I know we have a million threads on this, but I wanted to separate this one as someone who doesn’t raid, doesn’t M+, and doesn’t do PvP… or at least has not done any of those things during Shadowlands because ew…!
- I did all the challenges during Leegion. The fire mage and feral druid I completed first, back then with Nighthold LFR gear. Most of them I completed later, with Tomb of Sargearas’ LFR gear. Bear, brewmaster, frost mage, and most of the healing challenges, I completed last, using either Antorus LFR gear, or ToS normal gear. This time around, I beat the mage challenges using the campaign anima gear plus a few socketed peices. I’ll work on the other classes when I have more time.
- They about are as hard as I remember them in terms of dps checks… more or less. There are a few clear exceptions:
a) Frost mage seems significantly easier by comparison between the Legion version and this version. Legion frost mage was considered one of the hardest, and even high raiders and end gladiators couldn’t do it until much later once they got freezing rain on the artifact. Now that Freezing Rain is a talent… welp, I guess it’s doable. It also helps that Ebonbolt is now a talent, not a core part of the rotation, so you can use Frostbolt and Blizzard (for their slows) more often without lossing on dps.
b) However, just like the twins challenge got a little easier for mages due to Freezing Rain, it got harder for all other specs that have it… because they all lost tools. Priests no longer have the tentacle slow or movement during burst, Warlocks no longer have corruption slow, MM hunter lost their passive cleave, Monkin no longer has stakable Starfalls. This challenge was designed with different classes. It’s now a mess. It’s only ok for frost mage because it changed the least.
c) Bear seems much more difficult this time around. WTH, this was already one of the harder challenges. Bear needed Luffa’s or Ekowraith back then to be able to properly dps the boss because their aura was very large. Now with neither of these leggo’s, bears have to play this challenge in Moonkin form… who thought of that? Nerf the range on the aura, please.
d) Healing challenges are ridiculous. They were extremelly hard back then, they are practically impossible now. If you see a healer in their challenge set, you know they are better than anyone wearing Mythic gear… this BS is ridiculous now that the NPC’s you are suposed to keep alive have less comparative HP and die in 1-2 hits. Please, buff the idiot NPC’s, and / or lower the dmg the enemies do. That challenge is utterly broken.
- WHY ON AZEROTH are these challenges balanced around having socketed gear, enchants, and a bunch on consumables? Legion had templates. Why not just use templates, disable EVERYTHING, and then tune around that? It should be a fair challenge, not a mark of how much gold you are willing to spend.
- To those who got theirs with 5OUL C4GE or the Crusader enchant, I don’t blame you. To the rest of us, remember, “Exploit early, exloit often.” That’s what Blizzard seems to be encouraging these days.
- We need more solo content like this. Brawler’s guild, Visions, and Torghast… while they can all be done solo, have always also been designed for raiders first, everyone else second. I don’t like feeling like a second-class citizen, and I’m sure most other casual players feel the same. Just because I don’t like to raid (or rather, i don’t like WoW’s rading community) doesn’t mean I am bad at this game… give me content to progress through other than World Quests. I’ve done every possible solo challenge there is in this game, even got Endless DPS / Tank / Healer from MoP. But there’s so little solo content I can count it with the palm of the hand even after 15+ years, and the little there is, is utterly unrewarding. Give us more solo content that is either not tuned for raid gear, or rewards raid gear when solo.
PS: for those who will ask, yes, I have also raided (even Mythic), M+ and PvP’d. The content itself can be fun, but (1) there are schedule constraints when you need teams, and (2) it only takes one bad egg in the group to ruin the experience. Raiding mechanics are not hard, what is hard is organizing a team. And M+ can be even more toxic, when people vote-kick you 30 secs before final boss dies even though you were the top dps, just because you didn’t know the route and accidentally pulled a few extra adds, or whatever other BS. And it takes 8 hours to make a PvP team, that will disband after the first loss, because “everyone is trash.”
WoW’s community is toxic and elitist, so we need more solo content and more queueable group content. And solo content should be properly tested and tuned accordingly… not buff the dmg of everything from PTR to live.
Anyway… my 10 cents.