Filed under: Cataclysm

I did a post this week about raiding in previous expansions and in vanilla WoW, and how people often say those raids were harder and my opinion that it is easily demonstrable that current raids are if anything more complicated than they have ever been. I frankly believe there is almost no room for comparison between the game at 60 and today in terms of raid complexity and difficulty. Part of this stems from the many different variations on what the word hard means in this context. Something can be harder because it is conceptually or executionally more complex (the difficulty can stem from how much is required to successfully complete its mechanics) or it can be hard because it is laborious and/or time consuming. Was raiding with 40 people in classic WoW more laborious? Absolutely it was. It wasn't mechanically harder, but it was more time consuming and took a great deal of effort to organize and plan. It's the difference between working out a complex multi-stage math problem and carrying five thousand pounds of rocks from point A to point B.

But there were some points worth addressing. It absolutely has never been easier to level, even without heirlooms, than it is right now. Vanilla leveling to 60 took more time and effort than leveling to 90 does today. Even without heirlooms, one can easily and without much stress reach level 20 in a few hours, level 40 in less than two days, and be level 60 within a day of that, and this isn't spending all day staring at the screen either. This is a fairly casual leveling pace. I leveled a blood elf warrior to 35 in two days of rather casual play, an hour on followed by a half hour reading websites or having a snack or even going for a long walk.

It's also far easier to do the following things:

1. Get a dungeon group. You can queue for dungeons at level 15, and from that point on, all you ever have to do to run a dungeon is hit that queue. If you're playing in the tank or healing role you can effectively chain dungeons all day, and even leveling as DPS there are stretches where you don't even need to quest or do anything but dungeon.
2. Run a battleground. While you could argue that doing well at BG running as you level up and at max level takes some time and effort, if you want to risk queueing in whatever gear you have, it's simplicity itself.
3. Getting ready to raid at max level. The game now has catchup mechanisms in place for players who start later. If you just got your alt to 90 and are switching to it for raiding, deciding to give raiding a try for the first time, or what have you it's not the case that your raid group is compelled to run you through previous raids for attunements and keys, much less gearing you through older raids to get ready for the current content.
4. Find something to do. You could even argue that there's too much to do, or that it feels too mandatory. But you can't argue you don't have options - if you don't want to run dungeons, raid, or PvP there are pet battles, daily quests and scenarios you can do.

So the question then becomes this: is it better or worse for the game that these things are easier? For that matter, are they easy enough?

Vanilla raiding was not mechanically more difficult than current raiding. In fact, in terms of encounter difficulty, raiding in World of Warcraft has never been as challenging to remember and execute as it is right now. Fights like Lei Shen, Twin Consorts, Iron Qon, and Durumu ask players to learn mechanics and execute awareness at a level rivaled only by fights like Mimiron's Firefighter mode. And I'm not even talking heroic difficulty for those fights. Yes, it was often harder to get 40 people together, I'm not disputing that. But that's not design difficulty, that's social difficulty. The argument that WoW was objectively harder back then is beyond absurd.

I was there for all of those raids. I've raided in vanilla, in BC, in Wrath, and in Cataclysm. I've done hard modes and heroic modes since they were introduced. I'm neither the cutting edge progression raider nor someone who raids occasionally for fun -- I've been everywhere from a raider pushing for realm firsts to one leading a semi-casual 10-man while tanking. One thing I can and will say with absolute certainty is this: every single expansion to World of Warcraft has increased the complexity of the raid design.

Today's Activision-Blizzard financial reports states World of Warcraft took a subscriber hit this quarter, losing 1.3 million players since February.

The loss brings the total number of WoW players down to 8.3 million, its lowest level since the launch of the Burning Crusade expansion in 2007. Subscriber levels have fallen by about a third since WoW's post-Cataclysm peak of 12 million subscribers. The loss is hardly unusual -- you have to remember that WoW is a 9-year-old game, and we're at a pretty uninteresting time in the expansion cycle.

Have we mentioned yet that we're really excited to see if Blizzard is announcing a new MMO at BlizzCon?

