User:BaphoFM

Baphomette of Feathermoon-US.

I did the original item level charts and kept them up to date until my sub expired shortly before WoD. In total, I played for almost exactly ten years (vanilla beta around Oct/Nov 2004 - Nov 2014). First patch notes I remember were races getting racial abilities. Sadly my ten years were not the ten they were looking for when they gave out physical prizes!

Officially, I quit because my new job left me with an unsuitable time window for gaming: 5-8am server time or so on a fairly underpopulated server (4-7am in winter, since we don't pretend to save daylight here <3). I had raided with F&F guilds but most of the people I played with had quit before me. If I had really wanted to keep playing, I could have paid to move alllll of my characters to a more active server nearer my time zone, but a number of things had piled up that I was dissatisfied with, such as:


 * The item squish. I was a vocal opponent of the idea from the day it was introduced, and with mid-WoD numbers back in MoP territory it seems clear that they'll want to resquish in 7.0, 8.0, 9.0...
 * The redone player race models. They came an expansion later than expected, and when they finally arrived, for all Blizzard's assurances that they wanted our characters to look "the same, but better" they missed the mark. Some race/sex combos looked right, but my main and several alts were female Tauren. The end results were not recognizable as my characters. WoD approached and it was clear that things weren't going to be fixed.
 * Class balance. My main was a Frost DK, one of the most willfully ignored specs. Frost was quite strong at the start of Cata, but its core mechanics saw very little benefit from any secondary stats and so two tiers later it performed horribly. MoP beta came and went with about two blue posts for DKs... WoD beta made things even worse, somehow (instead of the obvious Chaos Bolt treatment for Killing Machine to make us value crit, they go and hamstring haste too). I am used to putting out bad DPS at the end of an expansion despite being a decent player, but it looked like WoD was going to start off bad and go worse. What did I have to look forward to?
 * The Item Store. I collected mounts, and the growing parade of mounts I could never earn was an insult.
 * Trying to make money in the AH without being an AH baron. 1c undercuts need to die: make a 5% minimum or something.

None of these things has been fixed or even recognized as needing a fix, to my knowledge. I miss the game, but I know if I were still playing I would be spending a lot of time on something and finding less and less enjoyment in it. I never gave a crap about Garrisons in the first place, professions were gutted, etc etc. I can't say I will never return, but at this point I don't know what it would take to bring me back.