Nope. They replace the stuff casual players like to do. Here’s how casuals play at level 60 in Classic:
- Look up their class/spec’s pre-raid BiS list.
- Announce to their guild that they want to farm for X, Y, and Z gear pieces in Scholo, UBRS, and Diremaul.
- Find four friends who are also looking to farm from one or more of those places.
- Spend months hunting those pieces down by running a couple of times a day.
- Acquire pre-raid BiS
Here’s the current experience for casuals:
- Solo Torghast for ash
- Solo WQs for anima
- Solo campaign quests to unlock covenant gear
- Realize that there’s nothing more to it and quit. It’s not like any of their in-game friends need the casual’s help, and the casual certainly doesn’t need theirs
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I don’t get it. If those same players were forming groups and farming dungeons why wouldn’t they do that in Shadowlands? It’s exactly the same.
Grab 4 friends and do a full clear of M0 Dungeons.
Start running the keys you get.
Am I missing something?
I think they’re trying to suggest that casual players would only dip their toes into Mythics if they were literally the only avenue for getting gear.
I assume that line of thinking also means they think more people would do Normal/Heroic raids if they removed LFR.
But he’s saying in Classic casual players would grab friends and farm dungeons. Why would that change in Shadowlands?
He’s trying to make a point but his argument is specious.
He’s drawing a distinction between types of content and who finds them appealing vs which ones have taken over prevalence in the game’s structure. Vanilla dungeons and retail M+ runs aren’t the same animal.
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I disagree.
They both require forming your own group which is made easier with friends. He even assumes those casual players are in Guilds in Vanilla/Classic. The barrier to entry for most casual players is the Group Finder which isn’t an issue in his post.
The same players who would never do M+ in Shadowlands wouldn’t be running Dungeons in Classic either.
I’m someone who doesn’t wanna play M+ but will do Vanilla dungeons. Here’s my perspective.
One, M+ is an enormous amount of pressure by comparison, even if you’re running with externally-sourced friend groups. You can run relaxed and with irregular, chaotic play periods in Vanilla dungeons. You can also be worse at the game or less invested in study and still succeed in Vanilla dungeons. Crucially, you can fail a whole lot more (and therefore learn a lot more) and still get across the finish line.
Two, Vanilla was on the whole a far better-designed social experience for casuals that’s far more likely to get them to those guild groups in the first place. A much longer on-ramp with a lot of opportunities for player collision lets the casual figure out what kind of player they want to be and who they want to play with.
Dungeons might be the right speed where raiding wouldn’t have been, but they’re in that more involved leveling experience long enough to maybe decide to make that transition on their own with likeminded people, and there’s enough rope they can learn from their failures. You’re retaining people and training them into better players rather than dumping them if they don’t get with the program quickly enough.
The casual is more likely to quit in retail when he runs out of ramp and hits an unforgiving, intimidating competence wall such as M+, which drops the bottom rung off the ladder. The new bottom rung is the low-tier raider, which everyone now calls the casual player.
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Vanilla Dungeons could take hours. How does that fit into “chaotic play periods”? And Mythic 0 doesn’t have a timer AND takes far less time to run than any Vanilla Dungeon.
If a player has social anxiety issues (seems common in WOW) they would find the same barriers to play in Classic that they do now.
well yeah , gold is getting harder to make due markets crashing basically bots and multiboxing cheaters are running rampant, hard to get a good raiding guild because people dont wanna try and learn fights they just wanna tank spank and be done with it. covenants are fun but thats about it . dont believe me about bots ? go 46,37 bastion , bots on every realm for the past 24 hours ,still blizzard haven’t ban a single one of em
Mythic 0 is far harder, as well. Something a lot of people celebrate.
When I say “irregular, chaotic play” I mean me and a bunch of suboptimal friends can make a night out of screwing around in BRD, stopping periodically for various life reasons, bantering, whatever. No such attitude or atmosphere today.
You could argue Classic is missing that experience as well, but that’s a consequence of terraforming the community over such a long time.
Nah. It was way easier when I was 14 to poke the guy I noticed had been questing next to me for a while than to cold-audition for Heroics, terrified of letting this group down. That’s because the game’s no longer really designed to encourage emergent social bonding in that way.
