Feedback for Remix from the Blue post on the Community Council Forum

Community WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria
41

I don’t understand this viewpoint.

Like, suppose right now I do my activities for the day and end up with 20k extra bronze. I can choose what to spend that on; I can fast track my progress and dump it into gear upgrades, or I can dump it all into purchasing cosmetics, or some mix of something in between. What I do with that currency depends only on my wants/needs.

But if instead those same activities gave me 10k bronze and 10k silver, with bronze only usable for cosmetics and silver only usable for upgrades, my hand is forced. The silver can only be used to upgrade my gear and the bronze only for cosmetics.

Making them both one currency gives me the choice to prioritize what I want. It also means that once my power is maxed, I don’t have a dead currency because I can dump it into cosmetics.

Why is more choice worse?

2 Likes
42

The level 10-60 and 60-70 dilemma needs a fresh new look IMO. You start off strong then become super weak, only to get strong again after progressing at the endgame. I get that new players might be off put by how little damage they do to mobs at level 10/20, but aren’t we supposed to get stronger as we gain power, not weaker?

You should enable scaling on newbies so players know they’re new and not a burden. But for experienced players I think we’d prefer the opposite experience: Start off weak, get much stronger as you level

I understand why it’s done: To let the players explore their talents and build. Being able to actually take time to kill something. But isn’t this better done at earlier levels so new players aren’t overwhelmed at high levels?

43

My feedback is that the game mode is boring.

There was a lot of hype that it would be better than Plunderstorm, and it’s not.

The excessive nerfing of grinding methods after the matter has been a kick to the teeth of anyone who didn’t partake in those methods.

Then there is the emphasis on forming groups instead of just using a finder tool, meaning we’re back to relying on toxic stats to determine who gets to play content.

Plunderstorm was click and play. It didn’t require excessive adjustments to the grind, either. To me it just felt way more accessible and easier to garner rewards from, plus was different and fun.

There is absolutely 0 fun in remix for me personally.

Blizz needs to make characters OP, as advertised, without having to apply to join groups and get rejected for not having being a frog farmer.

Then they need to greatly increase the drops of bronze to the point where it is trivial due to being gained passively in larger quantities than now.

It’s actually pretty ridiculous how unfun remix actually is when you stop and think.

44

For better or for worse a lot of players hate being forced to choose between one or another. It’s a psychological thing, even if you made two currencies that transfer between one another (at a reduced rate) people would feel a lot better due to having ways to grind the cosmetic or iLvl upgrades. End result may still be similar but players aren’t forced to choose to go full bore, halfsies or pretty transmog only.

45

  1. Let people play how they want to play. Dont nerf them, punish them, or put your failures and mistakes on player base creating anomosity especially for something like the frogs which where in the game wwll before this mode was concieved and reported on in ptr. The fault should be fully on blizzard instead they chose antagonism over the right thing to do in that situation.

  2. If you want to make an op event stop tweaking stuff to make it less op.

  3. A better and different system for upgrading ilvl so it doesnt seem exploitative and wrong for the players to have to choose between that or the rewards. Again something blizzard was told about early on but ignored.

  4. 1:1 cloak between alts and main as you seemed to have advertised early on as a saling point.

  5. Which leads me to stop false Advertising things or using confusing word jargon to confuse the the player base like saying 8750 bronze making it seem like it meant for each activity but it actually meant in total.

  6. Better bronze output.

  7. Dont worry if people will be done before the three months is up or offer new incentives to get them back in.

  8. Time isle rep output increase.

  9. If you do this again just do better by the players.

3 Likes
46

Because it creates a sense that the currency system is fighting with itself.

Ostensibly the purpose of this mode is to just have fun and progress a character in an accelerated mode. If you create a curve where you earn more currency by spending that currency over the long term, that is going to feel bad for players who are not there to progress a character hardcore but rather to get cosmetics.

It is a hard sell to convince someone that they need to commit 500k+ bronze into their character via upgrades in order to get over a hump where they can clear raids faster in order to get more bronze.

If there is a currency devoted strictly to upgrades, it allows players the option to invest their time in acquiring that currency so that they can farm faster without it feeling bad. It may be the same, but it’s about sidestepping a feeling of loss aversion.

47

Of course they only want community council feedback. It’d be like if your boss could ask for feedback from only the people that would request the bare minimum or positive feedback.

Simply put 1:1 cloaks and neck in LFR there’s no reason to not have literally either of these. Maybe occasionally run a 1x/2x/5x/10x bronze week as we progress further into the event.