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Spoilers for patch 5.3 to follow

Back in the day, and be not mistaken the day was well before The Burning Crusade was even a glimmer in our eyes, I rolled a tauren warrior. His name was Vorn. Vorn went on many quests, because questing was my favorite way to level. Vorn went all over the world, exploring the Horde and the lands under its control, and he found a lot he liked about his allies. He could respect the orcish ferocity and skill in war, the trollish craft, guile, and restrained sense of humor (the Darkspears are sardonic in their way), and even the forsaken seemed to have a wide disparity of personality types. I met forsaken in Thunder Bluff who sent me across the world to return a locket to a tombstone, and that quest moved me to explore the forests of Silverpine, and in time to go to Undercity itself. To be sure, I found there to be aspects of their unlives that disturbed me, but they displayed a strength in adversity that I found admirable.

And then they ruined it.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Let's just be up front about this now -- the Titans left stuff everywhere. It would be hard to disbelieve in them, frankly. They left bases, research stations, fortresses, labs and more. We don't even know what everything they left behind originally did or why it was there in many cases. Some places have somewhat clear reasons for existing (Ulduar, for instance, was tasked with holding the Old God Yogg Saron prisoner, but the Halls of Stone and Lightning point to other goals for the complex) but others, such as the ruined complex now known as Ahn'Qiraj was simply a 'research facility', and we have no idea what it was researching or why such a complex was needed so close to Uldum.

At any rate, there are a lot of Titan complexes currently known of on Azeroth.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Matthew Rossi will be your host today.

This isn't meant to imply that one is harder, or a better benchmark of skill, or what have you. It's simply a personal realization based on thinking back on the past years of World of Warcraft and the changing roles I've played.

People who've read the site know that I tend to fall into certain patterns - I start an expansion tanking, switch to DPS for a big chunk and then, somehow, I end up tanking again. I did this in classic WoW, where I played as a DPS as I leveled until about level 40, then tanked until Four Horsemen in Naxx 40. Cut to Burning Crusade, and while I tried to level as a tank, the rage problems and lack of AoE threat meant that I went DPS for a while, only to end up tanking post Karazhan as bosses began to hit harder and the ranks of tanks willing to endure it thinned out. Wrath of the Lich King I tanked for the same guild, left and ended up a DPS for most of Naxx 25 and Ulduar, only to switch to tanking in Trial of the Crusader and stay there until Arthas was dead. Cataclysm? I tanked 10 man Tier 11 raids, switch to DPS in 25 man Firelands and stayed there for most of the expansion only to switch back to tanking for Dragon Soul. And finally there's Mists of Pandaria, where I began as a draenei tank, switched back to a pandaren DPS warrior, went through my orc phase, DPS'd as a tauren for a while and am now a worgen arms warrior.

Last week Adam wrote a piece about how tanking changes you as a player. What's interesting to me is how much I have to unlearn from tanking. There's a DPS mindset, where you learn to watch for spell effects, learn to avoid damage if at all possible (rather than learning how to survive it) and to Always Be Attacking, to constantly get as much activity translated into damage on whatever it is you need to be damaging. Tanking comes second nature to me. I could go tank right now and be fine. DPS requires much more attention from me, it's more demanding and while I'm competent at it, it's always something i have to consciously work at. It's made me a better tank because it's challenged my preconceptions. DPS isn't easy. Especially not being good DPS. There's a ton of work that goes into it.

I just wanted to say that, as someone who has tanked and DPS'd, I admire really skilled DPS players.

Adam ‏(@Adamdm_) asks on Twitter:

Saur-priests say saurok were created by mogu, but they mention a belief they evolved from devilsaurs. Which is more likely?

We have plenty of evidence that the mogu meddled in saurok evolution. Between the Dagger in the Dark scenario, Primordius' existence in Throne of Thunder, Progenitus on the island proper, archaeology in the game, we know the mogu made the saurok to serve as soldiers. What we don't really know for sure is what, exactly, they made the saurok from. There's no dinosaurs on mainland Pandaria, but there's plenty of them on the Isle of Giants to the north, and there's no reason the mogu couldn't have included a few in their experiments to make the saurok.

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the concept of "twinking" in WoW for PvP. It generally entails decking a low-level character out with all the best possible gear available to them and then tearing up the battlefields. In these post-experience locking days twinking is more straightforward than ever, and our own Olivia Grace has already covered a lot of the gearing aspects of twinking, for both PvE and PvP.

PvE twinking is a bit of an unusual idea. Mostly it refers to locking experience at one of the former level caps - 60, 70, 80, or 85 - in order to enjoy the challenges of old raids or to accomplish something limited to players of a certain level, such as the Herald of the Titans title. These are fun and interesting ways to spend time in the game, but what about PvE twinking at even lower levels? Say, level 20? Or 40? Why on earth would anyone want to do that?

