out of curiosity, if you don’t play for competitive end game content what do you play for?
how can blizzard create content for you if you’re not interested in participating in content?
from my pov blizzard needs to double down on competitive content since ladder based content is the biggest source of evergreen content after cosmetics
I don’t but then there is no reward path. The problem with WoW is that they only develop meaningful rewards for people that want the challenging content. Sure you can play WoW and not engage in challenging content, but then there’s nothing to make you feel rewarded or that the game is worth your time.
We want to maintain a challenging content. If the challenging content becomes a joke, we would leave.
If Solo gets Mythic Raid Quality loots, why do we need to do Mythic Raid or M+15? Mythic Raiders and M+15 players can solo too. If it happens, Mythic Raiding and M+15 would become a joke. But it wont happen, anyway. Solo will always have lower ilevel loots than 5-man and Raids. It was like that since Vanilla and it will remain like that on all incoming expansions.
Simple rule. Do you want powerful items? Step unto higher difficulty content. Solo has the lowest difficulty. Group with 5-man group could be the next higher difficulty. Group with Raid for higher and highest difficulty.
If you expect solo to get Mythic Raid Quality loots, you are on a wrong game. Solo will never ever gonna have Mythic Raid Quality loots becoz Mythic Raiders and M+15 players can solo too. Why do Mythic Raiders and M+15 players go to Mythic Raid or M+15 if they can get equivalent gear on Solo?
Maybe they don’t care about the gear but want something? What about a mount? Pets? Mogs? All meaningful rewards.
I want something like the bee mount. Solo play, casual, reward at the end
If you have WQ’s offering 226 gear, people would just whine that they couldn’t get 233’s and that’s the reason on why they’re being declined from groups.
That’s contradictory though. I thought the whole argument from them was they want challenging content. If we’re saying they wouldn’t do challenging content if they could get the same rewards from easier content than how is that any different from people that don’t like challenging content saying they would like rewards from easier content??? If rewards from easier content would invalidate the more difficult content than people weren’t doing it for the challenge and were doing it for the rewards to begin with. I’m not even arguing about ilvl. I’m just asking for something worth my time. They missed the mark so bad on anima that it’s not worth the time. Covenant upgrades are useless. The only point I’m trying to make is that they only cater to pvp/mythic+/raiding and if you don’t like those you get nothing.
This is just so weird. There are far more players with low skills (either due to ability or motivation or both) than there are highly skilled players. All skill-levels pay the same amount to play. So why would you utterly neglect most of your paying customers in favor of the minority of players?
One possible reason is that Blizzard wants to shrink the game down to more of a niche game that is made mostly for players who only do repeatable instanced content. It isn’t logical to throw away money, but if you believe you have a better cash cow in development . . .maybe?
The more likely reason is that, somewhere around the middle of MoP, WoW development was put more and more into the hands of developers who lack the ability to see beyond their own narrow preferred play-style.
WoD was a raid-or-die expac, with garrisons designed to streamline much of the raid prep and LFR gutted of decent rewards (here, have a brown generic armor, loser). Flying was almost removed because raiders don’t need to fly much if they can stay in their garrison between raids. No capital city because – yup – raiders can just hang out in their garrison, do their follower missions to make gold, and raid. And though the expac was cut short because of the massive sub drop, WoD was the game they wanted to make.
Legion tried to backtrack on some of those decisions to get players back, luring players in with a new class and loads of legendary weapons. Although the devs clung to some of the ideas from WoD, they did try to appeal to more players. It wasn’t entirely successful because Blizzard largely lacks developers who really understand casual players, but it was the best of the four post-MoP expacs by a wide margin.
BfA is, in my opinion, the saddest case of all the later expacs WoW has released. Much of it is gorgeous. New allied races were fun and worth working to get (though trying to get them all was a bit much in the rep department). But the two supposed features for casual players were very poorly designed. Again, the developers do NOT understand what casual players enjoy. The patches didn’t do much to keep players around, especially the last patch. And the promise of the expac’s story simply fizzled away. It was a battle for Azeroth full of atrocities that led us all to nothing. No real peace or change. In an expac seemingly tailor made for fun game-play, with witches and pirates and glittering troll cities, the story was derailed by a meaningless war that satisfied nobody. BAD game design. Heck, we didn’t even get to yank the giant sword out.
And now we have Shadowlands. One would think that a life after death expac would be riveting. It isn’t for the many, many, many players who have left in disgust. Even the dedicated Youtubers are disappointed. I won’t try to analyze this – better people than me have already done so. This expac is easily as bad as WoD. Easily.
