9.2 changes were not enough for me

Community General Discussion
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So, I came back for 9.2 to see how much things had improved since I quit 1 month into SL. It’s better but still too much of a chore for me personally, and I experienced a lot of pain points that made me not want to continue playing. I put in a lot of hours this week and the obstacles were still too great. Instead of playing the game today, I decided to write an 1800 word essay about my thoughts and experience. Take from that what you will.

1. Renown / Campaign

I was behind on renown and the campaign, but because of how important they are, I did them anyway, until I got 80 renown and flying. This was tedious and not fun for me. I know there are different types of players, but I’ve literally never seen someone play WoW and do anything but try to get through the campaign asap. Let the people who want to grind out a long story do so. But as it is, it’s an obstacle to doing the things I think are fun in WoW, which is the overarching theme of my experience.

2. Torghast / Legendaries

I did a lot of Torghast, which I actually found one of the most accessible and enjoyable parts of Shadowlands. I think it’s very close to being a great source of endless content, but needs more variety and more interesting powers. Some people don’t like it, and that’s fine. They shouldn’t have to do it, but they do if they want to play with legos.

It’s way too expensive and/or time consuming to craft a single legendary. I want to play with the new toys and on multiple characters, but I don’t have millions of gold and I don’t care about crafting, so…I have to buy a token to pay for each legendary base item? You have to get the legendary memories, farm the soul mats, then craft/buy the base items, upgrade them, requiring a new token or craft. I’m sorry, but just typing this makes me squint with disgust at this system. It’s too big of an obstacle to the fun thing you added, which is new abilities/interactions. Doing this for 1 piece that doesn’t conflict with tier set, doesn’t need to be upgraded, and that has swapable effects would be perfectly fine for this amount of effort.

3. PVP

PVP is what I want to be doing the most, but when I saw you have to upgrade gear several times and certain upgrade levels were locked behind various things, I couldn’t be bothered. Go back to WoD gearing please. Or, let rated modes have equalized gear. The fun part about rated PVP is the intensity of good competition, improving as a player/team, gaining SR. Gear is an obstacle to those things for me.

I think having gear progression in unrated is fine for casual players who just want to stomp lower geared players, but competitive PVP is different. It’s inherently an endless progression already, because you can always improve. It doesn’t need another layer. Personally, if all WoW had to offer was equalized pvp, I would stay subbed for that alone.

4. Zereth Mortis

I think ZM is a cool zone, but there are some annoying things about it that make me not want to explore it. I was interested in the zone for 2 reasons - catch up gear and the puzzles. First, the lower catchup gear isn’t good enough for the normal raid’s tuning and the higher catchup gear isn’t worth the effort.

I imagined it being a chill zone where I could take a break from other stuff and try to figure out the puzzles. But, I can’t simply explore and do puzzles, because I’m constantly aggroing the countless mobs around. Also, several things aren’t unlocked or I have no idea how to even begin with them without looking up a guide. The mob density and unapproachable nature of some puzzles are obstacles to having fun with ZM for me (not talking about the chests btw).

5. Sepulcher Raid

I don’t do much raiding, but I’m a competent player who is capable of doing mechanics and playing my class well. With the ZM catchup gear and a few upgrades, I was above the previous tier’s normal gear. I thought this would be enough to do normal, and maybe it is for a group of more skilled players. But is normal supposed to be tuned around having a whole group of above average players or being overgeared? I joined multiple groups at the same item level or a little higher that did fine with mechanics, but struggled with damage. No groups at this item level could kill Skolex before enrage killed us. I eventually got into a guild group of heroic geared players and we were able to kill bosses relatively easily (obviously). The fights were pretty fun. Didn’t get a single piece of gear on 3 boss kills though. I don’t care a lot about gear, but if that’s what it takes to do the raid AND I can’t get a single piece of gear after several hours of play, it feels bad.

General Thoughts

In additon to sharing my experience, I want to give some of my thoughts on the state of WoW and things I hope the dev team are considering or will consider for 10.0.

Time Wasting and MMOs

The devs have already heard that many players, like myself, feel like our time is being wasted. I think they didn’t go nearly far enough with the changes in 9.2 to help with this, and I’m sure they have their reasons. They’re worried about the long wait until 10.0 or they have development/business driven restrictions that force this kind of stuff, I don’t know.

