WoW - Mists of Pandaria - why I'm glad it wasn't a joke.

[Sansha]

Two years ago, I wrote this ignorant thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.319225-WoW-Mists-of-Pandaria-why-Im-convinced-its-a-joke] about the then-upcoming Mists of Pandaria. Now that the last patch is out, I can both ashamedly and proudly admit that I was completely incorrect and have had an absolute ball with Mists of Pandaria.

The quests are genuinely interesting - I can actually sympathize with the issues on Pandaria, and sympathize with the factions taking care of them, especially the Klaxxi and Shado-Pan. I didn't take part in a great deal of the post-90 reputation grinds, only bothering with the Cloud Serpents and recently Shado-Pan.

That, unfortunately, brings me to my biggest problem with Mists - the initial grind involving both reputation and gear currency was total horseshit. You had to level enough to go to the area, meet the faction, do a ton of setting-up quests, then banging out daily quests as well as dungeons and such in order to build valor for when they allow you to purchase stuff off them. A huge and unnecessarily complicated grind. I disliked the system so much that I simply chose not to take part in it, and as a result took little part in end-game PvE.

Moving on. Pandaria itself is beautiful and varied. It's extraordinarily well-designed with overflowing detail and many secrets. The raids and dungeons are all really well put together, too - unlike the other expacs, I don't have a dungeon that I despise going to. I'm really excited about Siege of Orgrimmar, and I'm getting that sorrowful feeling for the end of the expansion that I've not felt since Wrath of the Lich King was ending - opposed to Cataclysm, where I just wanted it to be over.

A lot of people bailed on the expansion because of the Pandas. I nearly did myself. But, partly out of curiosity, partly because my friends since Wrath urged me to join them, and partly because I once accidentally purchased ten goddamn years of game time, I stuck by, and I'm really glad that I did.

People who say WoW isn't what it used to be are right - it's infinitely better. It builds and improves with each patch (with the exception of Hour of Twilight and Rise of the Zandalari). WoW Classic was poorly designed and with very basic features, which excluded millions from being able to enjoy the game. Today, it's awesome - hardcore players have Challenge Dungeons and heroic raids, and casuals have pet battles and LFR. Who gives a damn - everyone's having fun unless you're just way too anal.

Someone recently asked me if I really think 'bamboo eating pandas' really contributed positively to World of Warcraft. I replied with what I should have realized two years ago:

"Bamboo eating pandas have contributed about the same as the grass-eating cow-men, Cockney werewolves, hyper-capitalist goblins, hippy night-elves, walking dead and Jamaican stereotype trolls."

As an overview of all the expansions, while Wrath of the Lich King is my favorite for its lore and sense of adventure, beating the hell out of countless undead and, of course, Ulduar, I think Mists of Pandaria is Blizzard's best work yet, a huge contrast to their worst - Hour of Twilight, and indeed everything out of Cataclysm except patch 4.2 - Rage of the Firelands.

I'm humbled by being proved so wrong about Mists, but I'm glad I was.

 

[Ulkjen]

This thread is certainly not late. It is actually pretty well timed. Though the OP could have waited 2 or 3 more weeks before making it. I say this only because of the high that is Garrosh getting his ass kicked finally.

I cannot fully agree with the OP. I have played WoW since Vanilla and with MoP I grew terribly bored. I thoroughly enjoy Wrath and Cata questing content and have a good time relaxing my way through to 85. However... MoP zones are quite dull half the time. I just feel the quests for Farmers Valley to be far far too level 1 for me. If you get me haha. I like the dungeons, quite a bit actually, but most of the questing feels so dull.

I could just be biased torwards older content though. I'll know in a few years.

 

[Sansha]

This thread is certainly not late. It is actually pretty well timed. Though the OP could have waited 2 or 3 more weeks before making it. I say this only because of the high that is Garrosh getting his ass kicked finally.

