So Cataclysm, probably the best expansion ever released, has hit World of Warcraft. After having an immensely fun time leveling, as well as having the most fun I've had in a while doing the extremely hard instances, I finally feel it's time to call it quits on the game that I've had a lot of fun with over the past few years.
It's not because it's lost it's fun (though I have been getting more frustrated recently, but I'll get into that later), it's mostly because it's time for me to move on.
Between all of my characters, I have a solid 2 years of playtime. This isn't how long I've been playing (I've been playing since the June prior the Burning Crusade expansion was released, which makes it about 5 years I think). In that time I've really only gotten two different characters to the max level, my Paladin (Superbian, superbia (Latin for Pride)+N to make it sound more masculine), and my first character, Xenodyne (Warlock). I've had a ton of different alts, most of which peak out around 25-30.
I've seen things, gotten places that I wasn't supposed to be able to get, and I've had fun throughout all the years total.
But it's time for me to move on.
Recently while playing, I noticed that days were tending to slip away from me. I would wake up, flip on my computer, take a shower, then come back and play the game for 8-12 hours a day.
That's the point when I finally decided it was becoming an unhealthy obsession. This isn't the first time I've spent so much time on the game (during Burning Crusade and the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King I spent a lot of time on as well), but now that I'm older, and I haven't really progressed so much personally, I took a while and decided it was finally time to call it quits. It's also coupled with the lack of success in areas where I have been trying to succeed for years, and also recent developments (or lack of such) that have weighed on my opinion.
Now I mentioned that I'm getting a little frustrated with the game, but not really more than I would normally be, but it does also come into consideration while I'm quitting.
First off, PVP has become pretty frustrating (get more resilience!). While I agree that more resilience would help, there's a ton of flaws that need to be fixed to help even the balance. As it stands, casters have an extreme advantage to melee classes as a whole, the mage class being the biggest example of what's wrong.
For those who aren't that familiar with the topic, let me give you a little bit of backstory on what changes/reasons for those changes that happened in the Cataclysm. Reasons after the break.
Superbian's face after I decided to quit.
Anyways, every expansion, 10 more levels have been added, and more talents have been added to the talent trees, either to help augment abilities, or add new ones to certain classes. A few talents in each tree would help the class cope with some of the mechanisms that would hinder them from being the Uber class. For example, Paladins that specced Ret (my spec for PVP) would get the ability to break out of stuns with their move that normally only breaks/makes them immune to snares and slows. A lot of other classes had things like "Disarm time reduction" and "Reduction of your spells ability to be dispelled (or removed)" These made sense.
Only problem was, it became more of an arms race amongst the classes to have more CC to counter the anti-CC in each tree, and vice versa.
With Cataclysm, Blizzard completely redid all of the talent trees, and the way that they work, so that they could change stats, and make it a little easier for people (and newbies most of all) to pick up and understand, and make the better choices. They also wanted to put an end to the arms race by removing most of the talents that countered the crowd control mechanisms.
You would think that, while pruning these talents, they would reduce or remove some of the skills and talents that were built to counter the old skills and talents. Unfortunately, most were kept, and even a few were added.
"But what about a PVP trinket, which removes movement impairing effects?"
Unfortunately, the trinket has a two minute cooldown, which sounds short, but is actually a very, very long time when you're talking about skills that come up every 10 seconds, and multiple skills at that.
"So CC has become more powerful, so what? You should have tools to deal with it."
Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, the tools have largely been removed, while leaving these ranged classes at a huge advantage.
Yes, I'm mainly complaining from a Ret Paladin's point of view. They removed a ton of the utility that we had (not being able to cleanse magic, breaking out of stuns) and gave us...what feels like nothing. We still have the ability to break out of roots/snares, unfortunately it's on a bit of a long cooldown, doesn't last for half of the cooldown, and can be removed and/or stolen. We were given a gap closer that is affected by snares/stuns, and doesn't clear distance very fast.
"So...you're warriors now?" Kind of. Not as many stuns, don't have a distance closer that works as well, and we don't do as much burst damage.
And this isn't a cry against Warriors. They work a lot harder than the rest of the classes to be competitive, it just doesn't feel like balance is in place when a single class has absolutely no counter (Mages). Add in the fucking ton of damage that they can do on TOP of all of the crowd-control, and it does tend to feel a bit retarded to even try to PVP.
But Mages aren't the only problem. Druids feel like they've become an even bigger problem than any other class. They can freely change their role on the fly, while staying a healer the whole time. Add in to the fact that they have a ton of escapes, and now an instant root? It kind of makes it feel silly to not play a druid or a mage.
I really like the sand textures this expansion. It looks absolutely gorgeous.
So yeah, minor gripes. Things feel a bit unbalanced in PVP. Granted, it may be my gear, class, or maybe I'm just bad (all likely options), but at the same time, I've never felt as useless in PVP as I have this expansion. As I said, minor complaint, but not my reason for quitting.
I'm also getting a little tired by the player base. We're on a server (Gurubashi) and trying to get a guild together. Unfortunately, when I spend whole days spamming the global channel (trade) with our message, I'm lucky if I get even one person looking for a guild out of the multiple days I try. One problem is that we don't have too many active people (starting small, few core people), the other problem is that at least half of our server (West Coast server) don't speak English, they speak Portuguese.
Now, this isn't a racist statement, but I feel like it somewhat ruins the infrastructure of a game that's built on communicating with other people when half of a server (if not more) is unable to understand you. Being a US server, this shouldn't be a problem, but it sadly is. (and I know that most of the Brazilians are some of the best players on the server, etc)
I have a similar gripe when I'm playing a game like League of Legends, and I get paired with 1-2 people who don't speak English. In that game, where it's a 5v5 PVP game, and you have no ability to communicate/understand what your teammates are saying, there's a clear problem.
And that makes it frustrating to try to communicate a recruitment message to a server where half of them can't understand what you're saying, the other half are already firmly planted in their own guilds.
Finally, my last item under "reason to quit" goes along with what I was saying in the beginning. I've been playing too much. There are plenty of other things I should be doing instead of playing, and getting angry over both PVE and PVP aspects of the game. One of those is to start learning/practicing the craft that I've been trying to get into for years, so that I can work my way closer to the career I want. Another of which is to work on losing the weight I've accumulated over the years, and turn the fat into something useful.
Either way, it's become clear to me that I can't do all of this unless I take out this 8-12 hour time sink that is World of Warcraft. Maybe I'll play again sometime, but for now, I'm leaving it behind.
Au revoir WoW, it's been fun.
Jervan+Mirror Images, dressed three-amigo style.
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