Weren’t you claiming earlier I was intellectually dishonest?
Yet somehow you can’t be?
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You are.
I’m not.
mmm. I think we’re done here.
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I was done with you the moment you equated player housing to competitive play.
When the devs mention they have to sacrifice a raid tier for housing then I’d say it becomes relevant, to the design focus which people want changed.
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Suffusion camp gear acquisition is one of three key points in the OP.
It may or may not be clear but I’m not really a world content player, nor am I exactly affiliated with those who tend to write arguments on such matters (In good faith or otherwise). I can just see a decline in quality when it comes to world content sets and gearing methods and don’t think it’s a particularly justified one.
Especially when gearing for every other aspect of the game seems to have been kicked into overdrive.
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Oh no, you now will have to actually play the game. What a horrible thing!
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The bulk of content in Vanilla WoW was open world zones and solo-able questing content. WoW being more solo friendly was why it beat its competitors. Other MMOs wouldn’t even let you reach max level solo.
I suggest reading or watching interviews done by devs such as Ion Hazzikostas, Morgan Day, and Holly Longdale. They discuss things such as why they want to divorce player power from the open world, force grouping in open world content, and not add features such as Group Finder to WoW Classic.
This all happened at about the same time that we had armchair MMO experts claiming that Vanilla WoW was so successful because it forced grouping.
Better yet, look at the game itself. Torghast didn’t drop gear, despite requiring it. Why? Probably because it scaled to solo players. Devs wouldn’t have wanted players to do only Torghast as their endgame. They wanted Torghast to be a side activity to the three pillars.
DF is also starkly lacking in solo gameplay, other than minigame-like world quests, Zskera Vaults, and Sniffenseeking.
Legion and BfA made it a rule to always provide solo progression options. SL also made sure to provide activities for solo players through the open world, covenants, and Torghast. But DF makes it a rule that players have to group up for everything, including the open world.
Blizzard has admitted a drop in sales for DF.
The drop in subs during SL was pretty obvious.
No, I don’t have exact figures, and even if I did I wouldn’t be divulging them here.
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If you don’t consider the open world endgame content, then I’m not even sure you understand the MMO genre.
Obviously you are going to be having issues with arguing in good faith if you keep making baseless claims about players wanting Mythic iLvl from WQs.
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It wasn’t the endgame content. The best rewards from then came from endgame content.
You’re conflating leveling with “solo friendly” and attempting to use that to justify infinite power gains that are done solo.
Okay, so no big deal then. You were able to get what you needed at whatever level you could complete.
Well, the solo players cried torghast into the grave.
And those expansions were bad for their attempt at infinite power grinds. Especially legion with it’s RNG legendaries. WoW became a chore, and people got fed up with being forced to do chores in order to keep up. It makes much more sense to just play at even a moderate level for much quicker power gains than were available then.
Because of the streamer Diaspora over the lawsuit.
It wouldn’t matter if you did, because you’re presenting this in such a way that solo players not having access to better gear than what they have is the reason subs are whatever they are.
That isn’t a good faith argument. It’s a trust me bro.
It isn’t. It’s catch up and introductory content.
You have never argued in good faith. You spent the entirety of SL making single issue posts about how the sky was falling on “solo players.”
Then you come here and tell us how good it was for solo players.
Nah.
It took many players months to reach max level. That was the bulk of the content at that time.
Can you imagine if WoW had launched with Molten Core as its only content? Meaning, you created your toon and simply logged in to the raid entrance at level 60 with pre-raid BiS gear? WoW wouldn’t have survived to see its first expansion.
No. WoW’s explosive growth was due to the leveling experience being solo friendly, which proves that even in the early days of MMO the demand for solo gameplay was there. Solo players having progression at max level is no more “infinite” than group players having progression at max level.
Wow. I can’t believe I am reading this.
Group content players cried that they were forced to do Torghast for legendaries.
Solo players cried that they couldn’t do Torghast because it didn’t drop the gear they needed to progress.
Who got their way in the end?
Legion was a great expansion.
Devs couldn’t help the fact that hardcore players couldn’t stop themselves from chain-running MoS and clearing every WQ on the map for tiny power gains because they couldn’t wait for next week when AP would be awarded with a higher multiplier.
Devs couldn’t help the fact that hardcore players would throw tantrums when a legendary dropped that was good but not BiS.
In retrospect, yes, AP should have been distributed to all specs without forcing you to choose one. A weekly cap on AP might have helped protect hardcore players from their own fervor. And a legendary vendor could have been there from the start.
I would only hope that so many gamers would be willing to quit a game they enjoy out of moral conviction. But unfortunately, the exodus began happening in SL even before the lawsuit became widely known, and SL clearly had issues with its content and rewards systems that drove players away.
