It seems to me that there is a simple fix for the missions: There exists a big pool of missions with various levels.
Randomly pick missions from the pool that are based upon the level of your followers up to some max level governed by the campaign missions.
That way if all your followers are roughly equal, say around 25-30, you get missions in that range. If you then gain a new adventurer at level 1, you get mostly 25-30 missions, but also one or two lower missions so that you don’t have to send your noob on a death mission.
When you complete a campaign mission, higher level missions are available to your pool.
I love this thinking that it’s the player’s fault for Blizzard screwing up. I see it so often, it’s really indicative of WoW’s wonderful community where we dance on other peoples’ suffering. Love it.
We have one spec that’s already functionally dead, one spec that nerfs itself over time via scaling, and one spec that’s nigh impossible to nerf, that you probably don’t really want nerfed anyway.
Who cares about this stuff??? Freaking balance the Covenants and specs. Seriously, it has taken months for changes that were obvious in week 2 or 3. If you are already behind and you can finally play what you wanted now it’s going to take you weeks and weeks. You might as well forget this tier, because you will not catch up till 9.1 or 9.1.5.
I literally had a post a couple days ago about how players could potentially mess up their table by progressing too quickly. THIS was likely a big reason why, which for me makes sense since I have only done Venthyr covenant tables.
Only issue I am having now is it seems my followers are not healing naturally as often as they used to - the anima cost to heal them is a bit high. I also can’t lie that that anima collection on my behalf is definitely low as I can’t play a lot lol.
What are you going to do to help those of us who advanced our mission tables so much that we can no longer level our lower level companions (because we no longer get lower level missions)?
You didn’t explain anything**, so I had no idea we’d still be getting level 1 companions two months in. Meanwhile, as a night fae, I did everything I could to get my mission table “level” as high as I could, because I thought it was the point.
(** before any of you say this is the players’ fault, may I remind you that, as I just said, Blizzard DIDN’T EXPLAIN ANYTHING about how this works, not once, not ever)
Bro, Legion mission table was the best in every way, PERIOD. They literally should have duplicated this into BfA and Shadowlands. But, don’t get me wrong, BfA wasn’t too bad, just the rewards got nerfed WAY too much which caused me to abandon the table after I finished leveling my followers to max level.
Legion, OMG I couldn’t stop sending followers on missions. Like, I grinded that baby because it was perfect, rewarding enough, and essentially fun.
The Warlords of Draenor mission tables in your garrison were also very good, but you’re absolutely right. I was still playing my mission tables in Legion until BFA was released.
The adventure tables in Shadowlands are a hideous, unexplained mess. They had such potential, but we were all left on our own to figure them out, and now those of us who thought we were playing them correctly in the Night Fae covenant are pretty screwed.
In any covenant, I believe. I screwed up my table because I can’t resist mounts, pets, and toys lol. So I pushed my table too high. I get missions in the high 40s and my highest follower is 35 or something. I still got a bunch “stuck” at lower levels that may take me awhile to level IF the increased strength of my Venthyr companions isn’t affective.
The “fix” to the Ardenweald Trappers is way to severe of a change, far too late. The only gameplay we’ll have for the next however many months is sending our troops on death-marches until they’ve leveled up to where we are in the adventure table campaign.
While I’m generally glad that I might be able to do something other than 6 5-anima item and a rare 250 rep adventure missions with these buffs to the Venthyr followers, I still find the Adventure system to be unnecessarily opaque and over-complicated for something that is almost completely uninteractive. You said it right in the post, no one understood how to do these missions or what the intended play was. There’s no clarity as to what wins an encounter, there’s no clarity on what abilities do in any kind of practical sense. “Waits a turn then absorbs life and also does damage to two nearby enemies.” Great, but what does that MEAN in a battle? Should we be worried about how far away they are from the enemy troops? Do healing abilities matter at all? I tried to strategically position my troops at first, but it really doesn’t seem to matter if there’s mobs that don’t have anyone’s attack arrows on them. At first, there wasn’t even an explicit instruction that you could use base troops more than once in the same encounter, which is completely counter-intuitive. I have two separate addons that can only vaguely suggest if I’ll win or not when I put together a team.
If there has to be a mission table in the next expansion, I hope that it goes back to a simple ability-counterability system, but I have a feeling that it’ll double down in the other direction and make it so that you have to position troops on a map and also manage talent trees or something. At least that would potentially make it fun, though, nothing about Adventures is FUN. I’ve stopped even trying to figure out if positioning in the front or back row actually does anything and just sort of randomly throw followers at stuff in the hopes that they don’t die, then check how it went the next day.
I am really glad you guys have been working on making even the smallest parts of your game more enjoyable, but could we pick up the pace a little? I can’t imagine these changes took all that long, but I could be wrong I guess. I get that these covenants were considerably behind as far as power comparatively so they are more of a priority, but many of the Necrolord’s companion abilities are completely misrepresented in the tooltips, which I imagine is a very easy fix, or they don’t work at all and this has been going on for several weeks at least. Bonesmith Heirmir’s Serrated shoulder blades not working at all is the biggest one for me at the moment, but there are several other bugs that I would really appreciate it if you would address. They are listed in good detail on this thread https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/bonesmith-heirmir-mission-table-shoulder-blades-not-working/830293/15
Edit: I believe the issue with naturally healing was that is was too OP already without having the level two upgrade - companions chance to heal naturally is increased by 25%. So, when they made the changes recently, they most likely knocked that down a little to be more balanced once you upgrade your mission table to level two.
I still believe the anima costs to heal though, if you run missions around the clock, should be reduced by 50% minimum! I have 10 companions so far, still need 6 more, and with them all at their lowest HP it costs me 2,400 ish to heal them all - most are in their 30s but I do have 3 I believe that are still leveling through their 20s.
never, ever heal except your tanking toon and only if it something you can afford in anima.
when your heroes DING they automatically heal to 100%. so i aim to level them even if it means throwing them on a 900xp mission just to get them wiped as opposed to spending 200+ anima to heal them.
the only few times i have healed a hero is either my tank Kleia or Mekanikos, my tank/team buffer, to ensure an XP mission success (and even then only if it will cost me less than 200 anima) otherwise i just wait a few hours for them to heal up.
also did natural healing go down?
i have the upgrade that lets them heal 25% faster but i rarely let my heroes rest to use it. i just throw those poor guys in the fire regardless of success. i am more interested in the XP than any mission success unless it is for anima, the enchanting chests, and XP quests.
Almost a month since Heirmir became available and her Serrated Shoulder Blades STILL do not work. She is the worst Soulbind adventurer, as she is the only one with only one special ability. She is pretty much the same as Gunn Gorgebone, a normal companion.