The gaming experience doesn’t feel much like a fantasy adventure anymore in WoW. I go into dungeons and raids and I don’t worry much about mobs or boss attacks. I worry about circles on the ground. Circles, circles and more circles. Do you think Frodo and Sam were worried about circles as they ran up Mount Doom? Were Anduin, Khadgar and Draka worried about circles on the ground as they battled in the Warcraft movie? I read lots of fantasy genre books and I’ve yet to come across a battle where the hero trudging through a dungeon or charging across a battlefield had to dodge circles. Please don’t give me that bs that WoW needs them to make the game more challenging. How about make it so that a mob hits so hard that it actually hurts? If you want circles so badly, have a caster weave a spell putting a damaging circle on ground. Not 8-10-12 artificial circles that arbitrarily appear on the ground. Maybe create abilities where we have to actually parry, or dodge attacks rather than it being a passive, fake ability. Artificial damage reduction? Are you kidding? If only Benjen Stark could have hit his 50% damage reduction ability right before he died in Game of Thrones. Blizz… do you care at all about WoW actually feeling like a fantasy adventure? Or is the goal to create a bogus experience for people only worried about their place on the damage meters?
Edit: My opening line probably didn’t reflect my true point. The story line and quests for TWW have been great. Best in a long time imo. That part of the game certainly fits the fantasy adventure genre. My frustration is that aspects of dungeons, raids, and some class abilities seem artificial and arbitrary.
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I mean, the entire reason they left the Shire in the first place was because of a circular object.
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I hear there’s a game called Elden Ring that does what you’re asking for.
Because that stuff is never coming to WoW. It has always had announce systems. It always will.
People wanted clearer attacks, we got cleaer attacks. /shrug
Its been like this for most of wow’s existence. I don’t remember when we first started using damage meters, definitely not in vanilla, but once that became a thing it was all about the numbers.
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Yes. Turns out the one ring was a circle. Who knew?
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This is actually an interesting topic because I feel like art is imitating life, imitating art.
What I mean is, the way fantasy gaming works, has clearly influenced storytelling. For instance, I found the Gimli and Legolas kill count thing abrasive. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t interesting. It was just a tasteless piece of gaming garbage thrown in for really no good reason.
This is why I like the first few weeks of a new expansion.
That’s on you/the player.
I’m a lot cooler than Frodo and Sam.
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It’s more of an oval, but kind of.
Sounds like you want some kind of action RPG.
im confused are you talking about the raid?
I mean, the general theme and running story is literally fantasy. We just spent an entire expansion running around helping dragons fix their stupid mistakes, both recent and distant. Now we’re running around teaming up with ancient dwarves, a lost human colony, and rogue Drow/Driders to defeat their totalitarian void-influenced spider queen who is under the influence of the bigger bad, a void entity.
Maybe I’m just more used to the genre, but this feels very much in-its-element for a fantasy story and setting right now. Definitely better than Shadowlands was, at any rate.
It’s a game. Games have gameplay elements, some more and some less. Is tracking Spell Slots, Hit Points, Action/Bonus Action/Move Speed something that removes the fantasy element of D&D, or is it simply a standardized method of interacting with the world for players?
Feels like one to me. 
the game will only be about having the right addons and getting the highest numbers and gear until there is a drastic change and the 20-year boomers finally grasp reality that they won’t get the feeling like they did when they first stepped into an MMO. which isn’t where the game is now even though they argue they want it to remain this way, but anyway the genre needs a overhaul desperately. the experience is built for the boomers and new players just get pushed out due to being kicked from groups or not knowing anything like what 10 addons to download and setup and what stats are important
(hint: the game never tells you) or that the binoculars above your mini map are for a filter for said mini map (game also doesn’t tell you that). but what do I know I’ve only been gaming for 25 years playing everything but MMO’s until I picked up wow towards the end of BFA then jumped around to see what other MMO’s were like to compare to wow and to the industry as a whole.
Is it? I enjoy the endgame content for what it is, but it doesn’t detract from my engagement with the story or characters in the setting. The gameplay elements are there for me to interact with the world. If I don’t want to interact, I’ll go watch a movie, which would be why I don’t watch movies.
Get out of the instances.
Seriously.
I changed my outlook towards the game from a gear grind, to just walking the world.
WQs, the weekly events, rumors, fishing, herbing. Maybe a single Delve for the vault, but stay outside.
It’s much better. Just wandering about, aggroing random mobs, bumping into patrols, picking a flower, or casting a line.
When my valorstones fill up, I go and upgrade my gear.
This is a much better game.
I still have a boat load of questing to do as well.
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how long have you been playing? most newer players can’t grasp the story based on the cut scenes or don’t want to read the 20 years’ worth of walls of text to figure it out. just do a google search for how to follow wow’s story and you will get a list of different people asking that. the first thing that popped up for me was a reddit post from 4yrs ago asking how to find a way to follow the story.
You know that was in the book, right?
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Since TBC. I started when I was a kid.
They don’t need to if all they’re concerned with is current/recent story. There are enough elements present in the new player experience to get a general idea of what’s currently going on. For people who want further context or to explore older eras of the game, there are some choices as to how they do that. Not really any better or worse than most MMOs in the “explaining older content” department, but generally much better in the “bringing new players in at the current story point” department.