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Here is the difference though. I would need to run a vanilla dungeon maybe 10X max to get the gear I needed. No endless tokens.
I am willing to bet that the /played on mythic dungeons is way more than vanilla dungeons overall.
So, I read a lot of complaints on the expansion and replies to those complaints. I would just like to add my 2cp. This game has a heavy mixture of different types of players. The game, itself, has gone through different states since WOTLK. For a multitude of reasons, they keep changing what this game is all about. You have expansions that have catered to casuals, role players, hard core etc. But we now have an expansion that is HEAVILY time gated, and in my opinion, specifically fragmented to send you off to play in all portions of every zone. The zone design, itself, is made so it takes you the maximum amount of time to reach an objective. I have never seen so many darn elevators and holes to go through! So who is THIS expansion now made for? Debatable I am sure, but I would say for Blizzard. The other expansions, in one way or the other, used to be player friendly. If you are not a certain type of player, playing many hours a day, you are going to struggle. You can’t really fault the players either. We used to be able to log on, do some dailies, our mission table, maybe a few other tasks or an LFR and be done. The game has taken such a dramatic turn this expansion, I think it has a lot of players feeling the same way. I can only guess the decision to make it this way came from higher in the company, because it has lost the feel of even previous questionable expansions. Again, just my 2cp. From an old players POV.
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I think casual players would do just fine if add ons, keybinds and scripts to make a class get its function were not allowed.
If Blizzard designed a universal UI that allows you to customize and blocked all addons. What was intended for the game is in game for everyone. Instead you have to figure out how to make a UI so you can play the game in raids and dungeon engame content before you can ever try to play the game.
This part is a reason why apple and Steve jobs was so succesful in the beginning. Apples UI was pleasing, easy to use and learn for everybody. Mechanics pshaw, make your character work as simulated so you can join, well that isn’t always casual content.
Mythic 0 isn’t any harder than a Vanilla dungeon. I’m not talking about Classic. I’m talking Vanilla 1.9 era and earlier playing with the knowledge we had at the time. Scholo, DM and Strat were as hard (or easy) as any M0 currently.
You can still get some buds and goof around in Dungeons in Shadowlands. This idea that the game has passed casuals by is ludicrous.
As long as you have friends to play with any activity is easily accessible. Those same BRD runs with friends in Vanilla can be translated into M0 runs or doing Normal Raids.
Three hours is not casual. Unless youre unemployed and have no family.
If I’m lucky, I get 1-2 hours in depending on wife and toddler aggro.
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Can’t agree! Had a way easier, more relaxed time with dungeons pre-BC. I didn’t mind Heroics when they came out, because at that point I was in a close-knit guild built up over time, plus I was starting to get interested in pushing myself, since the game gave me the space to contemplate that while doing other stuff.
What pushed me over the hump was everyone I had met over the last year kinda all hitting that threshold around the same time, so we sorta all talked over starting up a loose schedule. We all failed a lot and learned a lot. It was great.
Yeah, you just gotta meet someone questing around, find a reason to group with them, instantly try to form a guild with them before they phase out or just run off, then try to recruit more strangers from a community shattered across disparate servers. Or you can just queue and run the dungeons with strangers as efficiently as possible in near-total silence, like everyone actually does.
Point I’m making is Vanilla made it a lot more natural to pick up friends over your “career” and do stuff you all naturally wanna do. Nowadays it’s more likely you got cold-called by strangers to fill a roster or are bringing in friends from outside the game.
They aren’t interested in the mechanical pressure or in herding cats, or generally in what Shadowlands has to offer outside that stuff.
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My hunter is at renown 4. I have an ilvl of 148. I haven’t even done all the normal dungeons yet and I have 350(?) soul ash total. I can play an hour a day or so most days. I’m having a blast and I always have lots to do when I log in. I just have to know how much time I have each day, and what I can expect to get done.
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Takes skill but arenas are quick and can be very rewarding.
WoW has always been a time sink. If you want to stay up with everyone, you’ve never been only able to invest 1 hour a day. That’s nothing new.
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