Quality progression comes from a combination of leveling and gear gathering - however over time the leveling adventure that made WoW great has been watered down to a cheap and rushed experience - while the endless and mundane grind for gear has been emphasized. This is a backwards approach.
I suggest increasing the number and quality of activities in the game, such as PvP, professions, quests, and new events such as racing. Take a look at some of the most successful console games and start adding elements of these into the game, while simultaneously cutting down on the gear addiction. Let fun factor be the addiction.
Tailor instance and raid challenges for specific classes and specs. Make the combat go beyond simple trinity and into something more nuanced. Add a story element to questing that gives players the chance to interact in a meaningful way. Characters such as Jaina or Khadgar will speak to you based on the personality you’ve established with them over time.
Create weekend events that allow players to place bets on PvP and racing. Have an actual audience of people lining up to be the gladiator team on stage, cheered or booed by a ravenous audience of actual players. Create and bar with cheers and heckles for the people watching. Throwing food or showering with praise.
Grinding for gear may be fun for the zombies, but this game is seriously not living up to its potential. You’re losing out on lots of money by fixating that garbage. Cut the gear focus down, remove balance-breaking stats such as haste.
Get the CC under control so that people aren’t just mindlessly spamming, and add resource management back into the game. If you use a CC, you cut down on your volume of attacks. CC is supposed to be a teamwork mechanic, not something everyone can newb spam.
MOST IMPORTANTLY: Focus the game around player skill, not gear.
Your dragon mount idea and focusing on talent trees and professions is a fantastic start. I hope you continue with this mindset going forward and unlocking WoW’s true potential.
…I suppose all I’ll say is I personally disagree with EVERY aspect of this post. And, I hope Blizzard does not pursue any of OP’s suggestions as they’re a great way to kill off the enjoyment of the game for players like myself.
You have a right to your opinion, but you weren’t able to offer any counterpoints so I don’t think you understood what I was saying.
How does the game lose out with fun factor being the addictive feature?
How is the game better for players when more half of it is inaccessible?
How is getting steamrolled by gear junkies during PvP entertaining?
You like spamming arenas with no audience? That’s a contradiction.
You don’t want more fun events and an enriched profession/leveling system?
Why do you even play the game?
What enjoyment of yours is being killed off?
Bullying people with lesser gear?
Zoning out while mindlessly spamming in brainless raid encounters?
Not requiring skill to be any good at the game?
One dimensional gameplay in raids/dungeons?
Broken CC to damage ratios that make no sense?
The complete breakdown of teamwork mechanics that made the game fun?
Clarify what you’re trying protect here? This game is hemorrhaging money and fans because it’s failing to live up to its potential. Time to stop living in the past.
The problem is the classes are so bad right now. They are pve bots meant to operate in a raids and not interact with an open world, or even to engage in non instanced pvp.
If classes were simply fun to play in the open world and you can log on and play your character and just have fun regardless of what you did, Shadowlands would have been a different expansion.
Exactly! Valid point. It’s why so many people are botting out there even if PvP. It’s just auto aim spamming cc and damage all at once. If blizz worked on an energy management system and utility for classes over mindless spamming, then the skilled players would have a reason to play.
Right now all the classes are jampacked with cc and cc counters, and self heals, and invulnerabilities. Hell I don’t even have enough keys for it all. It’s just a complete mess. Blizz needs to understand damage to cc ratios are a huge part of class balance, and you can’t have any class with all of it dialed to eleven.
They also need to ditch PvP talents and replace them with glyphs again. WotLK had it right. What’s the point of abilities that don’t work for more than half the game?
Thanks, man. I feel it’d add an edge of excitement and profit to the game. Bringing a bigger audience. Spamming BGs and Arena over and over with no audience is pointless and boring. Even when I had max gear I was bored out of my mind. Bullying weaker groups is no challenge.
Well imo opinion shadowlands classes have so many buttons, But none of them actually do anything. You might press 7-10 buttons for your dps rotation but only 1-3 of them do any damage. The rest of them shouldnt even exist.
Honestly the spikey damage and being able to chunk people down is good. But the problem is nobody has any defensives or utility to keep them alive. Its almost like shadowlands classes need their rotations cut in half, health pools need to be doubled. The amount of utility and defensive cds need to be increased, More movement options for all classes, I dont want to see people just standing there and getting ran over for trying to cast a spell, by a terrible player who has always been trash at the game, Its just a bad game design all around.
Players have no control over gameplay right now. They put their character in a posistion and press a button. There is no gameplay in shadowlands.
Haha, good answer but why? Removing haste allows Blizzard to actually balance the classes and skills. I mean look at all the classes that abuse Haste. MM hunters, formally fire mages, annoying melee classes with too much cc for the level of damage they produce… etc…
It ruins the game in general because our characters are sluggish all the way until the final phase of each expansion and max gear. I don’t even see the game as playable without heroism on.
My friend refuses to return to retail because she gets panic attacks from how slow and unresponsive characters are when you hit max level.
What’s your take on this? How do you feel Haste is a valid stat? Why not just have characters who respond on command? Personally, my reflexes and hand eye coordination demand a more responsive game. I find this slow and frustrating.
they’re abusing haste as much as i am abusing mastery on this pally(50% extra holy damage), my burst is front loading holy abilities into a hoj’d target and that’ll happen regardless of my haste.
That’s my point. That shouldn’t be a thing at all. They need to design all classes to respond on command and scale spells so that they function based on their power. Stronger moves either require longer windup times, or cooldowns to prevent spamming.
Take MM hunter or Greater Pyroblast before the cooldown was added. Just two examples of OP garbage that went unchecked for years because of this nonsense.
The speed of the move is critical to how its balanced, so there should be a set speed.
How do you figure? Elaborate.
Top raids and mythics. They’re not on the looking for group queue and most players are here to have a fun adventure, not revolve our social lives around the game. The lack of clear instructions and a quest related progression into these segments of the game is damaging to WoW potential for more fans.
Additionally, Blizzard allows the download of 3rd party programs that provide a tactical edge to players. This is unacceptable. We’re paying them for the game UI, and no one should have to download anything from a 3rd party sight to keep up in raids or PvP.
I emphasize PvP because it has the most problems and is affected the most by these issues. However I’d very much like to see skill based raids where classes all have their chance to shine.
No it doesn’t, it comes from getting better and improving teamwork with friends, which allows for defeating harder and harder challenges.
It’s already designed that way.
Your problem is that you don’t actually do any challenging content. Go get some Cutting Edge achievements on a regular basis for a few years, then tell us how the game isn’t based around player skill.
I’d go as far as to say you could have been the worst player in previous expansions but in shadowlands you can probably be a rank 1 glad just starting the game
Yeah, it’s more like 3/4s of it. Because the leveling process has been watered down to a joke. Basically the game starts at max level, and you grind gear endlessly with a combination of repetitive raids or PvP encounters. PvP is worst of all because you’re either top gear bullying people or the one being bullied. It’s trash either way.
I agree. Too bad the game doesn’t do that. It’s not skill based, it’s gear based. What you said is the entire backbone of my post. It’s why I want teamwork mechanics back in the game. It’s why I want classes to have actual roles that go beyond the trinity system.
You are delusional or have very low expectations of yourself if you think this game requires skill.
As for the ‘challenge content’ there’s nothing challenging about it and I’d do it if I could queue up for it. Achievements are easy to get but time consuming and require a group. Mine quit because the game sucks in its current form. Hoping for change in the next expansion.