Added another little paragraph about leveling through the garrison exclusively, though it would be more a long haul type situation.
Nope. It sells as "Baleful Trinket", which doesn't show what it actually is until opened.
Pretty much all classes have been changed to give them more presence. Some classes are even getting spec and artifact specific visual bonuses, like if you play a Fire Mage, once you get Flamestrike, the corpse of every enemy you kill will turn burnt black and be on fire. They hope to add little stuff like that to all of them to further enhance the new melee and spell effects.
I hope they've got something good planned, because the last couple of expansions were just shit*\
Yeah there's a lot of great spell/attack updates, as well as fun things, too. For example the Elemental Shaman Artifact, the Fist of Ra'Den, causes Air Elementals in Stormheim to become friendly to you because you wield "the Master's power."
Cata was rough, MoP was great until SoO content drought, and WoD felt pretty half-baked.
The overwhelming opinion of people these days is "turn it back to pre-WOTLK" because the changes ether aren't working or the story is just too dumb to care about anymore. Honestly, as someone who left at the beginning and who hadn't played again until post-Cataclysm, I haven't had much of a problem with the game. All the changes I've noticed (especially the zone changes, as Thousand Needles is FUN now) have been for the better. Then again, I haven't played Warlords of Draenor ether... I only played up until Mists.
Considering it was free, a couple hundred thousand isn't all that much. It's still a very niche group that would never pay a fee for a vanilla server that never got updates past Naxx. BTW, many people don't know this and don't like reporting on it since it kind of hurts the narrative, but Nostalrius was shutting down anyways, as they didn't make the money they needed to keep the servers going. The fact the C&D order came over soon after they were considering shutting down just gave them the reason they needed to let it go without getting themselves bloody in the process. All blame was on Blizzard now.
I call those people masochists.[DOUBLEPOST=1460755380,1460754989][/DOUBLEPOST]I say this as someone who saw all the content when it was current all the way from Vanilla to Cata, then as someone who just played with a few friends after that. All of my fond memories of any MMO I ever played were of the dumb shit I got away with while playing with others, or of clearing a hard as fuck boss after trying at it forever. It took me a really long time after I quit raiding to enjoy WoW again because I had to adjust my thinking. I have fond memories of EQ too, but I know I'd get bored of it all over again if I didn't have the same people connection.
The issue is the game changed with the times to try and capture new blood. Many people don't realize it, but WoW has not been the same ten+ million players every year for the last ten years. They have cycled through over a hundred million+ people since the game started. That means there are people that left after each expansion and new blood coming in to fill those missing ranks, which kept it at a decently consistent number for years because they changed each expansion to be more accessible to that new blood. Cataclysm was the first downward notch, and that was because they tried to deviate back to a more "vanilla" format of thinking at the start of it, which they had to regress on to stop much of the bleed. MoP suffered from similar problems, but not to the same level, and made up for it with much of the story.
No one will be able to be the "next" WoW until WoW is gone. The key to success is being different or being tied to a massive franchise: SWTOR gets along by being THE Star Wars game, ESO gets along by being Elder Scrolls AND having a different sort of buy-in, TSW gets along by being RADICALLY different than any other MMO on the market, etc...
I guess what you have to question though is, what is a "success?" Many of those games in the eyes of the developers were not successful, not in the way they were hoping. They all had to drop to F2P to recoup losses, since they couldn't survive on a subscription model, which all of them had attempted to do when they were first released. Now they are successful in the general F2P game sort of way.
Some have tried that too, so far the only one I hear good things about is Black Desert Online.
It really depends on what you consider a success. If "makes enough money to turn a profit and still be able to make new content" is your measure of success, all the games I've listed are successful (except SWTOR, which is STILL eating through it's 100+ million dev costs). If your measure is "Does exactly what it set out to do" then TSW is basically the most successful MMO of the bunch, as it's kept it's narrative focus it's entire lifetime and even has spin-off/tie-in games in The Black Watchmen and The Park. If your focus is "Make billions of dollars in profit like WoW did" then your expectations were already set too high.
I like the fact that the artifacts add so much new flavor to the specs. Like how fire mages now makes their kills exploding into a burning, charred corpse, or how the Shadow Priest artifact whispers to you like it's trying to influence you. Will be fun to see what else they add.
This was the whole reason they added the max level boost for WoD and Legion, plus the ability to buy further boosts. They noticed a lot of time a new player would be lured in to join the game, only the friends that invited them didn't want to level with him. This forced the new player to push himself hard through the leveling process rather then enjoy it slowly, since he joined to play with friends that were already max level. This burned them out on the game before they ever reached the cap, and thus a player was lost.
I kinda liked WoD too. So did everyone at release. Blizz dropped the ball with lack of content and end game on that expac. The ending really felt... lame? Garrosh dying so fast, and Groms big 180 is what I didn't like.
