heh, read that linked thread and can't say I disagree at all with the people complaining. I may be in 6/8 tier 2 and have epics in nearly every gear slot, but it's still ridiculous how poorly designed the endgame is in wow. I still remember how in beta I spent forever playing the game, but because it was a lot of fun and not because you had to just to gear up to handle mobs that have way more health and hit harder, but are otherwise just as dumb and killable as non-elite trash mobs out in silithus. In beta, there was no need to farm for anything, it was just a nice bonus to get a really rare drop when the hardcore people who were playing it ALL THE TIME would get thousands of gold, or dragon's call, or ironfoe or something like that.
Personally I can think of a ton of things Blizzard should do to make the game more friendly for 5-10 man groups and soloers, and destroy this ****ing garbage raid game we're all forced into:
1) Make all trash mob epics in MC/BWL/AQ/Naxx bind on equip, so casual players can at least grind up the money to spend on an item that a raid guild would otherwise shard
2) Remove pointless-yet-required talents like improved fort/mark and make these spells as strong by default as they are with the full talent improvement (wouldn't really benefit soloers vs. raiders or anything, but it frees up 3-5 talent points for priests and druids)
3) Remove the reagent requirements for group buffs (the extra expense is purely added in as a moneysink, and priests/druids can't farm up a lot of money compared to all the other classes)
4) Work on some ****ing 5-10 man instances in the expansion that will drop epics off each boss just like raid encounters. Epics that are better than Naxx gear. 5-10 man groups require each class to use way more of their abilities, while every raid encounter I've been through (all of MC, all of BWL, AQ40 up to Fankriss) works on a lame gimmick that's on the level of the undead FF bosses you kill by casting cure/raise spells on. It requires a little bit of thinking to come up with a plan, but no more than 5 abilities per class for the most part. And once you kill a boss the first time it's very easy to repeat it. Not that pvp or anything else in this game takes a lot of player skill, but the time investment:reward ratio is insanely over-balanced in favor of 40 man raids, when the game from level 1-60 isn't a raid fest and the gear for the most part is balanced for a person who logs 10-15 hours a week compared to the people who play this game 40+ hours a week.
5) Rework itemization and talents so classes are more balanced and get more out of their gear and talents. Right now if you were to rank the classes, it's something like this:
1st. Warrior
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2nd. Hunter
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3rd. Druid
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Everybody else
Seriously, I'm hoping the expansion/patch 1.12 adds in some stuff for non-raiders. Very little of the actual raid content is fun for me, even when it's fresh (like AQ40). My big focus on the game is exploration (it's the main reason I keep playing) and seeing new bosses and so on, not collecting the best items, and so that's why I raid. I've found personally it doesn't require much, if any, skill to do raid encounters. It also doesn't take much to pvp (just read the basic formula for facing x class with your class and talent spec), but anyway, my big gripe with the game is it only benefits the old EQ1 playstyle at 60. I really got into this game because I liked the Warcraft series, and wanted to see and fight some of the bigger characters from the Warcraft games (which Blizzard decided to stick only in raid encounters). Also, the actual gameplay was fun (for an MMO, I mean), especially during beta before they weakened the hell out of most classes. It had a lot faster pace than it does now... and WoW still has a lot faster pace now than almost every other MMO out on the market that I've played.
