- Mobile cashgrab style handholding
- Commiefornia SJWism
