Cataclysmic difficulty:

In my last post, I offered difficulty as a potential explanation for the steep drop in subscriptions World of Warcraft has recently experienced. I obviously can’t be certain whether or not that is the case, but it did get me thinking about difficulty in Cataclysm.

I have generally been of the opinion Cataclysm is not significantly harder than previous expansions. I do agree that it’s been a harsh expansion for the casual player, but that has more to do with general game mechanics than actual encounter difficulty.

The trouble is, a lot of things skew my thoughts on this. I’m a Wrath baby, so my only knowledge of the difficulty of classic WoW and Burning Crusade comes from second hand accounts and extrapolations based on doing the raids with 80+ characters.

To make matters worse, it’s been a while since Wrath gave way to Cataclysm, and I took a few months off WoW just before Cata launched, so my memory of Wrath is fuzzy.

We can all agree that heroic dungeons were positively brutal when Cataclysm launched. I will always take a small amount of smug pride in surviving playing a healer during the time when you would go OOM before the boss hit 50%. I kind of assumed all expansions had heroics this hard at their launch — I’ve heard mixed reports from those who remember those times.

I definitely thought that Cataclysm heroics have now been brought down to Wrath level through a combination of gear and nerfs (primarily the “your DPS sucks” buff, as a fellow blogger calls it).

But then I got thinking. I don’t remember ever encountering a boss in Wrath heroics (excepting perhaps the final encounter of Halls of Reflection) that would be unbeatable if your DPS wasn’t up to snuff, but I still encounter this in Cataclysm heroics. Good luck defeating Erudax or Ozruk if your DPS aren’t doing at least 10Kish.

There are still trash pulls in some dungeons that require crowd control, or at least will get pretty ugly if you skip it. Back in Wrath, I remember wondering why CC abilities even existed.

And then there’s the infamous changes to healing. I don’t have any problems with them anymore — I spam flash of light like a boss and never go OOM, but I firmly believe paladins are overpowered, so that hardly counts.

So maybe Cataclysm heroics are a step up after all.

That brings us to raid content, and this is an area I’m really not knowledgeable of, sadly, since I’ve never gotten to raid much (raid inaccessibility remains my biggest complaint with WoW, but that’s another topic), and I’ve never done a raid when it was current without any kind of nerf, discounting a solitary Halfus Wyrmbreaker kill many months back.

But I’ll offer what thoughts I can based on my limited experience. The tier 11 raids felt more or less like what I was used to in Wrath. There are some really easy bosses (Omnitron/Flame Leviathan), some “OMGWTFBBQ WHAT IDIOT DESIGNED THIS?” hard fights (Nefarian/Malygos, although in the case of Maly, that was more due to player stupidity than anything), and a lot that are kind of in the middle (Ascendant Council/XT-002 Deconstructor). But that’s post-nerf, and I imagine they must have been damn hard pre-nerf. The lack of an easy intro raid has often been criticized, and I think it really got the raiding this expansion off on the wrong foot.

And that brings us to Firelands. Having been in a few runs of that place now, I am inclined to judge it as unusually difficult. Barring one extremely lucky 6/7 run, most of my groups have killed Shannox and then crashed and burned, and even Shannox is a tad harder than what I’m used to for an intro boss. I wouldn’t claim he’s a hard fight in the greater scheme of things, but he certainly makes Halfus look like a pansy by comparison. And then there’s the fact that it takes longer to explain the strategy to Beth’tilac on Vent than it does to fight her, wipe at 50%, run back in, and rebuff. And Alysrazor. Oh, god, Alysrazor…So taken all in all, I’m starting to wonder if people might not have a point when they say Cataclysm is harder than Wrath.

Now, Firelands complaints aside, I don’t really have a problem with Cata’s difficulty at this point. I can complete pretty much all my heroic runs just fine. Raids are a bit iffy, but that’s always been the case. Not that I claim to be an especially skilled played; I just run nerfed content on an OP class. But I firmly believe WoW’s difficulty should be tuned to — for lack of a better term — the lowest common denominator. MMOs are about playing with your friends, no matter how good or bad they are. If you want a challenge, go complete Starcraft II on brutal (that’s what I did).

