Plunderstorm was not really my cup of tea. I find Remix a better experiment, but not really as exciting as thought I’d be initially. The boatload of ensembles/mogs is really tempting. Maybe because I’ve been playing the game for so damn long and already leveled so many alts and lots of those went through Pandaria campaign. And even with the account-wide cloak buff the leveling still feels a bit sluggish.
I remember back in the lockdown, the “Winds of Wisdom” - 100% xp buff, was so much fun, fast and you literally could hit max level within hours on multiple toons. Even losses in random BGs gave an insane amount of XP.
Back to the title, I think zones like Forbidden Reach and Emerald Dream deserved their own dungeon and DF as a whole, a last new raid tier. But can’t deny the surge of new/returning players from these limited-appeal events is probably much more profitable for Blizzard than just new Raids/Dungeons.
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First you have to understand Plunderstorm / MoP Remix didn’t cost us a tier.
It isn’t a question of one over the other. Blizzards decision not to do a 4th raid is completely independent and likely derives from their ambitions to get TWW out sooner than later.
Your title should be a ‘4th Dragonfight Raid Tier over TWW Releasing This Year’
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Even though it’s a one poster, which usually means trolling, a lot of what you say does make sense. But Galedron is correct.
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It’s more like a 4th raid tier in DF: or TWW in 2024.
If you’re ok with TWW releasing in mid 2025, or being guaranteed to be undercooked, maybe a 4th tier in DF is what you want.
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I’m personally getting a ton more value having done PS (Dragonriding parrot and outfit) and the Diablo-esque power systems in Remop than what another weekly raid worth of enjoyment would give me.
I think the part that hits home is that it’s something new or a spin on something which I think WoW has needed for a long time. I’m glad they chose to do this
i just got a gold astral serpent and heavenly onyx in 2 days
what raid tier?
This was not an either/or scenario. We were not going to get new content in retail.
Ordinarily we’d have our final raid, and that would be it until the pre-patch for the next expansion. There would be a year of just running the same raid and dungeons, with nothing new to bridge the gap.
The fated seasons, plunderstorm, and remix are their attempt to take things that already exist and present them in a new way. So that we have something to do in the meanwhile without it costing them a bunch of development resources that they need to make the expansion.
And because it happens at the end of expansions when players fall off anyway, they can take risks and see what sticks. Because again, it’s this stuff, or nothing at all. And i’d rather they just try some things.
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Except it very much did, and saying otherwise is just being naive.
The amount of art team resources that went into making the new armor set recolors, 33 mount models, 2 pet models, all of the tinker/cogwheel/etc. animations, etc. is way more than would be required for tier sets for an old raid being “Awakened” for season 4.
As has been said, it wasn’t PS/ReMoP or a 4th tier, a 4th tier wasn’t going to happen. In terms of dev time, it probably took way less time than you think.
PS:
- Limitedly new models for pets and mounts (mostly reused, recolor and maybe a new asset added)
- Armour. 1 new(?) armor set, the rest are from existing models.
- 11 weapons, some new models, mostly new textures.
ReMoP
- Armors, pets, and mounts are recolors or from original mop, recolors take very little dev time to do in comparison to making completely new models and rigs.
- Sprites don’t take much time to make as they are simple 2D assets.
- Animations, now I havent touched ReMoP but I can almost guarantee that there are no new animations, just new ways of activating them, aka maybe 5 lines of code to connect various bits of already existing code.
A new tier
- Story integration
- New Models
- New animations/vfx
- New voice lines
- New armor/weapon models/textures.
- New sprites
- Tier sets abilities and balancing
- Trinket abilities and balancing
- Other item abilities and balancing.
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Awakening an old raid takes design work. Class design and raid design as a whole change so drastically between expansions you’d have to redesign fights to fit the paradigm of the current expansion. It’s not like dungeons where dungeon gameplay has mostly been the same across time. A fight like Thunder King only makes sense with MoP class design. Something like Flop Remix raids “work” in the sense they are trivial content you bully by being OP, they’re not well tailored to modern progression raiding.
It’s almost like Plunderstorm and Remix also takes design work.
Different designers.
Blizzard, or I should specify Retail, only has one raid design team. Designing meme Flop Remix cog gems or fun abilities in Poggerstorm is closer to the open world live service team who do have spare cycles mostly likely as opposed to the raid team which is currently make azkahett or whatever the new spoodermin raid is called.
The only time we’ve seen a second raid design team like, ever, has been with SoD.