Patch notes for 3.2 are all the rage. Look up any site concerned with World of Warcraft and you'll find spoilers, analyses, loot tables, and previews of everything from profession changes to new dungeon encounters. The patch has something for everyone, from bright-eyed young level 20s who can mount up for the first time to epic new armor sets and achievement rewards. Though some of the changes are controvertial (Badges of Conquest, anyone?), it seems that almost everyone is looking forward to patch 3.2.

Except me.

Enter the casual-hardcore player. I love raiding, wouldn't play WoW at all if it weren't for the endgame, but I have a life outside the game so I can't devote four nights a week to the struggles of Azeroth. I enjoy progression, but I can't stay up until 3am for another wipefest on Mimiron; I have work in the morning. In general, I'm the type of player best suited for a middle-of-the-road guild: one that heads into Ulduar a few times a week and works hard on the content, but doesn't break its neck racing to the finish.

I've been playing this way since vanilla WoW. I never made it into the original Naxxramas or even Ahn'Qiraj, but Zul'Gurub was plenty of excitement and challenge for me and my small guild, and I was close to finishing my armor set when BC hit. After a slow start in the expansion, I spent many happy hours in Karazhan and SSC, and though I never got to kill Kael'Thas or Illidan, I felt good about raiding and my progress. I felt like I was accomplishing something worthwhile.

Then came Wrath. As a mid-level raider with a healthy stable of alts, I'd never lacked for things to do before the expansion, and with the addition of a new continent and the advent of Achievements to catalogue old-world exploits, I was swimming in things to do. At first, it was awesome, but soon Blizzard was adding more. And more. And more.

The first shock I got was the removal of the Glory of the Raider proto-drake and its heroic counterpart. Okay, maybe I was a little slow getting into Naxxramas, but I had a few achievements down and I was working on more. I was perfectly happy with my progression until the day I checked my achievement progress and saw that the reward was no longer there. 

It wasn't the first time I'd missed out on cool content due to the disconnect between the pace of my life and the pace of Blizzard's game. I never got an Amani War Bear and just missed becoming Hand of A'dal before the nerf, but those I can understand. It makes sense to remove cool content when people are about to outlevel it, to the point where the challenge would become trivial. I still don't think it would have hurt to leave them in the game, but I can see Blizzard's reasoning.

The drakes, however, are a whole different ballgame. The time they were available was less than half that of the war bear, a few months as opposed to a full year, and it's not like players were about to level up. The only way to "trivialize" the challenge of getting the proto-drakes was to get Ulduar gear. Yeah, it's an upgrade, but it's nowhere near the upgrade that ten levels is. You still need a group of focused individuals to complete those achievements, no matter what their gear level. To compensate, we now have another set of proto-drakes, one that will shortly be removed as well before many guilds have even finished Yogg-Saron.

Setting aside my philosophical frustration with a goal being presented, without a visible time limit, and then summarily removed because 'we don't want more people getting it,' this stinks. Blizzard has ramped up their content releases to a schedule that heavily favors the hardcore, all the while touting their accessibility to casuals, but the result seems to me like a tangle of confusion rather than a harmonious gaming experience. Hardcore raiders are up in arms that their privileged gear will be available to casual non-raiders, my casual friends STILL haven't set foot in a 25-man instance, and the 'middle of the road' players like myself are left with our efforts feeling trivialized and outdated.

The Coliseum sounds great, but do we really need another raid? I'd rather work on getting through Ulduar, then ramp up to hardmodes, even go back and do some Naxx or Sarth or, god forbid, level an alt. I'd rather iron out my guild's strategies, build my gear set, and vie for the next Shard of Val'Anyr. I don't want to abandon everything I've been working on because it is suddenly out of date.

It's not just the drakes, either, though they are a visible target for my frustration. It's everything. The new patch is bringing so many changes, making it so easy to skip to the top tiers of raiding that the earlier content is quickly becoming passe. Yes, of course you can still run the old dungeons for fun, but where are the rewards? And more to the point, who is going to run them with you? The faster Blizzard releases new content, the less mileage they get out of the old, and I'm tired of feeling like I have to abandon things I enjoyed but couldn't finish because the game has come out with the new big thing. 

I love the idea of the Coliseum, and I'm eager to play through it, but I'm not ready to move on yet. I want to fully enjoy what I have before it becomes obsolete. So I say to Blizzard: hold off on that new patch. Let me finish Ulduar. Let me get my Hammer of the Ancient Kings. Let me farm up the emblems for all the Crusade mounts, finish the Loremaster achievements, level up that priest and hunter I have lying around. Let me work hard and rise triumphant on the back of my Rusted Proto-Drake. Don't push so much new content out that these things feel like a waste of time.

I realize that there are serious, hardcore raiders who don't share my views, that there are people out there chomping at the bit for new content, for whom Ulduar is already a thing of the past. I say to them: Lighten up. Play some Battlegrounds. Run old vanilla raids. Level an alt, or two, or three. Go outside and smell the roses. Leave Ulduar to me. I promise to make good use of it.