Feedback SOD P1, P2, P3 - The Recipe For Success

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Feedback on SOD from a guy who’s played WoW since open beta and every expansion.

Overall, I have enjoyed my time playing SOD. I appreciate the team’s hard work in creating engaging content and the effort to maintain server balance. While I have a lot to say about phase 3, I don’t want to sound like I’m here to complain. I’m still playing and looking forward to what’s next.

Phase 1: Overall :slight_smile:
Very positive experience. There was an awesome balance to how classic WoW originally felt, but with new runes and abilities. There were tons of unknowns. The 10-man raid size == perfect. The content brought back the old but with new. Like ice and fire of frostfirebolt. The faction balance on servers was well managed. The phase was too long because it was P1, and the content was easy, but I wish the team had taken this phase 1 approach further for the upcoming. This was the recipe for success.

Phase 2: Overall :slight_smile:
Positive. The game captured the new with the old. There was more world engagement. Keeping 10-man raid sizes was great. Some enjoyed Gnomer. Some didn’t. I personally liked it. Things should get progressively more difficult. Three-day raid lockouts kept us busy. Sometimes, this was too much, but it did keep us active with things to do. Personally, I think the phase concluded too quickly. This should have lasted longer than phase 1. I looked forward to having a new PVP event when the phase was released. However, there were tons of initial issues with Bloodmoon/STV and layering, which did impact the overall enjoyment, though these were mostly resolved.

Phase 3: Adding Dual Spec :slight_smile:
Huge win. I don’t think anything else needs to be said.

Phase 3: Leveling :confused:
XP buffs are enormous. Here’s my subjective opinion. There isn’t enough to do this phase to skip the leveling journey. I get it, alts are important. We can now grind to the maximum level in single-digit hours. We can level faster from 40 to 50 than phase 1 from 1 to 25. If people quit because of the time it takes to play the game, why play classic World of Warcraft? If there are tons of people quitting (most of my group has) because of the time it takes to max level, this is the wrong version of WoW. Allowing leveling this quickly should not be in the SOD recipe for success. This isn’t why the people I normally play with have quit.

Phase 3: PVP :frowning:
There is not a lot of new for PVP. The recipe previously used for keeping the old but adding new was thrown away. There was no phase 3 excitement for a new PVP event or battleground.

Phase 3: Incursions :frowning:
These broke the game in many ways. Breaking the game == ruining the experience. Another subjective opinion… I do not enjoy these. They drastically changed the economy. Incursions ruined the classic wow SOD recipe that was captured so well in the first 2 phases. This was the cause for so many transferring servers, leading to less server balance, which the dev team did a great job maintaining. I understand the reason why it was thought to be a good idea. I understand the argument for changing the pace of quests and dungeon grinding.
Incursions were originally intended, as Josh quotes: “If you find yourself wanting a change of pace from your normal leveling routine, there’s a lot of repeatable content that gives experience there.”
Incursions give so much XP and gold; why would anyone do anything else? Of course, you could go level or dungeon grind if that’s what you love to do, but it’ll be more difficult. You won’t be able to find others as easily. You’ll be behind with gold, and you’ll level slower. Subjective opinion incursions broke the recipe for success. It doesn’t balance the old with the new.

Phase 3: Raiding :confused:
I love 10-man raids. ST is nostalgic for me, and I like the new bosses. I have a solid group that I play with. I would say we are a better-than-average group. Some of us are recent retail glad PVP players, and most are 95+ parsers. But there are 8 of us. We’ve been unlucky with not being able to recruit. We have pugs who cannot run out of blood or don’t know how to use dispel. 20-man raid sizes have caused massive frustration. I’d be curious to see a public poll for this. If you’re really looking for feedback, here it is. I strongly believe 10-mans are the best for SOD. I enjoy being in Discord with a small group of competent players. Cataclysm is attractive for the 10-mans. Several of my family/friends have quit SOD, or at least for this phase, because of this.
For certain classes (feral druid), the loot in ST is marginally better than Gnomer, and in some cases, it’s worse. This doesn’t make sense. Also, this is a melee season. According to WorldofWarcraftlogs, certain melee classes have a higher average parse on EVERY boss in ST.
Edit* The last thing I wanted to add here is about world buffs. These are getting tedious, and I now hate them. Just let everyone compete on equal grounds. Or how about instead of removing them on death, they persist and are removed on a timer?

