It's really a shame when a popular franchise manages to lose sight of what has made it great. I left a fantastic but vastly underappreciated MMORPG (Lineage II) for World of Warcraft because it was fun and whimsical, but I stayed because raiding was a challenge and I love puzzles. And yet with this new expansion, Blizzard has decided to cater so heavily to casual players that I can hardly find a compelling reason to log in and play. Like other people who find enjoyment in the challenge of raiding, I am incredibly disappointed that Naxxramas has been so severely oversimplified.
When it was originally released to tide people over until the release of The Burning Crusade, Naxx was full of demanding bosses, intricate strategies and many entirely unfamiliar challenges. The previous raid instances were massive and repetetive, but Naxx boasted a number of new and unexpected hurdles to overcome. At the time, I played on one of the original servers, Stormreaver. It was (and still is) a server with an excellent raiding population and quality players. I was in a hybrid guild of serious raiders and casual players (ranking roughly third in progression) that had been clearing all game content for months. Even so, the best raiding guild on our server took well over a month, maybe longer, to finally kill KT. There were guilds that never made it past the first boss - they attempted, and seeing the level of coordination and effort it took, realized they were outclassed and went back to the easier raids. We didn't raid once or twice a week, or for two or three hours. We raided every night of the week - and twice on Saturdays (no joke).
We were in Naxx 3 days a week, farming and learning new content. It took an entire raid night just to learn the healing rotation for Patchwerk, and even still we hit the enrage timer for the first few weeks. We could spend three hours wiping to Thaddius, trying to get through an attempt where no one lagged out. We worked hard for our achievements. We read strategies and rehashed raids afterwards for hours, discussing strategies and theories. But by then our raiding core was bored, and interest waned as word of how quickly our gear would become obsolete began to surface, and the guild elected to stop raiding in advance of The Burning Crusade, rather than finish clearing Naxx.
Naturally, I was a bit hesitant at first when I heard that Naxx would be retuned for level 80. I wasn't sure what to expect, but at first it was exciting to be back in Naxxramas. I can't really say that I had been looking forward to or dreading it, but after spending so much time in the 40 man version, the thought of some of the encounters made me quite nostalgic. I was beyond disappointed to see how easy the encounters have become. Crushed and demoralized might be better terms. The 40 man version was hard - very hard. The encounters were precise and rigid - they required everyone in the raid to perform their roles properly in order to complete each encounter (with the exception of Heigan, whom you could defeat even then with the right 10 or so people and enough patience). The removal of a good quantity of trash was nice, but I noticed right off the bat that the instance had been severely simplified when I saw how little damage the poison charge was doing in the Spider Wing. That attack could kill someone in the 40 man version if not cleansed - it appears it's doing the same or nearly the same damage as it did at level 60 which is idiotic. Everything does less damage - or rather the damage hasn't been significantly boosted to match the far greater amount of health each character now has. Survival is a joke. I can't even find the interest to finish raiding the heroic version after seeing how easy the first few bosses are, and I will be letting my account expire for a while until (hopefully) something challenging is actually implemented.
Naxxramas is an interesting instance that was designed for the sole purpose of occupying people for a few months time (not unlike Sunwell Plateau, another quite difficult instance that only a small portion of the raiding population managed to clear). And yet it was cleared in the very first weekend the expansion was released. In less than one week, the content that previously took months to advance through was cleared. In days, not even weeks. One night, not even multiple raids. Pick up raids clear the instance without difficulty. Pick up groups on my new server, Spirestone, where the general quality of raiding players is significantly lower than Stormreaver. You couldn't even hope to clear Serpentshrine Cavern or Tempest Keep with a pick-up group (not the end bosses, at least), and Naxxramas was far more complicated in design than either instance. Even with the advantage of practice on the test realm and prepared strategies to speed this process, the difficulty level is unforgivable. Knowing how is not the only factor for raid success. Bosses like Patchwerk exist to be a gear check and they were cleared in dungeon blues and quest reward greens, indicative of just how easy the instance has been made.
Blizzard did not deliver what they advertised. Having two levels of difficulty for raids was meant to allow both casual and serious players to enjoy the content, but there's no enjoyment to be had in a victory that requires no skill, no practice, no strategy, no ingenuity, and such an incredibly low bar for the quality of the raid's gear.
