It’s been a long journey. If this were classic we’d be in Nax with TBC just around the corner but thanks to SoDs long phases, we are just approaching AQ.
So as a day 1 SoD player here are my thoughts. First and foremost, SoD is the best version of WoW.
Set in the amazing world of classic, it has a lot of modern quality of life improvements such as class and spec improvements, itemization improvements, and profession improvements.
Unfortunately there has been some critical errors and game decisions that I feel have hurt SoD along the way. Obviously it’s never too late to fix things so here we go
No GDKP: not having GDKP has been detrimental to the game and I’ll explain why. People need incentives to play. When MC first launched people went to MC because they had the incentive to get gear. But once they had all the gear the incentive was gone. There was no need to go back except out of guilt to help guildmates.
So you leveled an alt to 60 but your guild has moved onto BWL? Well now if you want to gear up your alt you get to suffer in MC pugs (if you even get an invite and why would you with no gear?) Ever join a pug with 20 random people who all need gear like you? It’s a terrible experience. Do it a few times and if you haven’t quit your alt I’d be impressed.
Now with GDKP, you have incentive to run MC every week whether it’s your fully gear T2 or your fresh 60 and thanks to the beauty of the Gdkp system, the less geared you are, the more desirable you are for the raid.
I guess from my point a view, anything that increases player participation is a good thing. As far as gold selling/buying… I don’t know much about it but I do know that’s blizzards responsibility and the player base shouldn’t have to pay for their lack of ability to control the gold farmers and buyers.
Class imbalance: while SoD has done amazing things to make every class and spec great and fun, some classes have gotten way too powerful.
For example Paladins being able to bubble and be immune to all damage and crowd control effects, while still be able to do full burst damage means they have 5-6 seconds of unmitigated damage in a game where you’re dead in 2 to 3 seconds. Oh and if somehow you manage to survive the bubble, then boom! you’re stunned for 6 seconds. Manage to survive the bubble and trinket out of the stun… then boom! now you have a deal with a full health Paladin and if you somehow get him low, BOOM! lay of hands. Now beat him again.
To fix this they should do 50% damage and healing reduction in PvP encounters along with further damage reduction of paladins and priests during their bubble and dispersion windows.
On the other end, most classes have been given a gap closer but hunters still have a dead zone where they can’t use most of their abilities. Why is that still a thing? PS, I don’t play a hunter
Lack of LFG tool. This is sod classic. A version that is not pure classic yet we’ve had to use a crappy lfg addon to organize and find groups. Why not put in a lfg tool like mythic + in retail? (PS that is not dungeon finder)
Extremely long phases. As I said in the beginning, SoD has been out for 12 months and we are still not in AQ. If this was classic, we’d be in nax getting ready for tbc. People only have a certain amount of attention spans before they get burnt out.
I often wonder how sod would have turned out if MC came out only a few weeks after launch and BFD, gnomer and ST were all 10 man repeatable dungeons like Ubrs where you could go to gear up as you level.
Rune System: fun the first time around but having to do it again and again with every alt reduces people’s desire to play alts and like I said about no gdkp, anything that reduces people’s desire to play SoD should be eliminated. I suggest after you earn all runes on one character we can buy them on all our alts
Incursions: Incursions were detrimental to SoD and the start of its downfall. On day 1, people who went in there walked out with 1000s of gold in quest rewards and pretty much single handily destroyed the economy.
After it was fixed, incursions became the only way to level from 25-60. No more open world questing. No more dungeon groups.
On pvp servers it became a gank fest with level 60s going there to farm low level and under geared players all day long. It was hands down the worst MMO experience I’ve had in all my 25 years of playing MMO.
How many 10’s of thousands of players quit after that experience? Only blizzard knows. They’ve changed it to a daily thing which is what it should have always been. But even as a daily it’s really no fun. The colour schemes are headache inducing and the quests are boring. It’s still also the best way to level up even if it’s just grinding mobs. I suggest reducing mobs exp and increasing exp rewards and rep to keep it as an optional daily thing you can do while leveling.
Future Uncertain: Where does SoD go after Nax? Do we remain forever on our SoD server or get forced transferred to classic era and lose all of our rune abilities while our gear gets re-itemized back into classic crap? Or do we go into TBC? The lack of certainty really hurts the game as players who might consider giving SoD a try are turned away thinking it’s only a temporary server.
In closing, SoD is an exceptional game and the changes to make it even better are very doable. Thanks to lessons learned in SoD I am confident that if we ever get a classic + it will have all the good things without any of the negative things I mentioned in this post.
Thanks for reading, cheers