I cannot fully agree with the OP. I have played WoW since Vanilla and with MoP I grew terribly bored. I thoroughly enjoy Wrath and Cata questing content and have a good time relaxing my way through to 85. However... MoP zones are quite dull half the time. I just feel the quests for Farmers Valley to be far far too level 1 for me. If you get me haha. I like the dungeons, quite a bit actually, but most of the questing feels so dull.

I could just be biased torwards older content though. I'll know in a few years.

I kind of agree with you, but after levelling through Blackrock Mountain, Outland, Icecrown and then Cataclysm, it was just refreshing to see somewhere pretty for once. And I actually enjoy the characters and lore of Pandaria, like Cho and Taran. I'm really glad that old racial leaders like Jaina, Sylvanas and Lor'themar are actually taking part.
And the constant addition of features is making WoW less stressful, and more varied and fun.

I never touched the Farmer's Valley quests, because I was appalled and repulsed by WoW now having literal item farming.

 

[Zeckt]

I paid for a month of mist of pandaria and could only stomach 2 weeks. The gameplay was too repetitive, the farm thing was pointless busy work and I felt they tried to push Chinese lore on me way too hard without going anywhere with a cartoony flavor. They completely ruin (oh sorry, REVAMP) spec's so suddenly they are terrible at one thing, good at another. I LIKED to pvp as a protection paladin, but blizzard gave me a big middle finger since WOTLK. They literally told me NO, you can't play the way you want to anymore. You have to play the way WE want you to. Reroll another character for pvp and shelve your favorite. (SCREW THAT!)

And honestly, shortly before starting I watched Kung Fu Panda 1 and 2 and felt they did it BETTER. And the dailies? this was the absolute WORST as they may as well give you a ball and chain the minute you hit 90. The demand for you to do dailies is insane, where you have to do them for like 3-4 months doing tasks that eventually get worse then working in REAL life because you get so flipping sick of them.

All blizzard can do with races is make a real life animal and turn it human like and I'm sooooo sick of it!. Panda people, bug people, monkey people and Fish people this time around. I'm still waiting for the Platypus people, or the Flamingo people who are in eternal war with the Peacock people. Warcraft is not creative, all they did this xpac was turn a bunch of animals humanoid and mix in B grade cartoony lore that is not as good or enjoyable as kung fu panda's.

The story is completely predictable, bad guy in charge is bad and will eventually need killing. Why continue to pay my subscription when I already know the outcome? I've seen more interesting villains who are in power in movies. 13 Assassin's come's to my mind immediately as a better story with a better villain and it's just 2 hours.

I'm sorry, I hate pandaria and it forever turned me off wow. I can't agree with you in the slightest. Pandaria to me is a terrible expansion, and I hate myself for wasting 40$ to play it. Never again WoW. And the game honestly looks like ass to me now, it's too old and I'm sick of seeing the same type of things for years.

... I did however really like that quest rolling the fat panda back to his home. That was the best part of the game. And I'm sorry about being overly negative in this post, but I'm just being honest on how I feel with the game.

 

[ERaptor]

The Talent-Trees where dumbed down horribly. Everyone takes the same Talents currently, since th Playerbase heavily relies on Guides. The Theme and Areas were well designed and looked really nice. The Story however, was a bit lame. We allready had "Old God slumbering until Players show up. Strats wrecking sh*t." in WOTLK and with C'Thun. Also, Garrosh was killed solely because the Community didnt like him, appearantly he was to "Brutal". God forbid we have a Warchief that actually does something for once. Or...you know. Behaves like an actual Orc. His downfall into Evil was also almost worthy of Disney-Villains. I really liked him as a Villain, but it was a bit too Clichee.

I mainly use WoW as a Platform for Roleplay. Thus, the Pandas were a bit extra-hard to take seriously. Especially since i play an Amani Warrior, and a hulking Foresttroll looks...out of palce besides Cuddle-Pandas. They were a lot cooler than i initially thought they would be tough. The whole Monk-Stuff is pretty cool, the humour is pretty nice and the Characters are really likeable. I especially grew to like Loremaster Cho. The big amount of Fluff or Funitems were also really nice for me as a roleplayer.

