Are all casual solo players supposed to quit on

Community General Discussion
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The world definitely does feel like it’s gotten smaller in that regard, doesn’t it? Just in terms of raw surface area, the areas from the base game are still far and away the largest and most varied zones in the game. I doubt any expansion will ever come close to it simply due to the sheer size.

Here’s what I think the biggest problem with new expansions is - the only things to do exist in whatever plot of land was created most recently. We’re not really playing in the World of Warcraft, it’s the Archipelagos of Warcraft. I don’t think it needs to be that way. There are still plenty of places in the old world that have extreme significance in the lore and in the story. Am I to believe that nothing of note has happened in Durotaur or Ashenvale Forest since Cataclysm? I think the solution should be for expansions to stop discarding these old zones with every expansion and use the existing world they have rather than creating a new playpen for us to romp around in every 3 months while we forget the previous one. Blizzard should make a greater attempt to tell new stories in their old world and give players more opportunities to see the world they supposedly call home and watch it breathe and change over time.

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263

Pretty sure it is, but the last thousand posts have been Snozh v a couple others in a flame war.

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I would like to one day be able to PvP again.

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TBC, WotLK and every other expansion besides SL let me earn decent PvP gear on my own. I would be happy if I could just have that back.

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Every single time I queue for group content it tells me something like average wait time 20 minutes. I know I can shorten that by switching to Tank but the community has soured me on tanking for strangers. After 30-40 minutes of my average 20 minute wait time, I get bored and log off the game. So why even bother.

You also think that the only goals are about getting more player power in the game. Maybe not but your focus seems to be on that. My goal for Shadowlands? Obtain the transmog that my character is currently wearing. I obtained it a couple of weeks ago. I could try for the weapon mogs but that will be another 15-20 weeks of game play for me to obtain the anima.

Before Mists however, I would raid and run heroic dungeons with friends on a regular basis. Then the LFR came out and by the time I am able to log in on the weekends, everyone had run the raid. Eventually people simply stopped logging in. In Mists, I was in a guild and we were doing some casual raiding. It was fun. Then they decided to become a “progression raiding guild” instead of a casual raiding guild. Anyone without Gold Proving Grounds was kicked. And here I am since I mostly had to heal in raids but that is my least favorite druid spec.

So I limit myself to solo stuff these days. Queues are too frustrating. Dungeons are ability spam fests that I don’t find fun. Was never good at PVP and I spend most of my time in the graveyard. Not fun. So I log in for an hour or two per week, get 1000 anima, kill a world boss and log off.

My goals are like:

  • Obtain this transmog.
  • Obtain the new battle pets not in instances. (like anyone would allow collecting battle pets in instances anyway)
  • Raise XXX amount of gold.
  • explore the zones
  • complete the zone quests.
  • complete Archaeology (doesn’t exist today)

Once done, I just log out and do something else. I don’t actually care about BIS gear (have never had it anyway) or getting top level character power. I upgrade my gear by looking at the item level and seeing if it is higher. If I am lucky, it has haste, mastery or crit as well.

I don’t even know how to get a mythic keystone or how to add gem slots to my gear anymore.

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267

Sweats in Legion and BFA SL PvP gearing is still better than those two, though you could argue Legion gear didn’t matter. Yeah, TBC-WoD PvP gearing was much better and didn’t make you do PVE though.

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Don’t apply logic, it only makes it more confusing.

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I loved BfA gearing. I was 460+ in a world where 475 was the max, all solo. If I had to pick a single expansion to gear through, Bfa would be it.

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In BfA, I did a few mythic runs with my guild and I’m familiar with the repetitive nature of that sort of play. The weekly reward is nice, I miss it, but mythic is not for me.

Speaking for myself, I’m just hoping Blizzard put more effort into the world so poor slobs like me can have our kind of fun. :slight_smile:

Speaking for myself, I avoid LFR and Heroic because a) I have horrible luck with random groups and b) You usually group with people who have done things a gazillion times and they have no patience for someone who wants to get an idea of where they are/where they are going.

To put it in perspective: A former guildmate (left the game soon after SL), ran mythics, etc. and was really willing to walk his guildies through any dungeon and explain what needs to be done. He was very good. I made a toon for Maldraxxus and complained to him how the daily chests in other covenants were pieces of cake, yet in Maldraxxus I will never do it because I had to fight mobs daily and all I did was die.

He ran me through a few times, helping me. I learned then what I was supposed to be doing, how to do it and then I started both to have fun and really enjoy my WW monk in a way I hadn’t before. He made it look so easy and until then, it wasn’t to me. I now love my WW monk and love it when I get my timing right and kick bottom. :slight_smile: And when I don’t, I know what I did wrong and that’s it’s something I can improve.

That’s the disconnect in this game. For those used to the knife-edge efficiency you acquire for mythic + and raiding, PvE is super easy, super quick. It took me a while and a lot of repetition, but now Korthia is like that for me. I learn slower. :slight_smile: And I die. A lot.

So there’s a lot of impatience for those that hm, play differently, learn differently. And sadly, there is no real way to get better except through luck, patience and a really thick skin for those times you meet those incapable of considering other points of view.

If there were solo runs, for example, of dungeons, so a person who wanted could learn the dungeon layout, what to expect and what they should do at their pace, I think there could be less friction and less reluctance for some to pugging.

Yes, there will always be jerks, but the frustration would be less for those trying to rise up the learning curve.