Phase 3: Server Transfers :confused:
This is a massive relief for those who hate being on a PVP server. As stated earlier, this phase has damaged the effort put in place that was held strong for the first phases. The result of frustration from people getting ganked inside incursions and transferring is a server that goes from high to medium populated with little insight into the current state of faction balance. Please learn from the past, and don’t let servers die or become too faction-imbalanced.

Phase 4: Suggestions :slight_smile:
Make raids 10-man. Do not bring any Incursion leveling into phase 4. Make leveling a massive part of the experience again. To those who hate leveling, add new servers. On these new servers, give XP buffs or maybe allow them to click a button and be max level. Add new PVP events like you did for P1 and P2. We need more for PVP. Make the loot always better than a previous raid from 10-15 levels before.

In conclusion:
While I recognize the team’s hard work and effort in creating new content, I believe adjustments to this recent phase could improve the player experience for what’s next. I wrote this out because I love the game. I hope my feedback can contribute to your ongoing efforts to refine and help define the recipe for success moving forward in SOD.

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I hated being poor. Now I have 2k gold between my characters and can actually buy things and it feels really nice.

I was pro-GDKP phases 1 and 2 because the game had no good ways to make money. Now you can just play the game and make gold, almost like its a proper video game. There’s a reason WoW added Dailies. Dailies just work. Incursions are just dailies but not daily so people can’t whine that they added Dailies to Classic.

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I like the emoji pictograms. Let’s people skip to the more critical points.

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Is the repetition of the same quests enjoyable for you? Not trying to sound rude, but is this is a good long-term solution for you and do you actually enjoy these? Or is it more just a lucrative thing for the gold?

Were you running GDKPs P1 and P2, and if so, how were you broke?

Having done dailies for many years, I can tell you this is not an engaging experience.

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as if that person spent their 2k gold

think about it, anyone who wants to parse needs to spend 2500g~ on enchants/BOEs

i doubt that person has any of those enchants on their gear. So they spend time playing the game, earning gold, basically to not spend it. and now they can afford to buy basic consumables, where as previously they would be doing the same but floating a gold amount like 250g~

why even reply to them. one trinket is 3600g on some servers.

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Thank you! That’s cool feedback. I’m a UX designer for work, so I was trying to make things easier to read. :slight_smile:

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We need to define what “enjoy” means.

I have 5 50s. Four of them were leveled through incursions, one of them did NOT do incursions. If I were to rank how much I enjoyed the leveling experience of each, the character who did no incursions is just above the character I did my 3rd set of incursion leveling with. As in, my main was my most enjoyable, then the first alt (character #2), then probably my most recent alt (#5), then the no-incursion character (#4), then #3.

Why? Well, the first time I did incursions it was all new content and that was fun. Figuring out what does and doesn’t work, getting into a rhythm, the wave of people there. The second character I took over there it was still fun - we were now optimizing the route, doing no-kill before the term was even created and people didn’t yet know how to do it on a wider level. Leveled from 40 to 50 in a handful of hours.

The third time through incursions though… it was just what I did the second time but I had literally just done it. Nothing to be learned, just a chore to be completed to get that character to 50.

So for my next character, I tried to not do incursions… hoo boy, that sucked too. The level 40-50 bracket has some bad zones for questing in. Desolace is just a grindathon that was obviously not finished, Hinterlands is also basically not finished. Tried leveling in Tanaris and got ganked by level 50s so that was a no-go. I level grinded a large chunk of it in ZF and that sort-of okay but got very boring by the end. The only silver lining was that I got some Wild Offerings out of the deal and helped two different guildies get their Sulthrazes.

By the time I worked on my 5th character, I had a good break and some distance from incursions. Most people are already 50, so getting dungeons would be tough, just as it was tough to get dungeons later in phase 2. But incursion parties are role agnostic so even if you have 5 DPS it’s completely fine you can still enjoy the content. Drinking a beer and doing a few loops was actually chill vibes. Slowly chipped away at it not feeling in a rush, it was pretty good. It wasn’t lonely like later-in-the-phase leveling was in p1 or p2.