I know that MMOs have traditionally been about grinding / time investment, and some kind of reward for time should be there but it doesn’t have to be attached to everything. I think that aspect of MMOs already is and will continue to be a less critical/desirable element of the genre, because there are simply more entertainment and MMO options than there were when WoW was released. I think it’s a mistake for anyone to genre-gatekeep and say that an MMO has to be a certain way. It doesn’t. A game needs to be fun at any cost and genres of all media change over time.

It seems like more gamers these days want to play a variety of things and not be forced to no-life a single game to have the type of experience they want in it. If you’re going to have a substantial grind, it needs to not be an obstacle to doing what you want. My bet is that the value of easily jumping into fun content and playing with new/returning players easily will increase over time, and I think Riot’s MMO will get this right.

Content and Progression

There’s actually a lot of things to do in Shadowlands. Not all of it is for every player type, but that’s to be expected. The problem imo is that absolutely everything has its own separate progression system (often grindy) attached to it. Everything is drip fed to force engagement for a measured amount of time. And for me, it completely strips what fun may have been there out of it. I think a lot of the content and gameplay have the ability to stand on their own. I really hope the devs consider this and loosen their tight grip over progression, rewards, pacing, etc…

I’ve heard a lot of players say “there’s nothing to do” in the past and it seems like that might’ve been interpreted to mean “I want things to take longer”. That’s not the same thing, nor do I think artificially making everything require a larger time investment is necessary. Finding ways to make existing content more repeatable in a fun way like with Mythic+ is much better. The easiest thing they could do right now is have more gameplay changing legendaries, make them much easier to get, and make alts as easy to play as your main. Playing content from a different perspective is “more to do”. People just don’t want to now, because it’s too much of the same tedious work.

Another thing I’ve heard players say is that they don’t want player power tied to content they don’t want to do. But I think the devs might’ve misunderstood. I interpret this to mean they don’t want player power STRICTLY tied to content they don’t want to do. The key though is that they don’t want to have to do a lot of something they don’t want in order to do something they do want. Why not make it so that all content progresses you in relevant systems? At least all current expansion content, but it could be the whole game if the code supports it.

Universal currency

I think WoW should have one currency drop or bar fill from everything in the game and adjust the amount based on time investment and difficulty (the best you can). Yeah, it’s a gamey solution, but so is gear magically and randomly appearing when you kill an enemy. And I think it’s worth it. This would make everything relevant, even the countless pieces of old content. And on top of that, it would let you see what content players truly enjoy, while currently players are forced to do what you incentivize. Yes, something is going to be the mathematically fastest way to do things, but I think that’s okay and it can be adjusted.

What if, instead of getting no loot after 3 boss kills yesterday, I still had the chance to get a random drop, but I also got the magic universal currency that I can save up to buy a piece after 3 bosses. I’d probably still be motivated to raid. Or let me farm the currency killing rats in Stormwind, and after 300 rats, I can afford legendary materials. Why the hell not? I know it’s goofy, but to me, it doesn’t make sense to play it too safe given the apparent state of the game. Bold changes need to come asap if they want to retain players like me, and I hope they do.

Conclusion

Why go through the trouble of typing all this? I enjoy thinking about game design and how to improve games. I’m not just trying to be a hater. And I respect any game dev for the difficulty of their job, especially one of this scale. I really wish I knew how and why some of the decisions were made, and whether it’s a simple case of them not wanting the game to be what I want anymore or if it could be again.

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This bit is pretty annoying.

I feel for the crafters who have spent hundreds of thousands levelling their professions to make the items, but the mad lads are still charging 40-60k for a 235 ring let alone a 262 lmao.

291 prices are going to be out of this world :grimacing:

Not really alt friendly or multi-build friendly, but it is what it is /sigh

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Well kudos on giving proper feed back :slight_smile:

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My biggest gripes are:

I don’t like pvp gear disparity at all.

I don’t like having to do things like torghast and horrific visions for a main piece of player power.

I feel like we are playing a f2p game but pay a subscription and box price.

Things I do like about the above:

I like the fact I can gain a currency to spend on pvp transmogs. There’s enough transmogs to keep me satisfied.

I do like seeing things introduced like torghast and visions. They can be fun.

There really isn’t anything I can say that is positive about the f2p nature of the systems tbh.