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Vereesa Windrunner has lost everything several times now.

She lost her oldest sister Alleria to the same Horde invasion that killed most of their family, as Alleria went off to seek vengeance against the orcs and ended up lost somewhere beyond the Dark Portal, never to be seen or heard from again. Her other sister, Sylvanas, was killed by the Lich King's servant Arthas Menethil, and the death knight chose to prevent Sylvanas from even attaining the peace of death, trapping her in undeath.

Worse, when Vereesa lost Sylvanas, she lost her homeland and her people. The high elves of Quel'thalas became blood elves, following Prince Kael'thas on the path to ruin, addiction, and madness and she could not, did not follow. Along with a few remnants of her people, she attempted to preserve what had been thrown away, to keep high elven culture alive even as Silvermoon resided in the hands of those that had abandoned it. Its not surprising that she found love in someone who shared her loyalty to the Alliance, nor perhaps is it surprising that she found it in human arms, as both Alleria and Sylvanas showed a predisposition to humans.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Before we get started, let's cover the previous posts in this series:

• Leveling a new warrior
• Levels 1 to 30
• Levels 31 to 60

What levels 61 through 90 cover is a staggering array of content, if you think about it, going from Burning Crusade (in many ways the oldest content still available in WoW) to Wrath, then Cataclysm and finally Mists of Pandaria itself. Even without raiding or running heroic dungeons, you're still looking at over 30 zones (I'm being conservative and not counting the DK start zone, the Worgen/Goblin start zones, Wintergrasp or Tol Barad) of content. And that content varies greatly, since it ranges from first being introduced in 2007 to 2012. That's over five years of game design iteration, and you can really feel it - in many ways, going from the Cataclysm revamped old world to TBC era Outland to start this patch of leveling off is like stepping into a time machine. Hellfire is a scattered zone, with multiple quest hubs only loosely connected and even with the quests having been adjusted to be much easier to solo it feels like the artifact of its time that it is.

Still, since both Outland and Northrend have had their experience requirements relaxed from their debut periods, it's not hard to get through them. Ironically enough, it's when you hit level 80 and start in on Cataclysm content that the game starts to feel bogged down. Several heirlooms currently stop working at level 80 (the hat, cloak and legs currently available last until 85, and new heirlooms are coming in 5.2) and the experience requirements, while reduced, are still more significant than the previous two expansions.

Still, let's talk about what you, as a warrior, will find when you hit these levels.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Matthew Rossi is riding this bus all the way to the ground today.

I said I would title this edition of The Queue this if I were allowed to write it. Here's the issue, as best I understand it.

1. They are introducing new snake models in patch 5.2.
2. These snake models are not tameable by hunters.
3. Several people, including my own wife, somehow think that if I say that I agree that these snakes should be tameable, somehow that will have some sort of positive effect and the snakes will become tameable.

So, in the interest of getting people to stop tweeting at me, I will now say that if Blizzard decided to make these snakes tameable I would be for it because then I wouldn't have to hear about it any more. I know that there are issues that are far, far more important than hunters, like warriors getting to dual wield polearms, but in the interest of a moment's peace I stand here today saying Okay, whatever, let hunters tame these snakes already.

Seriously, guys, my voice carries no weight. You're fooling yourselves. But for those of you who keep tweeting at me, here you go, I officially support strength polearms... er, I mean, hunters taming snakes. Yeah, that's what I mean.

darthonyx says

Freya isn't the only female Titanic construct like that though. There are several others, including Isiset, Ironaya, Auriaya, and Nablya.

There's also Myzrael, who might be an earth elemental, a titan construct, or perhaps both (a titan construct made out of an earth elemental) for all we know, but yes, there are quite a few female titan creations. Still, the vast majority of earthen, vrykul, mechagnomes, mogu and tol'vir we see are male (I have yet to see any demonstratably female tol'vir, not that I would be brave enough to try and check their undercarriage, as it were) and we don't really know why.

Vrykul are the only real exception in that we've seen enough female titan constructs to assume there could have been a few up front. (The Avatar of Freya is a female vrykul, not a human or titan construct). It's also worth noting that, while the Old Gods made the Curse of Flesh that seems to have created female counterparts for dwarves, gnomes, etc, the enslaved tol'vir and titan watchers in Ahn'Qiraj (Moam and Ossirian as just two examples) do not have flesh forms, nor do they have the female gender.