Concerning Gameplay, they tried to improve the amount of content for people, since Cataclysm had a lot of people finished really early and complaining of boredom. They "fixed" that with the giant amount of Factions you could befriend. I actually have all of them on Revered with my main, but the Dailies i had to do to get there were horribly tedious. The Raids were cool (The new Loot-System is also really offensive. It can take you literally forever to get decent gear.), even if i was horribly dissapointed at the fact, that even the Zandalari are now generic Villains. The Trolltribes cant be farm from being completely destroyed by now, and this makes me really sad.

All in all, it was a lot better than i thought. But especially the current Story-Events make me cringe a bit.

 

[Guffe]

--- I think Mists of Pandaria is Blizzard's best work yet, ---

Now now, don't get a head of yourself. Everyone knows that Blizzards greatest creation is Warcraft III!!
(I might be able to forgive you if you meant only in WoW )

Otherwise a very interesting read, and someone actually admitting they were wrong on the internet isn't something you see everyday

 

[RJ 17]

Well...there IS the fact that the expansion is based off of what was originally an April Fools Joke seeing as how, at this point, the collective millions of heroes of Azeroth have officially killed all the major bad-guys in the world's lore. As such they're REALLY running out of places to go.

People who say WoW isn't what it used to be are right - it's infinitely better. It builds and improves with each patch (with the exception of Hour of Twilight and Rise of the Zandalari). WoW Classic was poorly designed and with very basic features, which excluded millions from being able to enjoy the game. Today, it's awesome - hardcore players have Challenge Dungeons and heroic raids, and casuals have pet battles and LFR. Who gives a damn - everyone's having fun unless you're just way too anal.

I suppose that's why it's been leaking subscriptions like a cracks in a dam for the past couple expansions? Hehehe, sorry, just being a bit of a dick.

Seriously though, I got out right at the end of Burning Crusade, having been with it since the very beginning. There were various reasons for my leaving that simply led to the conclusion of no longer being able to justify paying a subscription fee to play the game. But from what I've heard from disenfranchised players that have been dropping out recently was that they've watered it down way too much...one of the biggest complaints in particular being the mounts and the levels required to get them. The best way I can describe it is kinda like comparing it to Minecraft in Survival Mode vs Minecraft in Creative Mode. Sure, Creative Mode speeds the whole process up, allowing you to create giant obsidian monstrosity without putting in the hours necessary for mining up all that obsidian, but in Survival Mode you have a MUCH stronger feeling of accomplishment because you "worked" your ASS off to get all that obsidian and build a giant floating black pyramid in the sky with lava flows running down the sides. There's pay-off for all the time and effort you put into it rather than simply coming up with an idea for something big and grand and being able to build it in 10 minutes. The magic of Minecraft was that it gave you a purpose, a goal, a PROJECT that you could spend days working on.

The same goes with mounts - as an example - with WoW. Apparently they're just giving the things away now. Back in the day you had to put in your time leveling up, then earn a crap-ton of gold to get yourself even a basic mount. Epic Mounts required max-level and an even MORE obscene amount of gold to purchase one. And if you were a Paladin or Warlock, you actually had to go through a long, expensive quest involving various dungeons in order to get your specialized Epic Mount. There was work and effort involved there, things that weren't just handed to you on a silver platter, but rather things you had to earn.

This is just one of the examples of the more modern gripes that I've heard of since I left three expansions ago. But they all stem from the same complaint of "It's just too watered down, too easy and accessible now" and honestly if what I've heard is true I can easily see where those complaints are coming from.

I will say that anyone complaining about the addition of the Pandaren just because they're pandas apparently didn't play WCIII, seeing as how they were established as a race in that game through various secrets, and even had a Pandaren Brewmaster as a Neutral Hero you could recruit in Frozen Throne.

 

[Ranorak]

My biggest problem was that it all felt so....anticlimactic.

The trailer of MoP even gave me that feeling, but it wasn't until I was level 90 I really got it.
The trailer speaks of the past victories the Heroes of Azeroth have had.
stopping those that threaten the peace of our kingdoms.
Venture to a new, alien world, and cast the lords of shadow and flame back into the abyss.
We held the line, when death itself rose like a tide to swallow everything we held dear.
We have endured the breaking of the world.