I can’t think of any type of gold farming that’s engaging other than GDKPs. But we seem to have agreed as a community that GDKPs are a no-go. I’ll take incursion gold grinding over the alternatives in many cases.

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Stop the cap, stop the cap.

This is you - https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/living-flame/pettersson

This is me - https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/lone-wolf/sentenza

Please don’t tell me I need to spend 2500g on BoEs. And to be honest, I don’t even use those expensive elixirs either.

inb4 Warriors are different from Mages blah blah blah. I don’t care, don’t make a sweeping statement if you don’t want to be called out.

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I mean it is true for top parses across the board. You need everything you can get to peak.

When people compare parses are say X needs to be nerfed, its based on the peak numbers, not the average.

I’ve had 1 raid where i didnt die w wbuffs, and our guild doesnt parse. You can see my parsing history throughout era with the same name

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Okay, I mean I agree with you in that sense. Why sweat it though? You don’t need to do it and you’re not at a level where you’re close enough for that to be worth it. Why even bring it up? Feels a bit like the ol’ “If I put in 1% more effort I could be in a World First guild” type argument, it’s just silly.

The point is that this phase, the vast, vast, VAST majority of people can do what they want to do on the type of gold you can get reasonably playing the game now. When is the last time you’ve seen a GDKP thread on this forum, whereas phase 2 was constantly spammed with those threads because the community was complete poverty status? Most people feel satisfied with the amount of gold they have to throw around.

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The argument being made is that incursions are good for the game because that person has 2000g now to spend.

they arent spending it. thats my point.

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I argued what I was trying to say in my post. Incursions are not good for the game for the reasons I listed: It took away from the old and mixing the new. Levels are too fast, and the gold earned is too much. I don’t have the quantitative data to back up my subjective opinions regarding incursions. I do know that I’ve lost a lot of guildies and friends during this phase, though.

I also saw on Reddit that almost 100,000 fewer people are raiding this phase, or maybe it’s because the classic WoW leveling journey and raiding experience was drastically changed. Incursions are not fun for me, and I don’t want to level another character doing them.

Reddit classic wow link showing we are down 90k raiders from phase 2.

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Going from an incredibly easy 10-man with a 3-day lockout to a more moderately challenging 20-man with a 7-day lockout and you’re surprised less people raid and some of them dipped?

:thinking:

I’m going to be straight with you, if you think grinding SM is better than incursions you’re capping hard.

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To your point, I don’t know if that’s necessarily what I’m saying. I’m saying they missed the mark of mixing the old with the new.

There are a couple of points that I do need to say, though.

  1. You can make the difficulty of the raid as complex as you want, regardless of the raid size. Look at Cataclysm and the excitement there. People are excited to have 10 people with a higher difficulty. It doesn’t have to be 20-man to be more difficult.

  2. Do you think Blizzard would have made this decision if they had known that 100,000 of their subscribers would drop in less than 30 days? I don’t know if that’s really the number of lost subs, but that’s how many have moved on from raiding this phase according to that reddit post.

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Obviously.

What decision? The jump to 20-man?

Probably. I feel that in the long-run they would definitely lose a number of players if they never moved to 20-man. I like 10-mans, don’t get me wrong, I really like 10-man and in fact think Retail should switch to 10-man raids. But larger raids sizes do have a certain appeal that just feels more “epic” and that a number of Classic players signed on to experience.

I think the only major difference with the raid in retrospect is I imagine they would prefer to err on making the raid too easy. Jumping to 20-man and launching the content overtuned probably did a lot of damage.

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Crazy thought here but what if incursions dropped consumables instead of gold. influx of consumes on the AH would drop prices curbing inflation and there really wouldn’t be a need to farm gold.

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that would eliminate profits for professions.

What they should do is drop non alchemy crafts that give 10% less stats than the best consumes.

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That’s not quite the recommendation you think it is.

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Sorry man but I strongly disagree. I don’t believe they would ever make a decision that would cost them 100k subs in less than 30 days. 10 mans are being discussed everywhere on Reddit, too. Make the raid more difficult and keep it to 10.

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I don’t agree with smaller raid sizes. Classic 60 is about big raids. That doesnt mean i dont think 10 man raids shouldn’t exist, there should be more of them, and with good chase loot, but I want 20 and 40 man raids too!

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