I've already done some Raiding with Leashes vanilla raid posts. The next logical step would be Burning Crusade soloing, but I've tried and failed to make a glorified loot list more interesting to read, since BC content tends to be more "walk in and win" nowadays than an actual soloing contest.

So, while I wrangle out an adventure in tiers four to six, I will talk about killing dragons solo as a warlock in order to grab dragon mounts.

I'm not talking about dragons that require friends by your side to complete: e.g., Deathwing's two dragon mounts, Ultraxion's mount, completing a dragonstick, or Al'Akir's dragon drop. Al'Akir has actually been soloed before by a warlock, but you'll need friends in order to clear his genie council first. I'm talking dragons you can go beat up by yourself.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

One of the interesting things about Garrosh Hellscream's rise to the position of Warchief of the Horde has been his display of leadership. When he was in charge of the Warsong Offensive, he lead the Horde in battle against the forces of the Lich King's Scourge and the Alliance. Upon returning from Northrend covered in glory, he began his tenure as Warchief by unleashing Horde forces to seize control of Azshara, make inroads in Ashenvale and Stonetalon, and encouraged (one could even say strongarmed) the Forsaken under Sylvanas Windrunner into invading Gilneas in order to secure a port for future advances.

Following this, he orchestrated an elaborate plan to lure the Alliance's leadership to defend Theramore, a plan that nearly succeeded in destroying them with a mana bomb, and has since extended the war to Pandaria where he's dedicated a great deal of the Horde's military resources (and those of factions within the Horde like the Blood Elves) towards finding ancient weapons or things that could be made to serve as weapons, all while sending his Kor'kron to occupy the Echo Isles. In short, Garrosh has been a dynamic leader, and it's hard to dispute that he's made more gains for the Horde during his time as Warchief - both the Dragonmaw and the Blackrock have become powerful Horde allies under Garrosh, Gilneas is heavily contested, the Forsaken have spread across northern Lordaeron, Azshara is firmly under Horde control.

This isn't the game I started playing!

This is a paraphrasing, of course, but the mentality is real enough. People lament that the communities have changed, that raiding has changed, that gearing has changed, that dungeons have changed, that how we play has changed, that our classes have changed. And every individual has to answer for him or herself whether or not the game has changed enough that it's not worth playing for you anymore.

Personally, I recommend that if you feel that way, you stop playing. But more importantly, it must be stated that the change we're discussing is an inevitability, especially since it's basically stated that World of Warcraft is more likely to see expansions and additions than a sequel ala Guild Wars 2 or EverQuest 2. WoW is going to keep changing as long as it exists, trying to address player concerns and improve its systems even as it gains new levels and sees new content. This is the nature of the beast - it will never be 2004 again, and I will never be a low level warrior getting Charge for the first time and ramming myself headlong into spiders.

The game cannot, will not, and most importantly should not freeze, not even to stay at the exact combination you found the most fun.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

They claimed to be the true Horde. They may yet prove it.

The Blackrock orcs seem, on the surface, to be a relic of a bygone age. A tribe of orcs holding on to a past swept aside by Turalyon's hand clutching Lothar's broken sword, a defeated remnant of Gul'dan's legacy. Once led by Blackhand the Destroyer, the Blackrock clan rose to prominence when Blackhand became Gul'dan's proxy as Warchief of the newborn Horde. And it remained central when Orgrim Doomhammer, Blackhand's second in command, slew Blackhand and seized power, for Doomhammer too was a member of the Blackrock clan. After the final defeat of the Horde atop Blackrock Spire, it seemed certain that the Blackrocks would trouble Azeroth no more.

Yet Blackhand's sons Rend and Maim, who had served Doomhammer even after he killed their father as leaders of the splinter clan the Black Tooth Grin, led the Blackrocks into the mountain that bore the same name and set about rebuilding them. When Teron Gorefiend came to Blackrock Spire, the brothers Blackhand refused his call to join Ner'zhul's Horde, seeing themselves as the true inheritors of Blackhand's legacy. In time, the Black Dragonflight came to the mountain, attracted by the reds still held in bondage there, and Nefarian brought the Blackrocks into his service. Maim Blackhand died in the war with the Dark Iron Dwarves to determine which force would rule the mountain, while Rend died when Thrall sent members of the Horde to kill him for his claim to the title of Warchief that Doomhammer had bestowed upon the shaman.

And yet, the Blackrocks were not done. Ironically, it may have been one of Thrall's most loyal supporters who brought one of Garrosh Hellscream's most dangerous enforcers into the fold.