And are now forced to spend our time doing silly odd jobs for panda's.
Sure, there is the Sha stuff, but it just all felt so minor compared to the previous expansions.

 

[VanQ]

As far as I consider MoP, it's all just buildup for the next expansion where - most likely - the main force of the Burning Legion will return to Azeroth. There was that whole prophecy that when the Horde and Alliance stand together the Legion would return. And lo and behold, together the Horde and Alliance stand to take down Hellscream.

 

[suitepee7]

i'm pretty much in agreement with OP here. i quit fairly early into cata (guild fell apart + RL commitments) and came back just before pandaria launch, and its been pretty awesome. my main highlight being the monk class itself, which is by far my favourite. couple of issues that i've noticed though

alts - this was not an alt friendly expansion, at all. leveling an alt took bloody ages until they nerfed pandaria xp req, and then when you got to 90 there was the grind of heroics and dailies. in 5.4 i think they've sorted it out, at last. a good use for justice points for the first time this expansion means a lot less time doing HCs and you can jump into LFR pretty quickly.

LFR - i don't understand why, but some people really took an issue with LFR being available for all raids. it just means more people can raid. however with 5.4 they released flex, so another way to raid easier than normals. both of these steps i think are great as a way to accommodate to as many players as possible

farming - never did it, never needed to. you can easily skip this

pandas - don't play as one. the NPCs are unavoidable, but i honestly haven't seen THAT many 90 panda players. my only gripe is with BGs, because pandas can be either faction, but it's largely a nonissue

talent trees - i'm gonna defend this one till the end of the earth. the main criticism is that now 'it's really boring, everybody just picks the same talents', to which my response is 'what's new?' before everybody picked the same fucking talents, there were cookie-cutter specs and you just looked online for the best one. also if you wanted to do PvP and PvE on the same character, you best not want to also tank and dps, because you'll have to respec every damn time. now, you can have two different specs, the talents can be changed on the fly depending on what you need, and there is much greater diversity between characters of the same spec based on your own personal preference.

lore - err... yeah. it wasn't the best. personally i loved WotLK story, and pandaria's was ok, but nothing really to get excited about. however, the patch trailers for ToT and SoO were both pretty awesome

 

[Mind2Matter]

When MoP first was announced, I was quite disappointed by the announcement of the pandas as well. I thought that there were a number of interesting races that they could expound on besides pandas, and I was ready to ragequit along with the rest of the Blizzard world.

But, I kept back my initial judgement and decided to at least give it a shot.

Frankly, I quickly got sucked back into it because the quests were new and unique, the dungeons were challenging yet enjoyable, the lore was exquisite, and it was a breath of fresh air from the drudgery that was Cataclysm. When I was taking my characters from level 80 to 85 in Cata, I found that I was dreading it. I didn't want to go through Deepholm *one more bloody time* just to level up and the game quickly became boring in the advanced Cata levels.

I loved the MoP advanced levels for introducing new ideas and new areas (which were eye-poppingly beautiful), and I still feel that they would be fun to tackle again and again in leveling. And I love WoW in comparison to other MMORPGs because they don't try to take themselves too seriously. They have allusions to other examples of media and pop culture that make you grin because you get the joke (and I, too, loved rolling the depressed panda home). It has a humorous quality that you don't see with the other MMORPGs, and I think that is why the others die out after a while but WoW lives on.

However, all of that did not help with other areas, and even those factors couldn't help my falling out with the game.

The account-wide pets and mounts factor was one of the reasons why the game died for me. I had built my characters with a specific purpose, a specific goal. I was so proud of the fact that one of my characters had a mount or a pet that none of my other characters had been able to achieve, and that pride was crushed when I discovered that *any* of my characters could have the same mount/pet for no work whatsoever. It made me feel that there was no use in looking for those unique creatures when all I had to do was get it with one character and suddenly every character had it.