2 Likes
48

I’m sharing feedback on remix from 2 perspectives.

  1. Solo player
  2. A progressive raider with my retail guild who seeks to keep them interested in playing the same content as I - With overall raid group coordination as a core component of fun.

Solo Player Feedback:

  • The extra spells in my gear is extremely fun. I’m a huge fan of “meta shifting” through talent and gear choice. (Think playing league of legends, where Evelyn can be high attack speed physical damage + lifesteal, or can entirely shift into being a tank with high health and slow on attacks, or goes full magic damage build and bursts out of spell button presses). I really enjoy that I can be in tank spec, and give myself tons of passive damage to hold aggro, stun things, etc. I don’t feel the need to switch to DPS spec when I’m doing the world quests, and that’s an extreme convenience. There’s joy in just pressing Crackling Jade Lightning for a single tick and watching a ton of hailstorm/meteor/wildfire/etc all just explode a small area of targets. Unlimited power!!!
  • The UX around equipping the extra tinkers/cogwheels/gems is really tiresome at the pace of gear acquisition and change while leveling. Thankfully, the Narcissus Gem Manager addon solves this, which you should look into adopting if you keep similar systems in future expansions.
  • The straight up separation of item level from transmogs is really kind of great. I really love that I can transmog for zero gold, and just keep my appearance while gaining power through completion of content.
  • I’m extremely thankful for the idea that I can RAID WHILE LEVELING. This is the best thing you could have ever done for the game, and you should just do this for all future retail expansions. Raiding is why I’m here, and lets be honest - Raids are difficult to develop! But, if I grind my way to max level just to start ‘playing the game of raiding’ then I reach this point where I want to ignore leveling alts, and simply focus on repeat progression through mythic raid. It’s much easier to progress in raid difficulties in remix, and bring friends along without waiting for them to gain max level + tier set + trinkets + weapons + whatever. We can just drop all that individual progress mis-match and have a chance to play!
  • I’m on my third character trying to pick classes/specs that drop dagger items. Pandaria Remix is supposed to have the Pandaren Sai transmog as a dagger, and I’m dying trying to grind specific content to obtain that one stinkin’ transmog that you refuse to give me. This is a pain point. I wish it was on a vendor, so I’m not telling my friends I can’t play with them while I hunt down this one transmog in your limited time event right now.
  • The fun between classes/specs is extremely disproportionate. Playing a rogue in remix feels terrible when you haven’t unlocked the tinker gems and stuff. I’m always out of energy, tinkers proc less because I can’t press buttons, and I’m just playing normal wow, and having to pretend the tinkers don’t exist until I unlock 15 more of them. Antithetical to the idea of rapid leveling. And rogue is my third character, so my cloak is starting maxed.
  • You should let me mail secondary stat gems to my alt. Having to trade with a friend and then have them trade back with my alt is a really terrible system to gear my trinkets/necklace on alts right away.

Guild/Social/Raider Feedback
My guild is having a terrible time with remix. We love coming together and playing against challenging raid content. We were really excited that the idea of leveling and gearing was removed as barriers to hop in and experience the content of Pandaria in it’s original glory. In a sense, many saw it as an opportunity to play “Pandaria Classic” that never experienced it the first time around. We regularly raid on a fixed schedule 2 nights a week. We have many players who literally “raid log” - Meaning they log in to raid, and log out at the end of raid. That’s the game for a lot of us. So this should preface as background for the feedback I’m sharing below on our mutual behalf:

