I still feel warm fuzzies about raid-leading my own Heroic PUG pretty early (week 5 IIRC) during Highmaul and just banging out attempts for like 5 hours straight on Mar’gok until we killed.
I think long raid bosses can feel really good.
The problem is, honestly, I think far too many people who shouldn’t be raiding Mythic do raid Mythic. I don’t think 500 pulls on a boss should happen outside of a World First type scenario, but it does because you have people who honestly just shouldn’t raid Mythic raiding Mythic. And there’s just this culture of like… it’s normal to spend that many pulls because other raid guilds have bad players too.
400-500 pulls is actually NOT common for that boss. But the problem is, if even 20% of the guilds who kill the boss have that experience, they are going to be far more vocal about having a bad time with it than those who do it in 200 pulls (which I think is a far more reasonable number and closer to what “good” Mythic raid guilds are doing).
Honestly, I think you could reduce the number of people doing Mythic Raid anywhere from 50-70% and see player satisfaction with the game as a whole increase quite a bit. I think a lot of people raid because they have nothing else to do and/or feel they need to validate themselves by Mythic Raiding even when they’re not good enough for it and that infects a lot of these middle-tier guilds.
Problem is, the lowest common denominator is the bottom 85%.
If the game was tuned toward the upper 15% super players, most of us would be dead in the water trying to do the story line. All you need is one quest that is too hard to do and you are finished.
If that were to be the case then the bottom 85% would be stuck, unable to complete the story line and we would have no choice but to leave.
As for the upper 15%? We don’t really need them. If they left, hardly anyone would notice.
You’d rather get mad at the game for designing epic challenging content than players failing against it and whining?
This is why I can respect Yoshida even if I don’t personally like FFXIV. They make those Ultimate encounters and then if you can’t beat em they say “%%%% off” essentially. They’ve adjusted their design paradigm such that Savage content, the regular Mythic prog content, is more attainable for the more casual Mythic Raiding type of guild, and then they have Ultimate content designed for actual elite of the elite.
Then again, that’s part of the problem in WoW isn’t it? In the East, you’re expecting to rise to the challenge. In the West, people simply want the prestige. They want to pretend they’re as elite as Limit Maximus for “beating Mythic” even though the version of Mythic they cleared was one, maybe even two orders of magnitude easier than the one Limit cleared. People want to pretend they’ve cleared “the hardest content” even though Limit Maximus has said on stream that the only guilds who have actually played the hardest content that has ever existed are exclusively Limit and Method and no one else.
In a sense, I would say that’s a big shame. If I play FFXIV, I can actually access and play the hardest encounters they’ve ever designed. If you have “triple Ultimate” you’re considered something of a legend apparently. You can’t get that experience in WoW unless you’re one of like 50 people in one of those top two guilds in WoW simply due to time scales and what-not.
Absolutely. People who thrive on complexity become min-maxers who do not understand those who are not wired that way. But wow has always been confusing. Even before it became systemlands, new players were overwhelmed with too much info.
Two problems:
Lack of a learning curve;
Nothing of interest to do while you’re trying to reach that point.
The game has never has so little casual content. All new players (and I’m not talking about elites who come from another game) start as casuals. There’s a huge learning curve and no help in the game.
Probably new player retention is worse than ever. A character of mine who was leveling on a low pop guild joined a guild full of classic/tbcc refugees who were eagerly looking to play end game and just reaching max. A few weeks later most had quit.
Imagine being a new player at this point and having to start the grind without any of the skips your alts can take advantage of. You just got out of BfA where you had to crawl on the ground while watching everybody else flying. The work ahead of you is massive.
Imagine just starting out in SL after seeing some cool looking raid fights, but someone gives you a big ole checklist of all the things you gotta grind up first, explains the necessity of all the addons you need, and then introduces you to raidbots just to calculate what talents and gear to wear?
It’s a bit of a meme of the person just uninstalling and doing something else.
There is already plenty of complexity in the raid fights.
Blizzard needs to stop taking the “game too easy” trolls so seriously whom don’t even touch any of the content.
I don’t think complexity is the word you want here. I think “system bloat” is more applicable.
I find WoW to be an easy game at a foundational level. It has a very “pick up and play” design philosophy for new players and eventually eases them into deeper waters. I don’t have an issue with that.
