There are those people that say that Classic is better than Retail because classic is ‘harder’ but to me this is the reality of the situation…
If you keep at it on classic, you eventually get to the next level sooner or later and although sure some elites will totally destroy you, the real issue is the end-game. For me without any achievements to hunt, once I’ve cleared a zone, or a dungeon, got all the quests etc, I feel done and I’ve noticed that as well among other people on Classic they are reluctant to go back to instances they have out leveled.
The good thing about retail is that let’s be honest, people might say ‘LFR has to go’ but the reality is, that there is a progression of difficulty you can go for, I’ve raided normal mode and sometimes higher in a lot of expansions and patches, but at least with raids and mythic+ there are higher levels of difficulty to work towards.
Obviously, a large reason why I don’t often go to the harder difficulty levels is because even if I do okay on LFR or normal. The real reason that people don’t raid on harder difficulties isn’t because easier difficulties exist its more the reality of the situation, say that you have cleared the raids easily on heroic mode, you’re one of the best players in heroic groups, you then get invited to a mythic raid, well my guess is you will suddenly go from being in the top 10% of people to the bottom 10% in terms of skill/performance, and that’s not a position anyone likes to be in at all. Especially with dps meters etc to call out the less skilled players. But this isn’t a bad thing, as it really gives an opportunity for an almost endless level of progression, to me its more a psychological issue with people.
I actually think that the old flex mode was a good bridge between normal mode and heroic from memory, what do you think?
Do you think multiple difficulty levels help the game, or do you think they are bad? I will be honest, this expansion the skill gap between normal mode and heroic has felt like a huge skill gap.
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Theyre Good to a
Degree but WoW is doing it all wrong
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I like that there are multiple difficulty levels. I stick to the easier ones and get my fun from playing lots of alts. Some people would get bored with that and go play another game but instead can keep going with Herioc and Mythic difficulties.
As Blizzard perfects this scaling tech maybe some day we will see a feature like in Diablo where a pro can slide the difficulty up for a chance at better loot while questing.
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I think the issues is that it creates a power creep in terms of gear, which isn’t helped by the fact that:
a) The jump in ilvl per difficulty is big because they want people to feel special
b) The jump in ilvl per tier further increasing the creep and invalidating a lot of previous work people did within an expansion (I understand that each expansion resets stuff but every tier is a bit much)
It also creates this dynamic where people end up working through multiple difficulties artificially increasing progression (for guild or player if they’re the solo type) instead of making different raids and more content.
There’s positives too no doubt, but the amount of difficulties with the power increases per difficulty I feel is excessive.
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I feel like the bridge between heroic and mythic raiding is where the real skill test is.
My guild progressed through heroic BfA raids pretty quickly but mythic… yeesh.
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I would love to do Mythic raiding, but when you have 12-15 players at the most that tends to be a problem. Also some of our party are from other servers so they can’t join us for Mythic because of that cross server restriction nonsense.
We breeze through Heroic Eternal Palace in under 1 1/2 hours, goofing off the entire time.
We are 4/8 mythic, not goofing off during progression. This is what keeps me logging in to raid. I already have all the gear I could ever want out of Heroic.
This is why multiple difficulties are good.
It really sucked when Classic came out. We had to go back into recruitment mode.
multiple levels of difficulties just means you are repeating the same thing over and over and over again aka m+ and the 4 lvls of raids in retail.
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I like multiple levels of difficulty, but the power creep via four different levels of gear is not good. Combine this with titanforging and you basically require a stat squish every expansion, which gets tiresome. That said… to me four also feels a bit much. I thought three different levels was fine - lfr, normal (to breeze through) and heroic (aka mythic…) to challenge yourself. Just an opinion though.
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I have ignored achievements since the day they were introduced, and I have no issues playing classic. Maybe people should enjoy the experience, and not just try to finish things.
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I am not too sure about this Klowdy, I mean let’s be honest, Wrath was the best expansion, this is irrefutable fact given the amount of subs wow had at the time, and that’s when achieves became a thing?
you think just because something is popular that means it’s good?
how do you feel about taylor swift then?
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The popularity of the game was not increased by the existence of achievements, it was the wrapping of the WC3 story. People didn’t just decide they wanted to play all of a sudden just because achievements made their way into the game.
Lol, i feel she’s still super salty after my boys took that top spot from her.
Multiple difficulties are fine, the problem is that there are difficulties that have no meat to them.
The adventure is only as satisfying as what you put into it. If you do an adventure that requires teamwork, and is a challenge, it’s more rewarding. Also teamwork requires getting to know people and making friends, and the game is more fun with friends.
Difficulties like LFR and Normal have no meat to them, do not require challenge, teamwork, or friends, and are therefore not rewarding.
It’s just like flipping to the last page of a book, reading it, and then throwing the book away, without bothering with the rest.
And then demanding that they publish another book right away. You know, because of the ‘content drought’.
So multiple difficulties are not the problem. The problem is with some of the current difficulties, themselves.
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they’re not bad, but there’s way too many of them atm.
Normal and Heroic should combine into one: Make it the middle difficulty. Call it Heroic.
What about Normal? Well that’s what LFR is now called. Want to experience the raids, but with none of the effort? Sure. You do normal now.
Then there’s Mythic, the hardest of the three.
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not everything needs to be challenging. lfr and normal are fine because they are challenging to some people. my guild when i raided on my warlock raided once a week in uldir and even with a lot of us in 360-370 gear we had trouble getting past certain bosses because of the dps needed. now… it might not be difficult for you but that’s why you raid mythic. that’s like saying normal dungeons should be challenging even though they exist for more people to see content. and even look at all the whining about karazan and op mech because there’s no heroic version. (with kara it didn’t go out for a while idk about op mech)
Yet people cry all over the internet for WOTLK and praise it for the 12 million subs and it was an expansion with 4 difficulty levels per raid.
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Then maybe there is a spot for Normal. As long as your team wasn’t complaining about a ‘content drought’ and demanding a new raid every 4 months.
I was reading the twitter stream from the Jinx crew during Tomb of Sargeras (you know Jinx, the people who make the WoW clothes). They beat it on Normal the 2nd week or so that the raid was out, and their closing comment was something like “Great job everyone! See you next tier!”
Which just seems like an awful shame. Beat it on easy mode week 2, then don’t play anymore until the next tier comes out? Good grief.
If people floated and self-selected to the challenging difficulties for them, and for their team, then that works best. The idea is that everyone should still be doing progression up until the end of the tier (unless they beat the last boss on Mythic, in which case they truly have run out of new challenges).
That’s why old school raiding worked so well. My guild was still working on Black Temple when Burning Crusade ended. And we loved every minute of it because there were always new adventures and challenges to overcome.
If people push on to the next challenge, then the current system works fine. But a lot of people don’t, it seems.