  • The weird hidden DPS for lower level players needs to be deleted. My guild mates are talking about un-subscribing from wow so that their character can level cap at 20, and keep the damage buff. This is a toxic way to play the game, and it feels designed and encouraged after a player hits like ~65 and starts to feel their lack of gear smack them in the face with all content suddenly reaching a plateau and throwing them into the deep end of high scaled mechanics. We all would have preferred if the game could just scale in a way that a level 25 raid worth of players is not performing better than a group of level 60-70 players who don’t have big threads or bronze to push gear.
  • My guild hates that when we jump into heroic raids, our disproportionate differences in item level are throwing off the need/desire to play and learn challenging boss fight mechanics. Some of our more hardcore mythic raiders are bored because their tinker gems just kill everything for them. Others are upset that we have 1 tank who never stops grinding bronze, and his cloak is nearly at 200k thread count, and the rest of us don’t have that kind of time. So when heroic content raid unavoidable wide damage 1-shots a majority of the raid, we’re all bored, dead on the floor watching our 1 tank solo the last 40% of most fights. Nobody feels challenged, nobody is learning mechanics. We’re all just dead because the scaling is wildly different from normal raid.
  • We decided that mythic is just impossible unless we all grind bronze.
  • Half of our raiders would just prefer to go back to mythic retail because they don’t feel like grinding bronze to experience mythic Pandaria is worth the grind investment up front. Otherwise, if we had a chance to gear in a more traditional fashion that wasn’t limited by threads + bronze - We would love to have hopped in all at the same gear level and played a balanced and challenging set of boss mechanic fights at a normal and reasonable scale for heroic and mythic difficulties.
  • Everyone in my guild feels lied to about how Remix would work. Alts only get 100% experience when you make them. You don’t get to immediately gear them, even if you spend a total of 6 days of in-game play time grinding bronze on your first character. The cloak level 10 starting limit is ruining that.
  • Our healers are sorely disappointed. There’s nothing to heal, everyone is permanently safe from damage, or getting 100% to 0% in one mechanic due to item level. All in a game mode where we started raiding together at level 25. Mix messaging about how we experience content in this regard.
  • Everyone feels like they don’t have time to grind bronze enough to experience the game at a reasonable level. We resorted to having the best players in the raid delete their necklace/trinkets to personally control the scaling of heroic bosses. The game is more fun if we delete gear, because the scaling is more natural. That feels like a design mistake. One in which (unless we spend a lot of time naturalizing our average item level) is discouraging several of our core raiders from bothering to play Pandaria for anything beyond a glorified character boost token.
  • Some of my friends don’t care about transmogs. They want to play with the rest of us, and experience mythic Pandaria raids. They really want this content! But, there’s no way for our 1 tank with 200k threads and 85k bronze to reasonably distribute his wealth to bring the rest of the group closer to his gear level in order to make the content feel more natural (as opposed to all of us deleting some items for the weakest link). He is at the point where he is saying “I don’t want any of these transmogs, I just like raiding, I offer to carry people through dungeons and nobody logs in to do it, and I can’t hand out this bronze to solve the problem in time/availability. But I’m addicted to my powerful character, although lonely that I’m grinding everything alone at this point.”

There are some repeated and strong themes here that I think are worth being considered as takeaways for future expansions:

  • Raiding and dungeons while leveling a new expansion should just be core features every time. This is a ton of fun, highly engaging, and worth repeat play!
  • Scaling bosses in level accessible raids is difficult. But worth trying to perfect.
  • UX for all these gem slot things please, swapping is hard
  • People enjoy the game generally, and want to progress through it by defeating stuff together. Not grinding a singular currency ad infinitum.
  • People want to be able to help their friends. Not through having to directly trade power to them. But, by making things scale more naturally when one player has 6 days of playtime, and the rest of us have only been in the game for like 1.5 days of game time.
  • We should not have to delete gear to make content playable without one-shotting everyone in heroic during unavoidable damage.
  • We should have to actually do mechanics, even when we have tons of engaging power choices across our characters
  • Let us bend the rules on rigid traditional roles. All the recent talk about making tanks only use tank trinkets has a sour taste in my mouth. In Pandaria - I queue for dungeons as Tank/Heal/DPS all at once, because it doesn’t even matter. When I get in the 5 player dungeon, nobody needs healing, and if they do, it’s happening tangentially through my Holy Martyr + Vindication + Lifestorm, while I’m playing as a tank, and pressing a DPS rotation. Again, recall my early comment about the fun of changing metas in league of legends. The same character is capable of multiple roles if you let them be. This actually opens up a lot of fun group combinations. I think it’s extremely engaging that everyone in the raid wants to Ward or Lifestorm at a specific time for a coordinated benefit. It’s true - The benefit does not need to be that groups are cheesing to burst 1/3rd of the boss health bar at the opening of fights. That’s probably not healthy. But otherwise, letting players group together and pump a bunch of spells into one person/location for a coordinated reward is something you should consider keeping, but in a healthy way. Maybe we need to do that 3 times in a fight to avoid wiping on some kind of mechanic. Maybe it’s part of the strategy. Maybe the fights are tuned to allow for it, but not entirely require it. Make fights that can be solved more than 1 way, but still kill players when their experimental coordination fails to be done correctly sometimes. I know I sound like I’m asking for the grass to be greener on both sides of the fence. Please try to consider what I mean about coordination, more so than anything I might be saying with bad examples that contradict tuning/balance/power of boss fights.

