I agree with this. I’m still rocking a 171 bow. LOL. Getting weapons upgrades is utterly ludicrous in this game.
That’s easy you have normal dungeons, heroic dungeons. LFR. PvP. You have all the end game stuff most committed players have just on a much lower level. If you intend to only play an hour a day your best bet will be to join a guild full of casuals like yourself.
Your litterly given a 197 set almost for free by just doing covenant campaign. Once your there your ilvl in current content should be more then enough for your casual 1 hour a day play
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See this is the problem. You’re claiming that the real game is content they’re not doing–I’d hate to break this to you but the majority of players don’t even do Heroic raiding, High-End Keys, or high-end ranked PvP. Most players who are casual log in, click LFR, or BGs and then log out. That’s it. You want to know what the real game is? It’s where the majority of the players are not where they can get to.
The Devs add keep-up mechanics in place not because people complain or whine, it’s because they have the metrics, they see that the majority of players aren’t in their difficult content either because of time to get passed it via gear, or because with the gear drought right now they don’t have the skill to do it. So what’s that tell you?
The Devs have a bias because they come from the higher-end of the tracks, that’s the game they experience. What they lack is an understanding of what it’s like to play and not be able to do that content. They’ve made everything else other than M+, PvP, and Raiding trivial almost to the point you can feel the lack of even wanting to design any other mechanics in game. Take leveling for example; they’ve basically created a system where you’re immediately now playing a game that when WoW was created most players never even got to! This is the issue the real game for RPGs isn’t what’s there to do when your max level. Actually most RPGs have terrible end-game mechanics. DnD most campaigns never make level 20. After a certain point in Skyrim, and Fallout the game becomes trivial and then you realize leveling was the fun part.
This is the problem for Casual players. The journey isn’t long. It used to be long and the world used to be huge. Then they realized that making highways costs a lot of money so what did they do? Basically just make the rest of the game an on-ramp to a highway that’s only about as long as a mile.
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I just helped Vash catch that one lich guy last night on my mage. Dinged 55. Feel like I’m going to fast and I still have quests back in Bastion I could complete but I’m just doing the story line at this point. Odd ball thing is I feel like I’m going to slow at the same time I’m going to fast. Some day I’ll get my first 60 if I don’t bore out from following the same quest paths on alts…hic!
yeah and many players who enjoy challenge feel that games that give every reward to everyone who shows up or who pay for player power are not fun. It’s a freakin video game. Why does this affect everyone? because if solo players completing trivial content get rewards comparable to group players completing challenging content, the rewards for the group content are less meaningful.
hence, not fun.
I don’t understand why. As someone else put it recently (sorry that I don’t remember who), an MMO seems to be the only genre in which you’re expected to complete the game in full before unlocking tutorial mode. Game difficulty is supposed to increase as you go. The current WoW flips this paradigm on its head. It starts out hard, and then it gets easier as you gear up. That’s why it’s ironic to me that the players who claim they want their content to be a challenge get so up in arms about non-raiders who want the ability to make their repetitive content less of a challenge the same way raiders do. They can’t just be happy with the satisfaction of completing their challenges. They have to make sure to stick it to everyone else in the process. Case in point:
Anima takes too long to grind >.> for those perks. They should be accountwide.
First of all, that’s an exceptionally well written and thoughtful post, so kudos and thank you for that.
It’s a fantastic question and one with an answer that perhaps is more art than science. You’re trying to keep people who want to play a traditional, group-focused, scheduled-instanced game happy. At the other end, you’re also trying to keep players who won’t touch group content, with a bargepole (PVE or PVP) and who want to play a multiplayer game in a singleplayer fashion and still have gear progression.
I have a possible answer and I fear you may not like it - WQ gear - “world encounter gear” scales all the way up to heroic raid level with the caveat that it scales down to 200 in instances and wPVP. Casual players can play turret minigames and get WQ rewards of slowly increasing ilvl. Their numbers can get bigger and bigger for the content they are devoted to. and yeah, for world bosses they can see if its only ilvl separating them from raiders – perhaps that’ll help them start on the progression path.
With xrealm groups, Personal Loot forced on everyone, including the most hardcore and tight-knit of old guilds, the Guild Finder, Discords for every kind of player and Communities, I feel that it has never been easier for casuals to find similarly casual players. I mean, if they can’t find each other with all this then a) idk what more Blizz can do and b) it may just be that their numbers are not as high as once thought.
But @Ippolite, suppose we flip the problem: what’s the minimum amount of effort that should entitle you to get increasing amount of gear?
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If you changed this from “WQ gear” to Heroic Dungeon and LFR gear, I’d be completely on board with this idea.