Another reason was the overly simplified talent system. I enjoyed using the talent trees, and it was fun to be unorthodox with them and subsequently prove that it could work. Now, you can't really have that because all of the creativity has been sucked out of it. It's simply, "Which of three looks do you want your one ability to have?" Where's the imagination in that?

And then there was the fact of the rare-spawns. Blizzard made it so you can't move in Pandaria without bumping into a rare-spawn. In the previous expansions, you were forced to sit and wait for the things to pop up, you would fly over areas continuously for the chance to get the honor of taking down that rare. Sure, it was grueling work, but again there was that sense of pride that by God, you had done it. I had beaten the same set of rares about 4 times in the early Pandaria levels by the time I had dropped out. That's not an achievement, that's a silver platter. Of course, the later-level rares would stomp you into the ground and the world-rares would grind entire groups into dust, but that's a different thing.

Basically, Blizzard made MoP so simple that even the dumbest noob could do it, and that became too simple for me. There was no pride, no thought required, just go forth and conquer. It kind of breaks my heart, because I did have a lot of fun with WoW, and I would love to do it again. But this new system is a little too child-like to live with. I must admit, though, that I have been recently fighting the urge to come back just so I can destroy Hellscream, which I have wanted to do ever since I started with my Forsaken warlock. Maybe I might come back for a couple of months, just to do that. But I don't think that I will be able to see the expansion through on my other characters, because there just isn't any more challenge to it.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

This is just one of the examples of the more modern gripes that I've heard of since I left three expansions ago. But they all stem from the same complaint of "It's just too watered down, too easy and accessible now" and honestly if what I've heard is true I can easily see where those complaints are coming from.

I played from launch up through about the middle of Cataclysm's lifespan, quit for a couple years, then started playing again a little after Pandaria's 5.3 patch went live because I got my hands on a free copy of Mists... and yeah, this right here is my biggest gripe.

The game is running on training wheels. Patch after patch after patch they've been watering everything down for the sake of either accessibility or faster leveling. Now, I have no problem with quality of life changes... but there's definitely a point where a developer can go too far, and I think they've reached it. The game practically plays itself now.

Hell, with the latest patch they've added the Timeless Isle, where you can get a full set of iLvl 496 gear for a fresh level 90 character in about 45 minutes just by riding around looting chests that you don't even have to fight for or anything, and maybe tagging a rare mob or two along the way (which you only need to hit once now to get credit, and you don't even have to have the initial hit - so just run up and poke it with a Moonfire or something, even if it's at 5% health, and woohoo free loot!). Hell, the gear isn't even bound to the character, so you can send it to alts - and it's so ridiculously common, you'll definitely have stuff for alts. My level 77 Discipline Priest already has a complete set of iLvl 496 gear for every slot other than weapon. This makes dungeons, heroics, and a lot of the raid content more or less an obsolete waste of time since I'll be able to jump into Throne of Thunder and maybe Siege of Orgrimmar pretty much the moment I ding 90. It's a joke.

 

[LetalisK]

Hell, with the latest patch they've added the Timeless Isle, where you can get a full set of iLvl 496 gear for a fresh level 90 character in about 45 minutes just by riding around looting chests that you don't even have to fight for or anything, and maybe tagging a rare mob or two along the way (which you only need to hit once now to get credit, and you don't even have to have the initial hit - so just run up and poke it with a Moonfire or something, even if it's at 5% health, and woohoo free loot!). Hell, the gear isn't even bound to the character, so you can send it to alts - and it's so ridiculously common, you'll definitely have stuff for alts. My level 77 Discipline Priest already has a complete set of iLvl 496 gear for every slot other than weapon. This makes dungeons, heroics, and a lot of the raid content more or less an obsolete waste of time since I'll be able to jump into Throne of Thunder and maybe Siege of Orgrimmar pretty much the moment I ding 90. It's a joke.

They put it in pretty much for that reason as it's a catch-up mechanism. They don't want people coming back to the game, probably precisely to take on Garrosh, wallowing in content 3 major content patches old that everyone else has moved on and forgotten about. That'd be an easy way to discourage re-subbing.