I’m personally thrilled about Pandaria Remix, and it’s been one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had in WoW. I feel like I’m playing the WoW equivalent of league of legends URF mode, if you remember that. And we all know - When the combat in the game is cranked up to 11 all the time, it’s like burning the player candle at both ends. The fun is twice as great for half as long. So, it’s not great for long term success, and I anticipate that you won’t revisit these systems the same way again in the future. But I wanted all of the above feedback to explain a few key points that the systems introduced are actually extremely welcomed, fun, and worth investing additional design time to more accurately tune for the standard wow progression of raiding that retail players are used to. The good heavily outweighs the bad. Even the players I shared commentary about above who feel bored about the raid not being challenging are still enjoying the leveling experience, and access to be able to raid while leveling a character. Everyone loves that gear acquisition before level 70 is not a barrier to group content. It’s really just when we try to push and challenge ourselves after 70 that the power systems and heroic/mythic scaling start to fall apart.

Thanks for reading my wall of text! I say all of this with no intent of judgement. The experiment has been a hell of a great time, and I just care so much to see the good in these systems continue in the future of the game, which I believe is really bright with the amazing ideas that have been introduced in this game mode!

1 Like
49

This whole forum sub topic is for regular players to provide feedback, they clearly read these posts, looking at the changes that have been made so far.

The Community Council is just seen as players who are thoughtful and less prone to complaining for the sake of it.

50

account wide. gear upgrade. discounts.

51

Scaling should be adjusted so that fresh 70s and players approaching 70 don’t feel like they’ve gotten weaker than they were 10+ levels ago. If not with mob tuning, with gear availability. Drops shouldn’t stop at 346; characters in 346 gear don’t feel powerful. I think it’d feel a lot better if drops went up to 400 or so.

2 Likes
52

  1. Alt Bronze gear reductions at the very least. If Devs are deadset on a slower, daily acquisition then that at the very least shouldnt apply to alt characters. That just spells prolonging your boring, repetitive event for engagement.

  2. Bronze Gains. I know I just mentioned Devs wanting slow gains but I believe the XP gains we keep getting on a main character go to the void. Even if not 1:1, XP gain increase should increase Bronze to give value to the stat. Keeps people doing the LFR they want everyday and increases bronze gains a little with each wing.

  3. Keep the farms. If I want to only log in Daily and can stand doing LFR/Dungeons/Scenarios ad nauseam then let me do that, but I want to knock it out with 10-20 hour grind to get the same power creep then let me do that as well. This daily crap certainly doesnt appeal to me at least and I would much rather have the option to be a Frogger killing stuff a few hours a day then doing dailies for a third of that time but over a longer span of days.

  4. Scaling. Not much to say, made the even feel awful at 60+ until you get gear.

Future Feedback:

  1. Event, imo, is a bit boring. I know in any MMO or ARPG you do the same things all the time, with Remix its just compounded as you can do ALL the content EVERYDAY. The kicker is none of the content was updated, changed, or anything new created. I think if a future event like this is created that something about the content needs to be more interesting. Even if its taking more after an ARPG feel (which I assume this event was trying to mimic a little bit), I want to be sweeping through hundreds of mobs, not WoW standard packs.

  2. Powers a bit bland. Some of them certainly have cool interactions but overall they are just random procs for doing the same thing with little to no interaction with most class kits. Also, a lot of the universally used powers seemed to be fire based, would have liked a bit more variety in that. I think some more interesting Class/game mechanic related powers would be more interesting, would certainly be less generic but I think that would have added to the fun for me.

Positives

  1. Leveling an alt was pretty fun with the expedited leveling. The random powers were interesting at first and allowed some creativity initially.

  2. Flying at the start was SO NICE. Not having to do walking simulator everywhere helped a lot with the leveling, even more so than the experience gains.

  3. The consumable items that were given like candy (and could be bought) were a great addition to give things like Raid Buffs or even just teleporting to a main hub. Kinda wish retail did the scroll buffs again…

I doubt this feedback goes anywhere, but overall I loved Remix at the start, have hated in the middle, and starting to accept it more in the end. A few changes here and there (mainly with alts) could have helped me accept some of the downsides of Remix.

2 Likes
53

My thoughts.

Generally fun, some aspects well done (being able to level running old raids is a blast), though a bit off from what was promoted and advertised (mostly the shared cloak, a bit of the ‘OP? Maybe’ as well).

Scaling still sucks - like how hard is it to tune the baseline HP and damage done of mobs such that 60+ isn’t a nasty slog even if gear is kept current and at 70 with the first set of gear where players are useless in any group content.

