I came back after a long break, last xpac I played was BFA and the game hasn’t changed a lot since then, but some aspects have just been turned up to 11 and not in a good way.
Mainly the gameplay just isn’t fun anymore. Even just the content level I’ve been messing around in (solo play mostly, delves, companion dungeons, etc.) the amount of movement required, the number of spells, cooldowns, interrupts to track, the game seems to just throw mechanics at you non-stop in an attempt to overload your senses till you make a mistake and die.
Mobs in delves hit for a ridiculous amount of HP, while at the same time just being huge sacks of health you whittle down a little bit at a time. You are constantly moving, stop make a single cast, time to move again.
None of it is particularly challenging, its just simply not fun. I imagine WoW gameplay is what it is like to have ADHD. The game is no longer something to just have fun with it is anxiety inducing by design.
I don’t want to even imagine how M+ and raids are atm. I’ll probably stick around a little while longer but the cheap mechanics just to make sure the player dies once in a while and the level of stress designed into the game has made the combat loop no longer an enjoyable experience.
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Is there any gameplay you can point to that you do enjoy and would like to see expanded upon?
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Training dummies it sounds like
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its fun enough that Ive totally burned myself out playing more than I should lol.
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Sure, most of the gameplay loop is the same as it has always been. You still get hooked on chasing that next carrot. It is just the actual mechanics of the combat, like I said it seem like it is intentionally anxiety inducing with the amount of things just constantly being thrown at you.
Move, dispel, move, interrupt, move, cast, find Brann’s health flask, oops nope it despawned move and find another one, dispell, cast, move, interrupt, cast, move, move some more, the web grabbed you and flung you 50 yards away, avoid the trap it just dropped you in, cast, move, cast, dispell.
It never give you a chance to just have fun. I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting burned out churning through delves, but I can’t recall the combat ever feeling this just bloated with things constantly being thrown at the player.
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Well, the silver lining is that if you play Devastation, moving would be like water as we get to cast most of our abilities while Hovering (which we do half the time).
As for the web grabby thing, it’s usually from the big Zekvir ghost (or Zekvir himself) where you just sidestep it. Is best to play with sound on because it has a pretty noticeable audio cue if you aren’t busy looking at it. Or one of the kobyss fish people casting a harpoon ability which you can interrupt.
Would it be fair to summarize this as saying you don’t find WoW’s combat gets more enjoyable for you as the difficulty increases?
Its us that is changing. Not the game.
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Hey man. Read the title not the post, sorry at work.
Ultimately if you aren’t having fun that is fine. Good for you for realizing that. I would go do something you enjoy more. No one needs to stick around doing something that don’t enjoy. Cheers bro!
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Its not a “difficulty” thing. Like I said, it isn’t particularly challenging to not stand in bad or use your interrupt.
And the dev’s have obviously realized that, the problem is their solution seems to be to just keep throwing more and more and more of it at the player till it overwhelms either their ability or the class’s toolkit to deal with it all.
And when that still fails they just make the mobs hit like a semi truck.
Mostly it is the ADHD feel of combat these days. I don’t want the major feeling I get from playing to be anxiety. I would guess there is a fine line there between fun in overcoming challenge falling into anxiety inducing, and I can’t say where that line is. Only that, to me, it feels like the game crossed that line by a mile.
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Do you have any examples of situations where you feel the game has managed to increase the difficulty without adding anxiety?
I feel like I play WoW more for the fact that I don’t have to think that much. I mean that’s also cause I just do open world stuff. If I want to think more then I play other games or pick up something new. Idk I just enjoy knowing like there’s always something I already know.
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The game has become challenging, and that’s why it’s still able to pay the power bill to keep it running.
if it were to continue with the old way, people wouldn’t be playing it. Gaming has evolved. The skill ceiling of today’s gamers after mastering game such as dark souls, multplayer fps shooters, moba’s, etc. has rendered the old classic style of WoW obsolete.
Classic still exists though. You can go play it right now. It’s the old way. Having to stop and drink for 1 minute after every pull. Having to mark every single npc in a pull and assign CC to each person for the pulls. You can go back to that if you want to via WoW classic.
Otherwise, you can just keep pushing and learning the game style , adapt to it, accept the challenge, and become good at the current game.
That’s what I did. It took be a while, but I’m finally to a point to where I’m pretty dang successful on anything I set my mind to in the game, and it really feels good.
I’m to the point now to where I’m probably going to start working on learning and becoming good on another character, because there is almost nothing left for me to do right now, besides pvp, which I already spent an entire expansion focusing on in shadowlands.
I will be doing mythic raiding soon, but that’s only a fraction of the time I spend playing the game very week.
Its a tough thing to pin down right.
Like I just came out of a tier 8 Nightfall Sanctum on my Ele Shaman. There are plenty of spells you already have to deal with, those guys that cast the Barrier who also hit like a truck in melee.
Then you get them empowered by the Zekvir thing and then add the web pully thing, which in this delve drops you right in the bombardier patches and it also slows you so you can’t outrun those, and it just yanked you away from your health pots.
And any two or three of these things at a time you can deal with but the encounters just throw more and more of it at you till today I just said enough and logged out. I wasn’t even dying repeatedly or anything I just wasn’t having fun.
This is also class/spec specific at times right? My Balance Druid or Ele Shaman I get this feeling a lot but if I was on my Paladin in the same situation I just pop wings and double tap Wake of Ashes and the mobs all go away. 
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But you said you want it to be challenging, but then say the mechanics are too hard.
Sorry, I don’t get it.
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I dislike the pacing of Retail as well. There’s a time for intensity, but Retail is Always On™. The design itself inherently caters to impatience, as shown in the triviality of the leveling process and the capacity to swipe to bypass it.
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It’s not made to be fun. It’s made to be just frustrating enough that you don’t quit and you spend as much time as possible in game. It’s borderline predatory.
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Exactly. When every mob and every moment of combat is turned to 11 it kind of removes that feeling of “wow I just overcame something” because everything is that same level of challenge.
In fact the bosses in delves are often less challenging than the trash since you don’t have whole packs of mobs all throwing everything at you at the same time.
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I find delves draining too, but as far as I can tell, this is simply what what WoW seems to have always been when it gets “harder”.
Thus, I’m very curious what’s gnawing at the back of your imagination that would replace the mechanics dances.