Tinfoil hat theory: the devs are putting in as many f2p mechanics into the game as they can, while charging a sub and box price, to maximize their revenue, until the breaking point finally happens, and wow goes f2p.

If they are under 1mil subs, it’s just a matter of time until they remove the subscription.

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I removed the subscription myself by cancelling and uninstalling. Grinding flight 3 times in one expansion says it all.

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Tinfoil hat theory is that this is a psychological conditioning technique that will not only convince current subscribers to continually lower their standards, but will also convince everybody who has left since cata, as well as tens of millions of others that this is the game for them! Time gating will make the game more successful than it has ever been before! All they have to do is keep doing what they are currently doing, and it will turn itself around spontaneously. At some point. Well, it has to work if their faith is strong enough.

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Great post. Thanks for making it. I hope people take some time to read what you put together.

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I hear ya OP, patch 9.2 is basically just “more of the same”. And it looks like this is all there will be until 2023 most likely. There’s only 2 explanations I can think of for why Shadowlands turned out like it did.

Optimistic Explanation: ion & company have been quietly full gas pedal/hard at work on 10.0 for quite some time in the background, putting most of their resources towards it. And it’s going to be something real good - perhaps TBC or Legion-tier quality. This would explain why Shadowlands has felt so “light”/lacking on content in comparison to previous expansions - the attention/man-hours of the devs are simply elsewhere (on 10.0)

Pessimistic Explanation: the devs really are finally out of ideas/out of ammo and just “coasting” on their old copy-pasted model with a daily set of chores, expansion-specific “systems”, etc. This is the worst-case scenario explanation, and means that Shadowlands turned out being low on content because… they’re simply out of ideas. With this possible explanation, there would be no 10.0 “coming to the rescue” and the game will continue to decline rather than bounce back like a lot of us are hoping for

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Could just not buy a max ilvl leggo for alts…

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This works on principle if you’re not intending to raid or basically do anything on alts, but not in a world where you’re picking up higher item level equipment than the first 3-4 levels of legendaries from dailies in the last zone.

Not everyone plays alts to pick flowers. Hell, this is an issue for classes that ideally want more than one legendary per spec, and that’s an issue even on mains.

So no. This isn’t just about “hurr durr my alts should be the same as my main”. Legendaries have been an incredibly frustrating gate in a lot of ways this expansion.

Leveling even one slot of one armor type to Rank 4 is incredibly tedious. Now imagine your main focus being crafting and having to even consider farming or buying the utter volume of material you would need to buy to get to Rank 4 just on all of one armor type.

Too much emphasis on painful choices for a system that is practically mandatory.

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Excellent post and I admire the effort you put in it. Agree on almost everything, except that I’m sure Riot’s MMO will be no good with Ghostcrawler at the helm.
However, I think you wasted your effort and your good ideas with WoW’s current devs.
They are not Rob Pardo or Jeff Kaplan, alas.

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Great post and I agree 100% whole heartily. The good news is that Microsoft may remove the developers who are too stubborn to give the players what we’ve been asking…no…begging for.

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You can easily do basically most content with lower ilvl leggos it really isn’t that bad. It really won’t matter as much as skill does. Only time it starts too matter is in mythic raiding and +25s.

People are making far too much of a fuss over ilvl when in reality playing better will be more of a dmg increase. Having a 230 leggo compared to a 260 isn’t much of a difference at all in the grand scheme of things.

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Again, re: this isn’t just an alt problem. This is an everyone problem. The reasonable barriers to entry on current-threshold legendaries is a lot higher than it should be.

No, the “affordable” brackets of legendaries being literally below daily quest gear item levels is not acceptable. This isn’t a player or economy-driven issue, because the economy has to sustain the sheer tedium of material acquisition for the legendary crafting somehow. And that’s done by raising prices.

Sorry, no. I’m not going to accept that absolutely shoddy attempt at justifying legendary costs with “just do without 4head”. It’s a non-answer; not only that, you literally just told people to engage less with what is a core function of the expansion. Legendaries have been here since 9.0 and relative to the economy are still ridiculous, because of the tedium and expense involve in creating the base pieces. They don’t cost as much as they do because everyone’s out to spite someone else; the cost of ranking up legendary recipes is tedious enough for one slot, let alone for an entire suite of JUST ONE ARMOR TYPE.

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