Just by removing attunements does not mean that the game is "dumbing down." It doesn't take much brain power to play it as it is. Removing the attunements is a way to make the game fun for people (such as me) who are 30+ year old parents that work 40 hours a week, not counting the 2 hour commute to and from work, dinner with the family, time with the kids and wife, and can only play during the week while the wife is watching Dancing With America's Next Biggest Loser Idol. If you are in school (middle, high, or college) or unemployed, living off of your mommy and daddy, and have all the time in the world to do the attunements, I feel sorry for you. Because you have nothing else to focus your life on. If you are actually that upset because other people can enjoy the more time consuming content you are a pathetic lump, and need to go meet someone of the opposite (or same) sex, and learn that this GAME is a way for people to relax and take their minds off of their real life for awhile. Not MAKE IT THEIR REAL LIFE.

The gear thing does sort of suck, though.

Content that you don't get to see is a problem.

But I wonder why didn't Blizzard come up with Heroic Raids.
Where you fight the same bosses but they get extra abilities, HP, just like 5-man heroics.
Loot could be higher level too of course.

That way while we wait on the expansion, casual players who are dedicated enough can see SSC, BT and what not, while raiding guilds can try and beat this content on heroic difficulty and get better loot/mounts/enchants.

WoW had changed, and had changed right direction.

- want to be at top? ok. raid 6 days a week, spend 6-8 hours a day in game, and you will be. you wil be first at final boss. kk gg.
- want to be not bad player? raid 3 days a week, spend 2-4 hours a day in game. be cool. and you will get to last boss after some time. 4 months after top guilds? 5 , 6 month? who cares.
-dont have time for raiding? want to be competitive still? wait a little bit more time and you will be fine too.

it is the same like nerfing bosses. at first stage, nihilum and others top guilds are trying and trying and finally downing bosses in instance ABCD. after some time, they will be nerfed, so other guilds can down them. what is bad on it? nihilum can say 'we, we downed Illidan before nerf. we - are - goood'. so you can say 'we cleared TBC content before 2.4'. too good.

but dont say plz "we have lost all of our hardly obtained equip". you were not at Black Temple for equip, you were there for fun.

/agreed.

It is not a question of dumming the game down, I would hope that they are tring to acomidate the men and women who play WOW, that have not quit their jobs or lost their wifes over the game. The fact is, wow is fun, and some of us pay to play the game, but we have full time jobs. For me the end game lost it's fun because i didn'y have the time to get attuned, or to raid all night long. So don't say to the intellegent folks who read your artical, and pay to play, that they are too stupid for end content. I think that blizzaed is smart enough to know who pays for their game, and they just want us to experience the end content as well. Thanks

Good idea in my book . Our guilds not the biggest or the best and without things like this as a casual non raid guild we have zero chance to either see this content or have gear anywhere near the quality of T6 .

Nobodys knocking the work the raiding guilds put in . Its just nice for us casuals to be able to see it and play it as well .

"At least pretend that hardcore raiders are important and introduce some kind of reward or recognition."

The tears of hardcore raiders doesnt earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year, you dont matter that much. If the major player base gets bored and leaves then thats a problem. Making gear more accessible as the game progresses stops massive gaps in gear forming between raiders/hardcore pvpers and casual players like in pre tbc. In the end a Hardcore raiders only real reward (along with those epics)is they will get there first. This game doesnt revolve around the elite, they have there place but are not the majority blizzard obviously know this. Come next expansion blizzard will do the same thing again, have rediculous attunements for everything to start with to keep the hardcore players busy and then slowly remove and "dumb it down" with every patch to make it more accessible.

Dont like it?
Find a new game that rewards your "eliteness"

I can understand both viewpoints, as I have been both a casual player and a raider, but unfortunately it's bad planning by blizzard i'm thinking. If this loot was already available when BT and Hyjal were available, with slight differences weighing more towards the 25 man raid side. There wouldn't be these arguements and disgusted players. From what i have seen, and I havent looked over all the loot that closely, it looks like Tier 5.5 equiv, if you could call it that. Where the BT/Hyjal stuff is slightly better. But this may not be the case for all pieces.

It also raises the question that blizzard are suddenly and not progressively giving out loot easier before we suddenly hit level 75 greens that blow our epics out of the water in Wrath. I almost think they're trying to gear the average player up quickly before they unleash Wrath!

They aren't. The only changes are to multiple-target attacks whose targets can't be controlled. The perfect example is the paladin shield throw. It literally was not possible to sap a target before the pull because the shield had a very high to guaranteed chance to break it, depending on the total number of mobs.

Blizz is simply fixing what, in my opinion, was a bug in the first place.

Well said. I agree completely!

Don't like it? Play ever-crack...

I disagree with one of your points slightly. They are, in fact, catering to the elites too, that's why they release several iterations of top-end content each expansion. First is was just MC and I think BWL and Ony, then they added AQ, then they added Naxx. Same with BC. Start with 1 big end-game then add more to keep the elites happy while making lower content more accessible to make the more casual types happy. Then when an expansion hits, everyone's on an almost even-slate (high-end raiding gear will still tide you over until the new end-game). That way the casuals that want to be elites have a new shot at it. It's really win-win.

