I dont know what part you didnt understand from this whole thread, but ill put it simple, leveling is TRIVIAL nowadays, no one cares about the difficulty of it, the difficulty right now lies on mythic+ and mythic raid, and theres many difficulties below so people can do what they find suited for their lvl, i find it amusing that you ask for the baseline difficulty to be raised yet you are far from playing challenging content, it makes no sense, you dont see Cutting Edge players asking for this, why do you ask for it then? when you dont even do m+ or mythic?
I do agree that having 4 difficulty modes is a little silly/redundant. However, I donât know if I would lower the ceiling.
WOW in itâs original form was not intended to be a âguided tourâ type game. It was meant to be an adventuring RPG in a dangerous open world. I wholeheartedly believe that if Blizzard ever decides to make the game a full on movie type game where you just level characters to end game, check out the story, and then just kind of dink around for the rest of the xpacâŚthat will be the final nail in the coffin for WOW. The baseline level of having the game rooted in the idea of improvement, competition, and engaging challenges is integral to the game structure and prolonged survival. Otherwise why wouldnât you just go watch a show? If you look at the gaming industry as a whole youâll see that âcollectionâ style grinder games were more or less a fad that devs are now moving away from. Destiny 2, Divsion 2, Breakpoint, all tried to move away from the monotonous collection grinder with interesting RP or challenge elements. POE solidified itself as a real competitor with DIablo within the isometric genre by incorporating not only a super complex customization system, but also engaging events/challenges within each season. So just based on evidence within the industry, those who claim that the majority of WOW players want the âguided tourâ style game would appear to be wrong. Assuming WOW players are similar to those who play other big title games, those âguided tourâ players are becoming the outliers.
Now Iâm not saying make things so difficult that casual players with limited time who really do just level characters to max level and want to see the plot play out canât do normal/heroic dungeons. However, I do think that the threat of failure is 100% necessary to create engagement and push enjoyment to a level that justifies $15 a month.
Even if you are just a player who wants to RP through the storyline, then your experience should be comparable to a story based RPG like say a Final Fantasy game right? But like when I was playing through FFX for like the 3rd/4th time last month, guess what? I still died on some bosses, in some cases it took me like 4 attempts. And this after Iâve already beat the game a couple times. Despite what people will say on these boards, the threat of failure and having content that potentially requires a handful of attempts to pass is not a âhardcoreâ element. It does not push it out of attainability for casuals. As evidenced above, other genres of games that are casual at their core have that same level of difficulty.
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BREAK YOURSELF UPON MY BODY
FEEL THE STRENGTH OF THE EARTH
Why did Cata have so many good boss voice lines?
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You are proving my point here. You should not have to be a hardcore player to hit meaningful content. Iâll agree leveling has been trivialized, Blizzard should not have let that happen. They should make the leveling process engaging and demanding.
As far as top level content is concerned, Iâm an example of the problem. I only do heroic raiding and I donât do M+ above 10, largely because of gear. And THAT is the point. You shouldnât have to be in the top 15% of geared players to do actually challenging gear. The challenge, the threat of failure, should be baked into the baseline experience. ENGAGING CONTENT SHOULD NOT BE GATED BEHIND GEAR, and to a certain extent shouldnât really be gated by level either. Itâs a fundamental design flaw.
The game needs to be un-trivialized and made mentally engaging from the ground up, from level 1 through 120, from the second you hit max level to the second you hit Mythic raiding or 10+ keys.
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Nothing is gated behind gear, you think hardcore players wait for gear to clear the content? at least i was doing regular mythics on 390 ilvl as soon as i hit 120, method started mythic race with less than 425 overall ilvl, doing content overgeared is your choice, not blizz.
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Why not both?
Raise the floor and lower the ceiling by removing some of the difficulties that lead to bloat (Normal/Heroic could be merged at this point for dungeons and raids) and making Mythic less frustrating (Bring back 10 man maybe).
I feel like M+ is already in a decent spot in the context of scalability, however we need a better in-game understanding of how the system and affixes to work to get more people feeling comfortable stepping into it.
One or two leveling dungeons with puzzles as part of play would be fun. Added experience per run along with keeping the puzzles focused on fun.
