Buckle up, buttercup. I can’t take another expansion of internal debate between KSM and KMS, so let’s get 10.0 started off right. I know a lot of it is already cooking, but let’s knuckle down and make it the best MMO we’ve ever had.
Complete talent revamp. This isn’t some blind cry to “bring back the old talent trees”, but that would be a better place to start than these MOBA sheets we have today. It’s a better RPG when you’re investing time and energy into a build instead of a loadout. Kill “specialization” and just have 12 classes with talent trees. Make some tanks not AM, like pre-WoD prot warriors. Being able to move hit talents into throughout talents because you got a piece of gear (or picking up hit talents so you can use the Sword of Awesomeness) is good rpg gameplay. Perfect segue, too.
Add more stats. Hit, defense, penetration, resistance, regen. These are all interesting stats to have in an RPG. Yes, it makes gearing from tier to tier a little messy, but that’s a good thing. Yes, it complicates things, but that complication is good for the game.
Another perfect setup. Denormalize gear. Gear is forgettable when the only variable available is “which of the secondary stats is higher”. Add in more pieces, (along with the greater number of available stats on #2) and just break the formula. Yes, this will occasionally lead to a bis item dropping from the first tier and never being replaced for some classes. Thats ok. Because…
Axe the catchup. No more scaling up m+ and heroics. No more “seasons”. No more shunting the entire playerbase into the latest dollop of content. Scaling up m+ doesn’t even make sense, it already scales infinitely. You’re just lowering the numbers. Why? Doing this means that there’s a clear line of progression for content for a new character. Yes, making a new character later in the expansion becomes harder, as they have to progress through the entire expansions endgame, but… playing the game is the point. It’s about the journey, not the destination. Which brings me to…
Bring back content that matters before endgame. I mean crafting BiS in a couple of slots, I mean attunements, I mean weird proc trinkets that have evergreen potential. Crafting and class quests for spells and ranks, writs and hand-ins. BoP crafting mats. Parts of the rpg that used to matter.
Get rid of builder/spender/filler, instead shift to resource management. This one seems pretty obvious, but moving the game back from the precipice of cracked out, twitch mongrel gaming should be a priority. Managing resources for a long fight should matter more than how fast you can input your priority system. Make wands great again!
Social tools. Let’s just get rid of everything cross realm. If a realm is dead, merge it with another realm. These modern “realm groups” seem like a pretty good compromise. No one loses their name, and you don’t get stuck with randos you’ll never see again. Then, let’s axe LFD/LFR teleports. Yeah, it’s a little inconvenient, but it puts people back into the world and gets them out of the lobby. This is by far the most controversial change on this list, as there’s an entire subset of gamers who primarily want the “gameplay” of wow without the social overhead. In my opinion, that’s not the right direction that the game should take; and socializing should be encouraged at every step. LFD should be on server (or merged servers) only, and only for leveling dungeons, and only opened up with X.1 patches. LFR should be removed entirely. build better tools for communication. Gchat/discord integration, social media and forum integration, etc.
I know, I know. But this is kind of an important bit. Removing LFR is part of the overall difficulty squish. We go to 2 difficulties. “Flex/Normal” and “Heroic”. Flex can accommodate anywhere from 10-40 people. It had its own unique loot table, with (on average) about 5% less item budget than “Heroic”, and uses per-boss individual lockouts. Heroic has a unique loot table, 20 man requirement, and an instance wide ID shared with the group. Ideally, we’d see a few unique bosses between the difficulties as well. This accomplishes 2 things. 1. The “hard” version of the raid isn’t exactly the same thing with bigger numbers, incentivizing both difficulties. 2. Lowers the item level creep between tiers which (coupled with item denormalization) keeps previous tiers relevant longer.
PvP gearing revamp. I hate to “bring back”, but well. Do that. Bring out a pvp only stat that lowers damage taken in pvp situations, and allow that stat to be applied to any gear, a la armor patches. PvP gear itself can follow the same basic formula of today, but instead of set breakpoints in rating required, just require wins at your current rating. PvP is dynamic, 1800 last season is like 1400 this season. The reward system should also be dynamic. If you’re 50/50 winrate I’m the top 30%, you should be getting rewarded. Between the armor kits and the revamped reward structure, this should break a nice compromise between using pvp and pve gear.
Speaking of gear, let’s talk about sets. I want to see way more set bonuses. On tons of things. World quest sets, PvP sets. M+ sets. Gathering sets. Crafting sets. Set bonuses for end game gear was a big thing for a long time, and it could make a return as a way to keep gear being the best in its lane, while making it not an actual detriment to get some gear from other sources.
You. I want you in my end game. I want to get to know you, either personally or by reputation. I want to hear about your exploits and failures and be able to relate to what you’re going through.
TL;DR: maybe shift some focus out of single player gameplay and into being a socialized rpg.
“Hey, we can’t raid, again, until we get the new guy attuned, again . . . and he just left the guild after getting attuned to go to the bigger guild . . . again”
Kinda? Classic is great at a lot of these things, but it could use some polish, too. It’s not some perfect utopia. It’s closer to “mmorpg” than retail is, though.
Depends on the type of player. Classic and TBC are proving that there’s a market for that kind of gamer, still.
The entire premise of this post is moving away from the “single player gameplay oriented” style of modern wow and back towards the “social rpg” experience. Having mountains of content to do and all of it in front of you with no time gates is integral to that.