At the moment, I’m in the ‘hoping there’s interesting stuff to do’ in the new patch as I have to say, SL has been a letdown. The big ‘Tazavesh is so great’ spiel Blizzard did also had me go, ‘So what’s in it for me?’ and the answer turned out to be: Nothing but a short quest to be able to go there and add it to my flight point list. :slight_smile:

I look forward to someday visiting it with a friend or two to see what the hype was all about. :slight_smile:

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271

I’m not really a solo player myself but I do think that there needs to be more opportunities for solo players to play the game in new ways and engage in challenging content in the endgame. For me I think we need to decouple the ideas of a solo player and a casual player. Casual players will always only engage with the endgame up to the point that they’re comfortable with but players who prefer to play alone whether it be because they have an unreliable schedule or because they simply prefer not to play with other players that frequently won’t have anything to do if they want to test their abilities and pursue challenging content. If you want to to do hard content you are forced to group up and I think it might be good to provide another endgame avenue for those sorts of players. It would even be good for raiders/dungeoneers as they would have something they can do on their own when all their guildmates are asleep because you’re the only EST player in a PST guild. (I don’t regret my choices.)

I think it would be good to provide solo players a form of challenging endgame content that gives rewards proportional to that level of challenge and provides solo players with the opportunity to watch themselves grow in skill and player power. Similar to the feeling raiders get when they kill a new boss for a first time or when dungeoneers time a new highest M+ key. It doesn’t necessarily need to reach the same heights as raiding or dungeoning if we want to continue to push players towards grouping up in order to get the best rewards, but I do think solo players need something that follows the same structure where there are multiple difficulty levels and there’s a reason to keep coming back to the content week to week.

Visions were a good starting point but perhaps something that was designed from the ground up to be endgame solo content rather than endgame flex content. I think the Mage Tower from Legion was perhaps the ideal form of what I’m thinking of. I loved the one-man raid style of content that offered so something like the Mage Tower with varying levels of difficulty and not time-limited would I think be perfect.

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272

Shadowlands has more open world content than any previous expansion, though.

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None of which offers anything cool or meaningful.

I don’t need any more transmogs, my ideal mog has already been pieced together through previous expacs. I don’t need any more mounts or pets, I’m already using the ones that match my character, the ones I’ve had since WoD. The only cosmetic out of SL I really use is the night fae hearthstone.

So what really is there? I play for achievements and all of the good ones are locked behind hard core group content.

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That’s understandable. For me, there’s a huge difference from BC/Wrath era into Cata and beyond. But even in Cata, Mists and Warlords, I was progressing in levels and power. I could out level stuff. I could beat rares I could never beat before. I can go back and own something from one of the earlier zones that used to own me.

Legion I lost that. And now with the squish it made me feel I lost even more.

Gear progression was at least a way I could eventually feel that I was getting somewhere.

And that may not translate to everyone. Which is okay too.

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Allow me to rephrase. There is an overall progression to the content that exists in the game. The solo content is the first and shortest part of that progression. It’s useful at the very beginning or for certain reps or sockets, but the current progression system is set up around the idea that you’ll move into more challenging content once the solo stuff is finished.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with stopping there and playing more socially. I’ve always felt that the story was pretty ridiculous so I can’t really get on board with that point lol. As far as I’m aware there’s a giant sword sticking out of the planet and spaceships are a regular thing.

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You know what this reminds me of? In FF14 they have something called “Trusts.” No idea why it’s called that but basically the way it works is that when you get to a dungeon as part of the story you’re able to go in with a group of NPCs rather than with a group of players. The NPCs would follow you and go at your pace and were more than good enough to complete the dungeon at normal difficulty. In fact, watching how the NPCs moved during boss fights was actually a really good way to learn the mechanics and how to avoid them. The NPCs would even provide color commentary for most of the bosses and set pieces you found in the dungeon.

So picture if you were able to run a dungeon instead of with randos, you have Malfurion tanking, Anduin healing, and Jania and Greymane are with you on DPS. It would be something like that. Helps make the NPCs feel more involved with the storyline as well since they’re actually doing things rather than sitting around waiting for you to solve all their problems. And if you didn’t want to run the dungeon as a Trust you could always just run it normally with other people.

I don’t think that it would be good to have that system for harder content that provides more substantial rewards - but allowing it for Heroic and LFR could be something Blizzard should look into emulating.

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277

Actually, no, it doesn’t. BfA has far more and in fact I still have toons doing content there when I’m bored of the chores of SL. Firstly, more zones. 2 faction areas with completely different quests and questlines. So I can have an alliance toon run the Alliance story line and a Horde toon run the Horde storyline. Yes, the WQs were available to both, but you have several regions too choose from: Kul-Tiras and its zones, Zandalar and its zones and then the added Nazjatar and Mechagon.

By its design, SL is smaller. 4 zones only, then the Maw (which I don’t consider really) and Korthia. Fewer quest options, more repetition.

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If you want to fight for tags, it seems you can build mounts and battle pets.

Might try this but since I never see Alliance players regularly, tags will be a pain. I suspect there will be huge parties of Horde tagging everything within sight.

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So you want to tribalize the player base even further, siphon developer time away from what should be the core aspects of an MMORPG, and create another path to progression that requires balancing?

Can’t see ANYTHING going wrong with that.

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There are 4 different covenant campaigns, there are 4 different sets of dailies/world quests through their anima conductors, and there are 5 (Venthyr has 2 for some reason) sets of transmogs through quests from Korthia.

Shadowlands has more treasures.
Shadowlands has more rares.
Shadowlands has more toys.
Shadowlands has more mounts.
Shadowlands has more pets.
Shadowlands has more other collectibles.
And BfA didn’t have 2 more zones because you’re not counting the Maw.

It most certainly does.

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281

I think you misunderstood? I’m not sure how having something like Visions or Torghast that would reward gear (and not overboard ilevels) would in any way do what you’ve said.

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