2/22/2012 -> Can we get an update on where the Combat Log is?

I killed every Boss up to through the Lich King. Can't tell you for certain when I killed them all whether it was prenerf or not. It was probably after the nerfs, because you knew at some point that company was going to nerf everything anyways - making a complete joke out of all the content they jsut spent millions of dollars designing. And like I said - that game could never hold my attention for long enough stretches of time anyways. Because guilds were blowing through their endgame content 1 month after release.

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How many guilds do you think would be clearing content in WoW without the assistance of a site like TankSpot?

I argue very few. Sure you could read about what you are going to see in old EQ days. But you can pretty much experience the fight 100 times before you ever set foot in it today watching ayoutube vid.

All of these factors contributed to the difficulty of succeeding back then.

When you ask if the Boss or the grind was harder. I will say the encounters were harder. There was more going on. There were adds that needed to be kited with aoe's with enrage timers with death touches. Bane damages where you had to have a balanced group of blunt weilders, slashing weilders, peircing weilders - fire damage, holy damage. You couldn't just swap specs and micromanage every little thing.

But developers were afforded more imagination with encounter design and difficulty, because they wern't strangled by the tiny raid compositions that the 16- 20 man raid community holds them to todday.

Everything about it was different. It was bigger, it took longer, it had more going on, it was harder.

It felt epic. I can't even get excited about doing anything in a 8 man group. Really? An 8 man raid? How much do really think can really be happening in an encounter with 8 players in it?

WE ARE?!

You DID NOT kill heroic lich king, ever. I'd bet my life on it. You would remember it.

Stop talking out your a**.

Also, respond to my post from a few pages back please, the one about meters, logs and addons being part of the evolution of gaming. You conveniently ignored it.

WE ARE?!

Meters, Logs and Addons are NOT in the future of gaming, sorry!

Proof of this comes in 2 titles that are following a similar path.

Darkfall released a niche gamea few years ago that has an action style combat that doesn't even have targeting in it.

A title being released in May - Tera, which has a huge commercial budget and a subscription based model has further developed it. You don't tab a target.

People have grown sick and tired of macro snoozefest. They are on the way out my friend. Do some research. I guarantee you games going into development today, are following similar models, because the day of the lazy nerd that likes to copy and paste a 2 button macro and bang their head off the KB for a win are coming to a close in the very near future.

Trust me - no company is ever going to follow the commercial succes of WoW until a different model is used. This model is worn out and dried up and dead. Gaming companies know this. They also know that there are 2 million gamers that will buy absolutley any new release as it is released because they are searching for something epic.

But all of these games have 3 month lifespans. Why? Because they are all too easy. macros make games easy. Add-ons make games easy. Parsers make figuring out encounters easy. Just because Blizzard allowed them and made them popular, doesn't mean it was a great decision for the gaming industry. It just means tons of gamers have become gimped over the last 7 years.

But these companies arent stupid. They know you will spend your 50 bucks and then give them 30 for 2 months if they advertise the game right. They cash in and when they make their money back they could care less about making a great game. They use you like a shake and bake bag to make a profit.

The last thing on a companies mind is to make a truly epic MMO. They would rather make a couple dollars.

We are not talking about addons here, but combat logs and parsers are past, present and future of MMORPGs, its just a tool to analyze the fights and to identify players that aint palying at a level they are supposed to. Logs or meters has been in almost every MMORPG since UO in a form or another, baseline features or mod based, also in your belowed EQ1.

Goodbye EQ, Hello WoW
EQ died months ago, but we're tenacious. Like kids with a can, we've played "kick the dead horse" night after night. Then we realized that we'd have more fun eating the EQ CD's than playing what they contain.

Afterlife will no longer be playing EQ. We'd rather watch TV than play EQ. Even if the TV is off. We'd rather go fishing than play EQ. Even without beer.

Making the decision easy is World of Warcraft. While EQ is plagued by bugs, with every quest broken to begin and end game encounters working only by accident, WoW, even in beta, is essentially bug free. I've personally done hundreds of quests in WoW, and they all worked. I haven't done that many working quests in EQ, and I've been playing it for 6 years.

World of Warcraft has thus neatly replaced our previous addiction: sleeping.

Afterlife is now a World of Warcraft guild. http://www.afterlifeguild.org/

The last thing on a companies mind is to make a truly epic MMO. They would rather make a couple dollars.

Don't worry... Most of us who actually care about the combat log will likely be gone before it ever sees the light of day. Sadly, I see nothing on the horizon worth a damn PVE-wise. GW2 is going to be a zergfest joke of a game.