Players aren’t going to stay subbed if they reach max level and have no appealing progression options available to them.
WoW always has good raids and raiders always get the best gear. So you have to look to other modes of gameplay and types of content to explain why some expacs bop and others flop.
WoD, for example, had great raids but brought the game’s MAUs so low that Blizzard no longer felt comfortable publishing them.
Legion revived the game because it offered so much open world and order hall content for solo players and 5-man content for dungeon fans.
Providing more content and progression options can only help the game grow.
The open world is endgame for a large player demographic, whether you like it or not. Current DF devs would already have stopped offering any seasonal outdoor progression if they thought they could do so while keeping this game running.
SL came as a huge shock to solo players, in the way that it nerfed open world gearing and in the way that Torghast offered no gear progression despite being a larger feature than its predecessor Horrific Visions. I stand by that.
But SL still beats DF as far as the design of open world and solo content is concerned.
SL and DF were both bad for solo players in different ways, but I would still personally pick SL because at least it had more content tuned and designed for solo players. DF is trying to wipe solo gameplay out of existence.
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It is still dishonest to repeat a claim that people are asking for mythic ilvl gear for doing world quests. It doesn’t become more true if you parrot it more often.
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Isn’t there a video of a mage killing the final boss of pre-nerf twisting corrodors layer 8 at launch naked?
I never understood this mindset. Gear isn’t the goal, it’s a stepping stone on the path. You get more gear so you can move up to more challenging content. If you never intend to move on to more challenging content, why do you need gear?
Having done Torghast regular wings as well as Twisting Corridors on all 12 classes in 9.0, I can verify that Twisting Corridors Layer 8 started off with mobs tuned lower than regular Layer 8 before quickly spiking, so it does seem possible that you could fish for better anima powers and torments in those early floors of TC and clear the whole thing easily regardless of gear, depending on spec and luck.
However, you can’t deny the fact that Torghast enemies have health and do damage, and you are going to need certain amounts of healrh and damage to survive their attacks and kill them before mechanics overwhelm you, so you are going to need a certain level of gear. It’s just how the numbers work.
Anima powers are there but just amplify the power from your gear. (Secondary stats for your abilities just amplify your base power levels, and even anima powers that proc damage scale based on your primary stat.)
Found the clip, linked below
He opens his bags at the end, and you can see a bag ilvl of 181. well below the max of what you could get from covenant sets/world quests at the time.
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There is a buff called “Refuge of the Damned” which allows you to change or unequip gear partway through your run.
This clip only shows the last boss and not the entire run, so it is safe to assume that the player had gear equipped during the lower floors while collecting anima powers.
Another caveat is how overpowered Mages were with certain anima powers in the first season of SL. There were countless clips of players literally one-shotting Floor 18 bosses. This became even more likely with TC because eventually after collecting over 100 powers, the game would generate any class-based power that you did not have max stacks of, virtually guaranteeing a good build. Mages eventually got nerfed in Season 2.
I cleared TC on plenty of toons in the 180s. As long as you could get good powers in the early floors, it was anywhere from possible to easy to finish the run.
But this doesn’t mean that gear didn’t matter. A toon with twice as much health and damage, for example, was still going to have twice as much health and damage even after collecting 100 powers, and was going to have an easier and faster clear.
It means you got more gear than was needed to complete even the hardest solo content that patch.
So you did not need any more gear than you had to complete all the content.
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As someone who played Torghast extensively for 2 years, I didn’t even think that Twisting Corridors was the hardest iteration of Torghast. As I said above, the first few floors were tuned more leniently than the equivalent Layer in the regular wings, so if you were thorough and not entirely unlucky on those first few floors, you could clear the whole thing.
Layer 8 was obviously tuned for players in raiding gear when it first released, and was nerfed in a matter of days due to the extremely high failure rates. You definitely needed gear for that one.
Layer 12 became possible for world and solo players once they had maxed out their Box of Many Things and had upgraded their Korthia gear to at least the 220s.
Layer 16 was again overtuned and required anima power fishing to succeed for world and solo players. Season 4 didn’t help much either because we didn’t get any gear upgrades.
The top few layers of Jailer’s Gauntlet were physically impossible to solo, except for a couple of specs with very specific anima power builds. The flavor text even said to “bring friends”.
Regardless, Torghast should have provided its own gearing system (but not necessarily the Twisting Corridors or Jailer’s Gauntlet formats).
if you dont do group content you dont need tier. Wanting it and expecting it when you dont do teh content to get it is entitlement of teh highest order, the only character of mine that will have tier is this one . All 40 odd others who only do world content do not need it and wont get it .