OT: I'm pretty much in the same boat as the OP. Made fun of MoP when it was announced, started playing it a few months ago out of curiosity and I'm very impressed with how far along their technical and creative skills have come since vanilla. That said, I got bored as I just don't think MMOs are a thing for me anymore, so I recently de-subbed again.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

They put it in pretty much for that reason as it's a catch-up mechanism. They don't want people coming back to the game, probably precisely to take on Garrosh, wallowing in content 3 major content patches old that everyone else has moved on and forgotten about. That'd be an easy way to discourage re-subbing.

I'm aware that it's a catch-up mechanism, what I'm getting at is that I think it's a very poorly implemented one. It's one that makes half of the expansion's end-game content a waste of time, while also encouraging players to get into content prematurely.

I play a healer. Always have. I was a Holy Paladin in vanilla/BC, a Resto Shaman for the Naxx segment of WotLK, and a Resto Druid ever since then. I'm pretty good at it, having been the primary healer in a reasonably cutting-edge raiding guild for years, but I wasn't always that way. I became good at the healing role through experience. These days a player could level a Paladin up as Retribution all the way to 90, switch spec to Holy, equip a bunch of Timeless Isle pieces, and jump directly into Throne of Thunder without ever having healed anything at all prior to that. Over the past week I've seen this happen an absurd number of times (sometimes by players openly admitting that they switched from DPS to tank or healer for no reason other than faster queues/more desirable raid spots), and it's resulted in more drama and wipes than I'd seen prior to that by far, which only exacerbates the problem of the game having such an unfriendly community - especially toward newcomers.

I had high hopes for the proving grounds being an answer to this problem. I figured that the aforementioned Paladin might be able to get some healing practice in there before immediately jumping in to raiding. But as things currently stand, the average player isn't going to bother since there's no tangible reward for doing so. Hell, most of the people I've talked to don't even realize that the proving ground is even a thing that exists. So that just means that the rest of the healers in that Paladin's raid team are going to have to work harder to carry him until he learns the ropes, if he learns the ropes, because he's being carried...

/shrug.

I dunno. I just think this expansion has some pretty deep-rooted problems, and I can definitely see why it's losing subscriptions. They're alienating a lot of their older playerbase for the convenience of a shrinking newer playerbase, and I'm not really sure if it's something WoW is even capable of recovering from.

 

[LetalisK]

They put it in pretty much for that reason as it's a catch-up mechanism. They don't want people coming back to the game, probably precisely to take on Garrosh, wallowing in content 3 major content patches old that everyone else has moved on and forgotten about. That'd be an easy way to discourage re-subbing.

I'm aware that it's a catch-up mechanism, what I'm getting at is that I think it's a very poorly implemented one. It's one that makes half of the expansion's end-game content a waste of time, while also encouraging players to get into content prematurely.

I play a healer. Always have. I was a Holy Paladin in vanilla/BC, a Resto Shaman for the Naxx segment of WotLK, and a Resto Druid ever since then. I'm pretty good at it, having been the primary healer in a reasonably cutting-edge raiding guild for years, but I wasn't always that way. I became good at the healing role through experience. These days a player could level a Paladin up as Retribution all the way to 90, switch spec to Holy, equip a bunch of Timeless Isle pieces, and jump directly into Throne of Thunder without ever having healed anything at all prior to that. Over the past week I've seen this happen an absurd number of times (sometimes by players openly admitting that they switched from DPS to tank or healer for no reason other than faster queues/more desirable raid spots), and it's resulted in more drama and wipes than I'd seen prior to that by far, which only exacerbates the problem of the game having such an unfriendly community - especially toward newcomers.

True. While proper raid groups can do their own filtering and testing, I did notice LFR had some spectacularly shitty members in it, both in attitude and skill. Though, I'm not sure I would express shitty pick up groups as a particularly unique phenomenon to WoW(or even MoP WoW) and I believe the benefit of giving new, less skilled, or players with a tighter time window an avenue of approach to the game is ultimately a net positive as a whole and at worst a net neutral for traditional raiding groups as there is no need for them to mix with dirty LFR plebs.