Trash that one shots in every run doesnât ring a fun bell. All dungeons do not need to be so serious, itâs game time.
You shouldnât have to put a ton of time in and get a big gear score to be challenged. Challenging content should be the baseline experience.
It shouldnât be âOk now that youâre fully geared with Heroic Raid ilvl, now you can start doing the REAL challenging contentâ. Threat of failure should be part of the baseline common denominator experience. Even a player only playing 2-4 hours a week should be able to fill that entire 4 hours with content that requires mental agility and engagement.
In short, Blizzard has focused far too much on making sure that casual players are not left out in terms of receiving gear upgrades. They should focus more effort on making sure casual players still receive a fun and engaging experience, whether they do low level keys and only raid normal-heroic for a couple hours a week, or they do 10+ keys and raid mythic.
Putting all of the content that is actually mentally and mechanically engaging/challenging behind a wall of gear score and IO, along with putting all of the engaging content past level 120 is essentially saying, âYou donât get to have fun unless you dump in X amount of braindead hours, then you get to have fun!â
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This is important too I think puzzles are a great tool to get people invested in mechanics without it just being a flat pass/fail.
Stuff like the Vault of the Wardens boss where you obviously want to solve the mirrors quickly but you have some time to do so.
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I think thatâs a really good idea for ways to make instances engaging. Finding encounters that arenât just bosses with 1 shot mechanics. As long as the challenge is there, the mental engagement is there, the threat of failure is there. The creative ideas like this are great.
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Oh god. Halls of reflection. LMAO! To this day people canât get passed the first room while leveling. Every leveling pug Iâve been in has noped outta there so hard. Makes the Occulus look like a cake walk. Surprised it hasnât been nerfed further tbh.
I donâ t think difficulty was ever a problem with Occulus, it just wasnât a fun to play through at all.
Occulusâs difficulty wasnât in its damage (like Halls of reflection is), rather it was in its mechanics. People just canât comprehend its mechanisms to beat it nor navigate it worth a damn.
This right here is the biggest part of it.
Due to the many ways to obtain decent gear, along with cross realm dps being so easy to get, very few players actually go into a dungeon or raid at an appropriate gear level for the entire team outside mythic or high keys.
Mecha Drops 415 and is a good choice for players at 405. How often do groups of all 5 players at 405ish go in??
Ignoring benthic affects for a min (they are quite an anomaly), heroic should be aimed at a raid of 415-420 players. After the first few weeks how many heroic groups are full raids of people in that level?
Same with mythic+. 10s can be run by 415 players but when was the last time you ran a +10 pug and had a group of 415s?
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LOL guess who has not done high m+?
I miss the early days where you actually had to use crowd control and plan your pulls, even on trash mobs. None of this run in and aoe faceroll everything while watching Netflix crap
Itâs absolutely gated behind gear.
Let me put it this way. The second I hit 120, I should be able to turn around and get in a queue for some sort of content that will actually present a challenge and be intellectually engaging.
In fact, I shouldnât even have to wait to 120 to find that content. The game should be littered with legit content from the ground up. Currently the pattern of play is this: wade through a whole bunch of braindead content, then unlock the ârealâ content of difficult keys and Mythic raiding. Instead their should be two parallel tracks. Effectively there should be a âguided tourâ mode and then a âcompetitive modeâ which operate from the second you create your character up until you are ready to step into mythic raids.
Another one that hasnt done any high m+, are you aware that people plan their pulls WITH AN ADDON so nothing goes wrong in the run? if you are referring to classic thats baby lvl compared to today, 1 missed interrupt in the interrupt rotation of the party and the pull goes to crap, early on? you used poly on a mob then you pulled, OH BRO THE COMPLEXITY.
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Regular mythics and m+ was available from the get go, again you chose to do content overgeared and yet you have the guts to claim the content is too easy, you sound like some1 that does LFR and says the raid is too easy, its that amusing.
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Here are two of the one shot/two shot mechanics Iâve found:
It can be a trixy one! Iâd be surprised if the intention with this and the LK dungeons wasnât to slowly increase the difficulty - while promoting CC - in prep for Cata dungeons that were probably already in development.