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ok, i’m okay with this - WQ, normal dung., heroic dung. and LFR gear is say “lone wolf” gear that slowly scales up to heroic raid level but scales down for all content other than
- PVE WQ
- normal dungeon
- heroic dungeons
- LFR
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I bought into Ion’s “we’re making it alt friendly” bs and greatly regret ever touching this game.
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Not really.
Why is the 35 anima consolation prize for M+s seen almost as a slap in the face? Because it’s what you get for completing a mission table quest.
Similarly, if drawing a triangle in the dirt for tortollans gives you rewards comparable to raids, the rewards for raids become much less meaningful given how trivial the first task is.
But mostly because it hardly does anything for your progress. Consider that you have to gather 1K anima a week for your campaign weekly. 1000 divided by 35 amounts to 29 Mythic+ runs. That’s absolutely ridiculous, and that’s why it’s a crappy reward. The fact that the mission table gives the same crappy reward is beside the point. It’s a slap in the face because Blizzard is effectively saying that you should be running 15 hours worth of Mythics to make minimal progress, if that’s your preferred content, and that’s the better portion of a part time job.
lol I thought casual players automatically excluded those who are willing to find a guild so I didn’t dare suggest “find a guild you like and run with them”. Idk, just seems that there’s an unhappy subset of players that doesn’t like LFG, doesn’t like PVP, doesn’t like guilds and doesn’t like M+. they proclaim they are the majority and that they want to gear progress.
I legit had someone claim in this thread that participation (mere logging in) should entitle you to gear up to but not including mythic raid gear. smh
My guild’s been on Emerald Dream for 17 years. I’ve seen them around ever since I started playing, in BC. I joined them in November and I’ve had a lot of fun noodling around and facetanking the floor in normal raids.
Any idea what one hour a day would have gotten you in Vanilla? Or BC? Or in any MMO?
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what are you talking about? you get chonking 250 anima rewards for just about any content. no one is progressing the weekly 1k anima renown quest from M+ . You get anima from the freakin mission tables man. the 35 anima for a hard-pressed M= is a slap in the face because it is rendered meaningless by the fact that you get it for a 4h mission.
ZERO people have problems completing the 1k anima weekly and yknow whats the proof?
Because if they did then they’d have come a-screaming to General Discussion, that’s the proof
Your definition of casual is very different from mine. I’m more old school. Back in the day, casual effectively meant non-raider. There was plenty of casual progression, and it usually involved Heroic Dungeons. Most Heroic Dungeon runs were done in groups by casual guilds. Before Cataclysm, most of my Heroic Dungeon runs were in groups with casual guildies, even after dungeon finder was introduced. When it was first introduced, Dungeon Finder was simply a tool used to fill one or two vacancies. Cataclysm crapped on that by introducing raid-level mechanics on Heroic Dungeons, prompting most casual players to simply leave the game.
Blizzard has taken more and more steps to crap on these players every expansion. They quit releasing new dungeons completely so that they could add more raids. The dungeon replacement was originally LFR, but when they realized it’s not a replacement, they decided to make the dungeons even harder and throw a timer on them. Then they added an extra (irrelevant) dungeon difficulty but nerfed its drops to the point that a typical WQ gives you better rewards.
Casual players like group content. Log into Classic, and you’ll find plenty of casual players farming Stratholme, Scholomance, UBRS, and even MC. That content all drops nice gear that isn’t gated by timers or boss fights with half a dozen mechanics that potentially one-shot the entire group.
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But what about the sworn casual players who on these very forums scream about how Blizz is trying to incentivise “forced grouping” and how they work 50 to 60 hours a week and can’t commit to any group and have 2 jobs and 3 kids and 1 hour of free time a day and they are "entitled to gear progression since they pay a sub like everyone else, darn it! "
I’m well aware of Classic - there’s no way a 1 hour a day solo player is stepping foot into any raid barring Ony. And even for that, idk how they’re getting the attunement done.
My definition of casual is the self-proclaimed majority on the forums - people with limited and irregular free time and who don’t want to PVP or M+ and just want to queue up for normals, heroics, LFRs and do some WQs.
Wrong. You can easily kill a few MC bosses in an hour. I went in with a group which was mostly first time players, and we did a full clear in three hours taking it slow. It wasn’t even a full 40-man group.
Please cite the example for that. This is a strawman argument that’s commonly repeated, but I’ve yet to see anyone demand anything other than gearing from Heroic Dungeons (group play), Mythic Dungeons (group play), and even LFR (also group play).
Everything you said there, except for WQs is group content. It’s just unpopular because, as you pointed out in another post, the rewards are laughable considering the time invested.
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Mandatory daily reminder -
Casual here, having a great time in SL, no issues with gated content and I feel like I can do what I want, when I want.
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