Oh this is something my guild mates and I have been saying for a good while now. In recent days, I've never seen so many level 70's that seriously have no clue what their doing. It's all just an express lane to end game anymore. I'm not going to try and say I'm the be-all-end-all of my class, but there's people out there that everyday I'm asking myself "How the hell did they make it to 70 and not know (insert WoW common knowledge here)?!" If you make the game too easy with the "Everybody gets a trophy!" mentality, you get nothing but clueless raid members.

"that many casual players have long said makes MMO’s less fun for them"

Well than maybe MMOs aren't for them then. Personally I'm not the greatest FPS player, not horrible mind you just not as good as alot of the hardcore players out there. So does that mean the game should have a god mode option to accommodate me so I can play on level of the other online players? Or should I just play the game, get better at it, and then be a valued member of a group? If I can't get better at it, is it the game and other player's fault for not making it easier for me...or should I just realize that maybe FPS games aren't my bag, baby....and only play them as occasionally for fun and move on?

WoW needs to seriously drop the "Everybody gets a trophy!" way of thinking and leave the epic loot just that...Epic...not Epic Fail.

You are precisely correct: They are letting people get some sweet gear that they can do more than just drool over before releasing the patch that will equalize the gear once again. Gives people like me that will probably never see the end of SSC, much less BT, something to look forward to :)

Very poor analogy. FPS games are designed so that everyone is PRECISELY the same, only your skill makes you different. In wow the more skilled will still have better gear than the crappy, since they will win BG's more often and down more bosses. Don't forget that there's a whole new level of gear coming with these changes that only the elite raiders can get!

It's true that 70 doesn't mean very much anymore, but that's because WotLK is on the horizon. Gear is nothing more than another step in the level grind after you hit 70. Soon enough, that will be replaced by the grind to 80 and everyone will be nearly on par once again.

phantom>> so players like me, who when i can raid can do so with the best of them, should denied access to the good gear simply because my job has me working when 95% of the guilds do their runs?

casual doesn't always mean doesn't have a clue.

I think, more than anything it's the issue that Blizzard keeps changing the setup. If they kept things consistent concerning things that required lots and lots of effort, you wouldn't hear 80% of these complaints.

If BT/Hyjal came out with no attunement requirement, but still had an attunement quest, no one would have cared and some people would have gotten the quest done for a title.

But MAKING people do it, and then suddenly dropping it - that is what bothers people.

I dont even think it is the end game stuff.... I am relelveling a char, and just killed the Gorrila King in STV, he used to be a 52 Elite.... he is now a 41 none elite... I had to get my buds to help me last time... now it was like, LOL he just show no go. I also get a kick out of things like "hidden" objects. I used to have to search thottbot, and look for hours on the game to look for a small box in a lake.. "is that a tree stump or a box?, Stump" Now it is like there is a big neon arrow that Screams HERE I AM!!!! Infact the quest at the torn down inn at Dustwallow marsh literally had flashing neon blue arrows... Come on Blizz... I now my new server is not PVP, and that PVE guys dont fight from a lvl 9 but this is sad when a 51 rogue can kill lvl 65 players... they are getting slow.

"Oh this is something my guild mates and I have been saying for a good while now. In recent days, I've never seen so many level 70's that seriously have no clue what their doing."

I blame the "wtb boost" noobs for that. In EQOA we had a guild tank at lv50 (max level) which was quite interested. We took him with us for a boss encounter, and wiped within seconds. Someone raised the question "how often do you taunt?" and his reply was "why should i taunt? it doesn't do any damage?". Needless to say, we had to write a tanking tutorial for our powerleveled guild tank.

People pay for this game monthly, and yet they don't care about playing it at all. It's just a race to lv70 for them, and there they are, the "level 70's that seriously have no clue what their doing."

I agree that the game has been a bit too nerfed. I welcome the "glimmering" effect around usable items, helping you find something that you might normally miss, but adopting the game for "hai i just bought this game and i'm a lv70"'s is a bit too much. If they don't want the challenge, don't bother with it. Kinda like the guy in AV a few nights ago that begged us not to report the AFKers, since they were just trying to get their gear, and since he thought they didn't like AV they shouldn't have to play. That's not an attitude that works.

Are people forgetting about the complaining that was happening when all endgame instances required attunements? The ONLY thing guilds would require was attunement to a specific raid and you would be in. This was right after TBC hit. They fixed that by removing the attunements, largely at the request of a lot of the raiding community, now they could recruit based on skill and not attunement. And now you are complaining that there are no attunements? So what if I can just walk into SSC/TK now? Its not like those attunements were all that hard anyway. So what if I can walk into Hyjal/BT after 2.4? its not like getting in there wasnt a timesink to prevent guilds like Nihilum to breeze through the raid in 2 days. If I am serious about raiding I will be able to get in there anyway. Now it will just take a little less time. And if I am a raider, I can now enter with my alts if needed without having to go through the attunements. At the same time I cannot breeze into SP, which is all that should matter at the moment.

Remember in the months leading up to TBC, there was the release of Naxxramas, gaining honor suddenly sky-rocketed and everyone was getting gear, well (hopefully) this should be the same thing. Blizzard are giving everyone a chance to get that gear they've always wanted and are giving the hardcore guys a chance to get in that last kill of one of the most "powerful" beings in the universe.
SO hopefully this is another ploy because as soon as we go to Northrend we'll get better greens! :D