So if Cataclysm really is harder, then Blizzard did screw up, in my view. They have said they plan to return to the Wrath model of difficulty in Mists of Pandaria, so it seems they may agree.

What do you think? Do you find Cataclysm much harder? And if so, is it a welcome change, or does it just suck the fun out of things? How do you think the game’s difficulty should be tuned?

Blizzard loses nearly 2 million subscribers:

Blizzard recently held its quarterly investor conference call, and something of a bombshell was dropped with the news that World of Warcraft has lost 800,000 subscribers in the last quarter. Coupled with previous losses, this makes 1.7 million players lost in the last year.

Holy crap.

Previously, I’d scoffed at the subscriber losses, but nearly two million in just one year is nothing to sneeze at.

Now, let’s try to keep all this in perspective. I’m not one of those doomsayers claiming WoW is dying. WoW is dying in the same sense I am — my body is undergoing an aging process that will result in my death in about fifty to sixty years. WoW still has about two to three times more subscribers than the next biggest MMOs on the market, and Blizzard is still raking in profits that make us regular folks weep bitter tears of jealousy.

But I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that such a big subscriber loss in such a short amount of time isn’t a cause for some concern.

Myself, I suspect Mists of Pandaria will serve to halt the bleeding and perhaps even reclaim some subscribers, but who can say for certain?

The real question I have about this is, why did so many people leave? The economy is often given as a reason, and this sounds logical, but most of the subscriptions lost were in China. I’m no expert on world economics, but I don’t believe they’ve been hit with the recession the way we have.

Of course, this has added further fuel to the fires of division in the fan base, with the hardcores claiming Blizzard killed the game by making it too easy, and the casuals claiming Blizzard killed the game by making it too hard.

At the risk of making a stereotype of myself, I’m inclined to believe the latter. Wrath of the Lich King is universally believed to have been the easiest period in WoW’s history, and it’s also when subscriptions peaked. I don’t think this is a coincidence. It’s also worth noting that the developers have pretty much come right out and said they made Cataclysm too hard and intend to go back to the Wrath model with Mists of Pandaria.

But that said, I find it hard to believe (no pun intended) the difficulty alone could make for such a mass exodus. While Cataclysm heroics were brutal at release, they’re now not much harder than they were in Wrath — or at least to me they aren’t. I could definitely see the difficulty causing the earlier losses, but the recent ones? Maybe I just wear the blinders of a fanboy.

I do think making an expansion where the end game largely boiled down to “raid or suck it” that also put very little effort into ensuring the masses could raid was a bad idea and may have contributed to the exodus.

In the end, it’s probably a combination of things. I very much doubt all of those 1.7 million quit for the same reason.

I’d be curious to hear what others think about this. Is the loss of two million players a minor hiccup, or the beginning of the end? What do you think turned them off?

On the bright side:

That phrase simultaneously makes me think of the Life of Brian and a Metric song.

Ahem, anyway, the good news for WoW fans is that it seems that 4.3’s launch is imminent. All evidence points to it being released either this Tuesday or the Tuesday after. Of course, it’s Blizzard, so you never know for sure until you’re playing it, but all the factors seem to be lining up: the end of the last PvP season approaching, the PTR build being marked “release,” preliminary patch data already being released for background downloading. There’s even a PC Gamer article categorically stating it will be next Tuesday, though since that’s not a direct quote from Blizzard, I’d take that with a grain of salt.

I, for one, certainly hope it’s soon. Much as I enjoyed the Zandalari dungeons and the Molten Front (no sarcasm — I really did like them), I’ve gotten pretty sick of them, and I’m eager for new content. Also, I wants mah sparkul poneh from the annual pass. My warlock just hit 60, and I can’t bear the thought of riding those hideous wyverns anymore.

Edit: Blizzard has now stated the patch will not release any sooner than November 29th. /cry