Very alt creation friendly - at least if using some whacky ‘hacks’ like running normal mode raids for XP% increases while not looting the XP items so they can be used later from the mailbox, though it does beg the question, why were all the XP % and XP items show in LFR on PTR removed from LFR on live - afraid the ‘queue only’ players might feel rewarded and not run normal?

Very alt unfriendly at level cap - like it is bad enough with the costs to upgrade one character’s gear at 70, but when retail is promoting the heck out of all the alt friendly changes coming in the next expansion, which I’m sure you’d like me to purchase, why is ReMix so alt unfriendly - did you all not get the memo?

1 Like
54
  1. Separate currencies for obtaining power and acquiring cosmetics/collectibles

It sucks having to decide between getting stronger or purchasing a unique mount or appearance. Why did we get this kind of all-in-one currency in both MoP:Remix and Retail?

  1. There should be more activities to participate in

Pet battles should have been available, along with a vendor that sells rare drops and exclusive colorizations just like we got with appearances, mounts, and toys.

Arenas and Battlegrounds should have been enabled. They don’t even have to be rated, just give us a way to see how crazy all this power stacks up against other players.

The Proving Grounds could have been tweaked to be a true endlessly scaling, wave-based mode with checkpoints that let us continue to push ourselves to see how far our newfound power can take us before having to tap out. The farther you get, the more you’re rewarded.

Challenge modes could have been opened up, even if all they offered were the challenge mode set recolors. Imagine trying to push for the fastest times week after week after getting more and more powerful.

There are so many avenues that could have been explored, but we were instead funneled into leveling or raiding as the only two ways to gain Bronze at a reasonable pace.

Instead of embracing the silliness of hyperspawn farming, Blizzard said “No! Go raid!” as they played whack-a-mole. Players in an mmo will always take the path of least resistance to achieving their goals the fastest, so if they would rather kill frogs or goats or whatever for hours upon hours because that’s more efficient than any other method, that’s a symptom of Blizzard’s expected gameplay loop being severely at odds with players’ expectations.

  1. The rising “get out of my game if you don’t like it” mentality of player entitlement

A lot more players are reaching the gear cap, and with it we’re beginning to see discussions surrounding some of those gear-capped players speedrunning through dungeons and raids without consideration for the other players in their groups. Oftentimes, their argument is a generalized “keep up and be happy you’re getting carried.” On the flip side, we’re seeing frustration from the players who feel like they’re being left behind and not really getting a chance to actually play or participate.

I understand not wanting dungeons to take longer than they need to. Even for someone like me, who will frequently wait at bosses for players to catch up as long as they’re not too far back or appear to be semi-afk, I toss out one Immolate or Rain of Fire, and the tinkers take over and remove all semblance of meaningful player agency as those effects alone can overkill just about any dungeon boss or trash pack.

And that’s just after a few weeks of thread gains. We still have over two months remaining of gaining more Int/Str/Agi threads. There has to be a way to make being overpowered both fun and engaging gameplay. Pressing one or two abilities and everything dying in seconds – even mythic bosses at this point – is not particularly novel long-term.

55

A mode that was supposed to be free from the strife of retail immediately became retail. The requirements to get into normal raids are not something my timerunner can meet, because by the time I’ve farmed enough to meet them, the people who were already in them got 100x as much, and the requirements increased.

2 Likes
56

We’ll have to see how things play out, but if Blizzard is planning to continue with new Remixes and use them as opportunities to freshen players up on past lore/storylines, then I could see BC before Midnight and, like you said, Wrath or Legion before Last Titan. I wouldn’t be surprised if they selected MoP before War Within because of the probable ties between the upcoming story they have planned and the old gods and Aqir-descended races. We’re already seeing art assets pop up in parts of the beta for some of this stuff, hinting that’s where they’re taking things with Xal’atath.

If the purpose of any Remix is focused solely on its gameplay, however, then I’d personally like to see this kind of mode applied to BFA alongside essences and corruption or Legion with the artifacts and legendaries mixed in.

1 Like
57

They need to break down the faction requirements for queued content, I just spent 20 minutes explaining the group finder ui to a guildie through guild chat instead of just inviting them and queuing because I’m an elf and they’re and elf but apparently we’re the type of elves that can’t group together.

58

we are ready told those idiots whats up and now its to late now

3 Likes
59

This reads so much like a threat to me that im gonna rush the last of the mog I want

1 Like
60

“We want feedback, but we need to limit it to the designated sycophantic brown noser brigade so it’s not too harsh”

3 Likes