What I think the problem is, is that Blizzard just doesn’t know when to stop with its systems. The systems we have in Shadowlands add absolutely nothing to the game for two reasons:
Those who are casual players have no interest in min/maxing their characters because they are casual players.
Those who push the hardest content are never going to do anything beyond what is considered the meta.
This game is getting to complicated? hahahhaha ummm no it isn’t. ALL mmos have their own learning curves. WoW is insanely easy to pick up and learn quickly.
WOW is easy to learn for someone who is starting off and doing the story line. It’s even easier now that they have a special quest symbol “[!]” to separate story line quests from side quests.
And the basic dungeons are not that bad either. People can pick them up pretty quickly.
But you have to be a pin ball wizard to survive Mythic + or Raids. Only the top people can do those things. And it’s not a matter of not being around long enough, you need gaming talent, a lot of work to gear up and a lot of study to understand all the mechanics.
Problem is, for some of us, and I believe most of us, WOW is a game, not a job. It’s something we want to do for fun after a long day’s work, not a chance to do two long day’s work every day.
You need to be a UI designer and do some programming and installatin of some kinda confusing stuff to do any serious content, and move so much UI around and configure a lot to make it work… there is no out of the box just works UI and command config.
Everyone expects you to have already done this and most ppl aren’t intrested in helping and u have to hunt around on several discords, messageboards, and google to figure out something that works
— The above points are also a strong positive point for ppl that LIKE to do this and NEED to do this for various reasons it’s a deeply double edged sword — It is NOT FUN
For some classes - hotbars and macros are a mess - after 3 days literally of doing nothing but macros and hotbars I got my holy priest into a nicely playable state. I played entirely through BFA with zero macros and only DBM and I had a lot of keybinds. I got AoTC even. It was uncomfortable to say the least. It still isn’t Super comfortable to play, it is NICE, and the level of complexity is OK, however, certain mechanics ruin that (flash concentration) my pet peeves personally, this doesn’t effect everyone and every class the same way. – Do I want to herioc raid yah, so I’m going through with learning the things instead of organically playing the game.
Do I wish I could just play more casually on normal and forgoe even worrying about some things - ya. I also wish normal mode was just as challenging mechanically and (you get hit hard by mechanics) without the rest of it. That’s a hard balance to strike so in lieu of striking any balance I think there’s just this mentality of ‘lets design the fights to be as complex and interesting and thematic as possible and we’ll let the community sort it out’.
— caveat the community is great, especially in casual circles. However the more hardcore you get, the less supportive of newbies ppl are and it takes a lot of time to walk someone through setting stuff up (I certainly don’t expect it, though I wish there was a 1 button install for holy priest). I don’t want to “just play another class” throughout my wow career i’ve played mostly holy priest and in classic with zero anything it was really good fun right out of the box in Dun-morough and Gnomregan and all those old sub 50 dungeons where absolutely a blast and I was immediately pretty decent at my class. —
I do think the game is leaps and bounds better now. It’s a way better game. It lacks the accessibility of a game designed this year tho, with a UI ground up for SL.
Adding the mousover stuff directly into the base UI was a good thing for blizz I praise them for that, because it’s one less addon with a million things I don’t need cluttering up my UI. (No I don’t like VuDo and healbot and I think it’s terrible). I was a better healer in BFA than those that used them and where dependent on them.
Other stuff that should be in the base UI > minimap button bags, radial menu for toys/food/flask. And scrap/junk seller.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a bracket of content that is somewhat gated by skill. The problem that lies with this design philosophy, however, is that Blizzard has deliberately designed their game around this content as opposed to designing different facets of the game by their own merits.
Torghast would actually be a lot of fun if they actually designed it like a roguelike, and not some shade of a roguelike. Part of the appeal of roguelikes is finding ways to break the game in your favor, and you can’t really do that with the limitations they’ve applied to it.
So when the rest of the game suffers, that skill disparity becomes magnified because the game is now no longer for that lower skill bracket.
I hate all the systems this game has, and the fact that they hit the reset button every expansion and make you re-grind everything to get back the stuff they took away from you.
It makes the game seasonal, instead of persistent, and kills the whole point of a MMORPG.
WoW peaked in WOTLK, because the game was a steady progression of skills and gear from Vanilla through WOTLK. You never lost anything during those year.
Cataclysm came out and the game became a expansion-to-expansion rinse and repeat ever since.