(The last part is only half joking)

 

[Waaghpowa]

I also believe that Mists of Pandaria is Blizzards best work to date in terms of art style, story and encounters. They're still mis stepping with character balancing and talents, but that comes with expanding any game, including the addition of new classes i.e. monks.

I can honestly say, aside from a couple choices Blizz made with the legendary quest line, there isn't a single thing in this expansion I could say I don't like.

I love the style, the environments, Pandarens, my Pandaren Monk, the music and the obvious reference to real world Chinese culture, history and language.

This was the expansion that made me come back after Cataclysm which I thought was awful. A lot of people were, or still are, hating on Mists of Pandaria, though I feel that many of them haven't actually played it and are simply playing hate for the sake of hate.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

True. While proper raid groups can do their own filtering and testing, I did notice LFR had some spectacularly shitty members in it, both in attitude and skill. Though, I'm not sure I would express shitty pick up groups as a particularly unique phenomenon to WoW(or even MoP WoW) and I believe the benefit of giving new, less skilled, or players with a tighter time window an avenue of approach to the game is ultimately a net positive as a whole and at worst a net neutral for traditional raiding groups as there is no need for them to mix with dirty LFR plebs.

(The last part is only half joking)

Ugh. The amount of filtering we've had to do this past week is insane. We put out recruitment adds for healers, had a plethora of replies, and only found two that were actually serious about the role.

Admittedly, I am basing a lot of this on LFR. We use it as kind of like a first interview, so to speak. Gather up a bunch of people interested in joining us, team 'em with an experienced player or two, queue up and see how they do. I took five potential healers into the final wing of ToT, and it was a complete mess. They were wasting their big burst healing cooldowns, no one was following heal assignments, they were running out of mana before even reaching the 50% mark, etc. I mean, I get that healing in LFR is a cakewalk - it totally is - but this was a trainwreck clearly resulting from lack of experience. And sure enough, all five of them were decked out in an assortment of Timeless Isle gear and PvP honor gear.

I'm cool with giving newcomers a way into healing and tanking roles, I really am. We legitimately need more people playing them. But we need people to play them for the right reasons. That's why I think making dungeons/heroics/early raids obsolete is such a problem. Those are the places where newcomers should be learning their roles in a less stressful environment. I don't even want to know how many potentially awesome healers are being turned away from the role entirely because they got all their shiny new iLvl 496 gear, jumped straight into ToT, and then got discouraged by what they found.

I can sympathize with the time commitment issue, but even that was handled a bit better than the Timeless Isle stuff. A lot of the reputation epics are now Justice Point items, and the Shadowpan Assault valor gear has gotten price cuts - reducing the amount of instancing you need to do to get decent gear. I went from quest reward to raid geared in about a week and a half of fairly casual play back in 5.3 prior to the cost changes on that stuff. I don't think a week or two of doing heroics/early raids is unreasonable.

 

[LetalisK]

I can sympathize with the time commitment issue, but even that was handled a bit better than the Timeless Isle stuff. A lot of the reputation epics are now Justice Point items, and the Shadowpan Assault valor gear has gotten price cuts - reducing the amount of instancing you need to do to get decent gear. I went from quest reward to raid geared in about a week and a half of fairly casual play back in 5.3 prior to the cost changes on that stuff. I don't think a week or two of doing heroics/early raids is unreasonable.

Good point. Perhaps Timeless Isle went a bit overboard and should have limited the types of purple gear it was going to give out. Weapons, rings, and maybe trinkets I think might have been a good balance.

Though, one thing...

Ugh. The amount of filtering we've had to do this past week is insane. We put out recruitment adds for healers, had a plethora of replies, and only found two that were actually serious about the role.

Oh, too many prospects for your raid group? Lemme pull out the world's smallest violin. ;p

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

Oh, too many prospects for your raid group? Lemme pull out the world's smallest violin. ;p

I know, I know. First World Problems, and all.

I'm still starting to feel like I'm working for an HR department, though