Blizzard needs change. They need to bring in a whole slew of new developers who are not devoted to the idea that all players have to play competitively. They need someone at the top with the vision to see a game with content for every kind of player, because that is what made WoW great for ten years. They need new lore: Leaning on what is established already is played out. What’s on the other side of Azeroth? There should be ten years worth of lore, areas, characters, and game-play there.
I didn’t intend to write a novel. The OP inspired me.
TLDR: The OP is right.
oh my , really? You expect ilevel 226 or 233 from WQ?
BTW, being declined from group is not really becoz of your ilevel… It’s becoz you are the least choice from gargantuan lists that queued at the same dungeon at the same time. You get declined becoz you are less desirable than others.
If you are applying for M+15, flood your raider io with 60x completed runs on M+14s. You have 10x M+14 runs, 1x M+15 compared to people with 30x M+15 runs, you would be less desirable. Cant you see?
BfA let solo players get high end quality loot and it wasn’t the end of days for group based content in the game.
People used to cry that “If dungeons awarded good gear, why ever run raids again?” and yet we have M+ and raids are still a thing.
I don’t want the gear to simply be handed out, and doing it via WQs would be a terrible idea, but they could offer a path for it. Horrific Visions did in BfA and it didn’t magically destroy the raid/dungeon part of the game like many people act like it would.
WoW’s core game is Dungeons, Raids and PvP. It was like that since Vanilla.
There is LFR. There is Normal and Heroic 5-man. There is random BGs.
There are sidegames like World PvE stuffs, Brawler’s guild, Sanctum Upgrade, Mount Collection, Mog collection, Hunter rare pet collection. They are all in there.
Vanilla’s focus was mostly on questing.
No. Reread my post, I am agreeing with you.
Funnily enough, these complaints actually stem from the fact that gear is too easy to get. Like right now, you can pretty easily outgear N Nathria by a solid amount simply by doing WQ’s.
For the first tier of an expansion, that’s unprecedented. But because it’s so easy to do, people do that in a couple weeks and then complain they’re bored.
Because that’s the core of the issue. They want infinite progression, but they don’t actually want to do any of the content in WoW that offers long-term progression, because that’s scary.
Sure can. It can even be used with tables. The main thing this forum lacks is CSS support, but that’s done primarily for security reasons to prevent unwanted “additions” by the users (otherwise I could create mouseover events that would automate flyouts on the PC side).
In MoP casual players were able to get gear throughout the expac that made them more powerful in the content they did. Casuals were still doing LFR and killing frogs trying to get that last upgrade through a very long content drought. They never had gear as great as progressive raiders, but they still had a path of progression for the content they enjoyed.
While I am sure there are players who want the best gear for free (that’s why paid carries are a thing), most casual players simply want what WoW used to give them: Progression and ongoing rewards within their wheelhouse.
To be fair, that was a quote from Ghostcrawler. Every time they expected players to rise to the occasion, they didn’t.
It’s called Welfare epics that opened up on its later patches.
Shadowlands is just on 9.0. Welfare epics (Catchup gear) would open up on next patch. ilevel 197 is the peak at 9.0 for WQs. It would improve to ilevel 233 on next patch but the highest ilevel next patch would be ilevel 330+.
It magically helped their broken dice. Becoz BFA is raining with epics… raining with garbage epics… all dictated by the broken dice. And Horrific Vision gets good rewards to promote/incentivize playing Horrific Visions. Becoz if there’s no rewards in there, nobody would play it. Did Casual noobs like it? They hate it and they hate it more than Torghast and The Maw.
So many people don’t get this. I don’t want Mythic raid gear for my alts or my main if I’m playing casually, but I’d like there to be some progression path and not a brick wall. Otherwise, why am I going to play for months?
This isn’t Vanilla lol.
I also wasn’t referring to catch-up gear that gets you caught up to the current patch.
That’s what WQs can be used for as well as secondary stuff like gold, rep, etc.
Sure BfA rained epics but you can tune the drop rate to whatever you want. You don’t NEED to have visions give you multiple high end pieces of gear per week with only a slight decrease in ilvl for each repeated run in a week, they just did that because that was the pace of loot in BfA for pretty much everything.
There was also already a reward for running visions in the way of corruptions. Once the vendor was added, it didn’t need to award gear.
Personally I thought Horrific Visions are one of the better ideas that they’ve had in recent years.
Torghast and the Maw suffer from a number of other issues in the execution. They aren’t fundamentally bad ideas, Blizzard just screwed up the implementation of them.