They could be two different games. Modern wow is not an rpg. It’s target demographic has zero overlap with MMORPG fans. It’s an MMO game. And it’s a great game, even. But it’s not an MMORPG. And as a fan of the genre (and this universe) I’d like to see a game that had both.
Wow’s insane revenue numbers, too, even in the face of losing customers, means it’ll be a long time before a triple A studio tried to make make a game for a smaller audience for like MMORPG fans.
Yes and no. Classic and TBC are proving more so that players will pay to re-play older polished games. Alot of hype about Diablo 2 remastered too.
If you took away former WoW players returning, players leaving retail, or players on private servers; classic and TBC would have a small fraction of the playerbase they now do. More or less what I mean to say is there is a market for old MMO games for players who have played them in the past, not so much for new players. A new player wanting to try an MMO for the first time is more likely to gravitate to a more modern game like FF XIV or even retail.
Balance and overhaul specs/classes. Some specs need some serious redesigns as well as classes as a whole because they either miss the mark of their theme or are just totally unfun to play. Others just need a little help with balancing and a redesign to a few abilities. Blizz keeps not wanting to do this and instead tries to cover holes with burrowed power - no more! A class should feel complete and whole at level 60 with no burrowed power, not halfway through an expansion.
Overhaul talents. As you said not the old talent trees, but just a new spin on this talents because being like “oh cool I have one viable build for X or Y situation” is just not fun. I would make it so we have 3 more rows, and 2 more columns (wouldn’t be hard just go to azerite amour or artifact weapons) and we can now pick 2 from each row. Done.
Overhaul gearing. Make the valor system sell gear as well, let raiders use it, add a system for World content gear, reduce the Ilvl jumps between each ranking of PvP gear, bring back PvP resiliance (and its a natural stat you get when you enter PvP depending on your Ilvl). Then let each type of gear get set bonuses that are active in that type of content (like for example you get 10% bonus PvP resilience or you deal 5% additional damage or healing when near a raid boss).
Add more cosmetic glyphs/race customizations. I want to be an elunian priest/paladin, a emerald dream boomkin, a black frost DK/mage, an arcane fire fire mage and I want every race to have dozens more hairstyles/hair colors/skin tones/tattoos/eye colours/scars/accessories. Let us for fill our character fantasies!
Make torghast it’s own playmode that’s not tied to anything else and just let us have fun. make it a proper roguelike with dozens more powers, more unique enemies, better bosses, a progression system, more diverse floors and more stuff to collect/earn from it.
Add play housing. As many others have suggested let us build a house somewhere on azeroth to our liking and add things to it. Make it so we can mix and match race designs and class designs for houses so for example a DK necropolis, a NE tree house, a Human preist chapel, A dreanei temple, A forsaken warlock mansion so on so forth.
Have only ONE system of burrowed power that we can progressively get stronger over the course of the expansion (like artifact weapons). Then each expansion it resets but some of it’s powers are moved into our base kits/talents. I miss having something like the HoA or the artifact weapon that I could progress on each of my characters and get stronger with (although I think it should have a conquest cap on how much AP you can get for example to stop needless endless grinding).
Let us do old world content and have it be relevant. Timeless isle, legion invasions, broken shore, N’zoth invasions, Horrific visions should all have an option to be scaled to our level and if it is we can get current rewards from it. This could also be extended to asn option for questing as well.
Just have a lot of content for us to do. Weather that be cool zones we do stuff in, or lots of raid/dungeons, new BGs/Arenas, lots of questlines and story progression, things for us to collect etc etc.
This is my ultimate wishlist, and hopefully it’s for filled some day lol but for now I’m just sitting around waiting for 9.1.
That’s a pretty hefty list to remove. We don’t have a new, modern example of an MMO that doesn’t bend over for the single player experience, and for classic, literally everyone over 21 has played it at some point, because it used to be good.
Balance is impossible in general, but we do have resource management specs and builder spenders at similar levels in Shadowlands.
You’d basically ruin what makes specs like Fury or Shadow fun if you just remove one group for an arbitrary reason. There’s a reason why some just don’t go back to Classic or TBC, and it’s because some people prefer the fast playstyle these specs offer.
4th spec for shamans: Earth Warder (tank)
4th spec for hunter: Trapper (old survival, ranged)
4th spec for rogues: Duelist (old combat, cata)
Revamp for outlaw: Close to midrange, pistol, grenade, and throwing knife focus.
4th spec for paladins: Inquisitor (ranged dps)
3rd spec for demon hunters: Ruin (ranged dps)
Revamp for Mistweaver Monks: Chi touch, increase melee skill range by 10 yards
4th spec for warriors: Skald (ranged/melee mix like survival (uses two 1h weapons, throwing attacks), support shouts (songs))
4th spec for warlock: Demonheart (tank)
Revamp for Unholy dks: More ranged and summoning undead focus, deathcoil generates runic rather than costing it.
PvE favors ranged specs but there’s like 2x more melee specs than ranged in WoW and Blizzard’s past three hero classes have all been melee classes. On top of this, some ranged specs have BECOME melee. 10.0 needs to rebalance the mix of specs so ranged and melee are closer to 50/50, even if raids are more like 75/25 ranged.
build better tools for communication. Gchat/discord integration, social media and forum integration, etc.