Originally posted by: RBachman
Coming from SOE, you'll remark at how well Blizzard treats its customers, simply because they don't bend you over and have their way without you at every opportunity. My experiences with Sony, both electronics and SOE games, and the recent discovery of the rootkits their CDs install, has led me to boycott the company. I really wish more would do the same, but... people are stupid
Anyway, others have pretty much said what's to be said about it.
The interface is beautiful. Elegant, powerful, and from the very beginning of beta extremely supportive of third-party addons.
The game isn't as deep and immersive as other games; this is by design. Personally I'd rather have something deeper, but I can't fault Blizzard for targeting a demographic I'm not a part of.
I think the PvP is pretty good. I've never been much a fan of a ruleset allowing Little Timmy to sit around and grief you all day because he gets teased in school, and so I roll on PvE servers. But even on PvE servers there are the PvP Battlegrounds, instances which you enter by choice for team PvP. There are objectives and rewards, it's not just boring back & forth killing.
The servers have been awful from day one; incredibly laggy and riddled with connectivity issues. Recently it's gotten much better. They allowed transfers from my server to a new one; I left one main, and transferred my other main and my alts. The original server was also "Migrated" (don't ask, no clue), which took around 24 hours of downtime. Since then the lag has been virtually nonexistent, quite a change from the usual. Pings have also plummeted. The new server, after a few hiccups, has been flawless as well.
Blizzard has a terrible attitude toward bugs. Game breaking ones may take a month or more to fix. Merely "annoying" ones may never be fixed. The game has a lot of line of sight issues for healers which have never been addressed, pets see stealthed characters and can attack them, again an admitted bug but never fixed. Mobs on an incline can go into "evade" mode, in which they instantly regen to full hp and are untouchable, but can still hit you. This one's been live for a year now. And those are just a few examples off the top of my head.
The playerbase is immature, there's no denying this. But there are good people playing as well. Finding a decent guild is integral to enjoying the game if you're older than 12. Once you find one, you can leave the general chat and looking for group channels, possibly trade as well, and you wouldn't even know there are 12 year olds playing. Download the Infinite Ignore addon from curse-gaming.com/mod.php (because the default 25 ignore slots aren't nearly enough) to catch any of the lil ones who slip past the goalie. The horde tends to be far more mature than the alliance, but they're also vastly outnumbered. This is good for battlegrounds; no lines to wait on for PvP. But it can make finding groups & guilds difficult, especially on low-pop servers where the horde is like a small town where everyone knows each other; guilds may simply not have an opening for your class (and if you want to play a dps class as you alluded in your OP, it'll be even more difficult).
At "casual" 60 (doing the 5man instances and the 10man one) rogues top damage meters. As you progress in end-game and begin doing 20-40 man raids and gearing up from them, rogue skills don't scale with gear - and very few rogue weapons drop - the few that do are often sidegrades, rather than upgrades, aka DFB. Fantastic warrior weapons are everywhere though, if you stand around one will pretty much fall into your lap. Additionally, much of the more difficult to obtain rogue armor is a downgrade from its more easily obtainable counterpart, and some is a sidegrade. Very little is actually better. (Compare tier 1 Nightslayer to tier 2 Bloodfang). In end-game, warriors dominate damage meters. It's utter bullsh!t, but Blizzard doesn't seem to care. Rogues are allowed to attend raids only because of social ties; otherwise we do nothing warriors can't do better.
Single group content is extremely stagnant. Blizzard hired Tigole, responsible for post-PoP EQ's raidfest atmosphere, as their lead content designer. Every patch brings with it a new 40man raid, more rogue nerfs, more bugs and a mountainous rep (faction) grind. If you're a more casual player you'll be fine, but if you devote a moderate-high amount of time to your gaming you'll have to be a fan of the gaming experience Tigole brings to the table.
At the end of the day, it's the best MMOG available, but I'll leave in a heartbeat when Vanguard is released.
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