Over the years blizzard added lots of awesome features that made game great just to take them away in next expansions. Instead of building new features that most people do not enjoy let’s build a solid foundation from the best features of past and current expansions. Here is my list that would be great to see in game:
Get rid of all borrowed powers. You tried to experiment but it didn’t work and nothing can fix it.
Great class design. Classes in current game feels like a reskin of each other. It’s ok when classes have their strengths and weaknesses, not everyone have to have a kick, mitigation A, mitigation B and stun. Good stating point would be MoP.
itemization and stats. Return stats that were removed from a game - hit, expertise, arp, dodge, armor on items and etc. It’s not acceptable when RPG game have itemization depth of a looter shooter (hello destiny) - ilvl, main stat, stamina, secondary 1 and 2. Stats do not interact with each other and makes game shallow.
Fix power growth. ilvl difference from first patch raid content to the last is too huge. It’s not ok when you have to squish stats every expansion. Several possible solutions below.
Merge several difficulties together. What’s the point in having heroic dungeons? Let’s just merge it with mythic0. What’s the point in having normal raid? Let’s merge lfr with normal. It will help to reduce extra ilvl jumps.
Gear progression. Imho best loot should drop only from raids. So player’s gear progression should be: mythic+ -> heroic raids -> mythic raids. Lfr is an entry lvl content that drops loot similar to low keys. Mythic raids should drop gear of heroic raid quality of the next tier.
Mythic+ redesign. Timer is optional like in challenge mode in pandaria. Maximum normal/heroic raids ilvl drop. Endless progression like honor system with seasonal leaderboards for people who like to compete and push high lvl keys. Seasonal rewards (cosmetics and mounts) based on your key progress.
Return justice/valor and honor/conquest points. Working towards your goal is awesome and is the foundation of this game. Return currency vendors and allow to exchange pve to pvp and vice versa.
Remove pvp scaling. It’s just a bad hidden system that makes your character weak. Add either minimum ilvl scaling from WoD or resilience/pvp stat.
Relevant professions. Wotlk had the best solution to this problem. Just add passive bonus to every profession and tune them to be balanced. Crafting entry level pvp gear can solve problem with pvp for new players.
What do you guys think? I tried to take best parts of previous expansions and adapt them to current problems that game have. Also mythic+ and gear that it provides is a huge problem of a game - it makes other content obsolete.
Especially sad that it’s not going to be any different in shadowlands. Previously they trimmed our game every expansion but after they found the absolute worse state for some reason they decided to stick with it.
I agree with all of these, but I will say I feel like ‘Borrowed Systems’ would have been better as a permanent horizontal leveling system. Say it every time, We never ever ever should have lost our Artifact weapons, you open up the bottle, you can’t put the genie back in. Those weapons could have been permanent staples out characters & classes, they could’ve have been greatly expanded on it, so much more could’ve been done with them. Throwing them away was a bad idea, same with this Heart of Azeroth. Heroes don’t throw away their legendary artifacts.
But I must admit your ability to convey your thoughts and feeling to the keyboard is inspirational. You are truly a valued member of the WoW community. Good post. +1
Im afraid that in this case it should’ve been untied from legion then and evolve to some kind of new talent tree system where you should grind to open new talents. Not sure that I like the concept.
That’s pretty much exactly what I had in mind, fully fledged, real talent trees. Doesn’t necessarily need to be a grind, could just have it level naturally as you do dungeons or pvp, no infinite AP grind, just gain some XP on it when you kill a boss or finish a pvp match, and give it a reasonable level cap, maybe even tie it’s level cap to the player. You level 50-60, the artifact also levels 50-60.
Yea, you described old talent trees that we had before old talent trees were much better than current system and I hope that one day they will realize this.
It is never going away, “borrowed power” is the mechanism they can re-sell you a (very similar) game every couple of years.
But it is somewhat sad that Legion felt great while BfA didn’t. I think they need to focus on more of a tree and progression, not just gift us corruption on RNG.
I wondered why the third version of talent trees have not come out yet. Then I realized BlizZard has bought into the borrowed power hype so they don’t have to put in the work for a new talent tree system or even improving the MoP version.
For now they just made MoP trees worse. In MoP I had a complete class and talents that were adding tools to its toolkit. In current version we have a pruned abomination and talents just add baseline stuff to make it less ugly.
I think they find it more fun to design a game from scratch than to have to retain working elements of the past. And flashy gimmicks. They love designing flashy gimmicks.
I actually believed that artifacts would show Blizz how popular a talent tree alongside a passive skill tree would be. When you think about it, they were essentially the original trees without choice other than the order you put your points.
Isn’t that the simple answer here? Two trees: a passive and our talent system that carries over. I think more people would rather unlock some sort of tree they know is going to continue with their character beyond the expansion.
old talent trees were much better than current system and I hope that one day they will realize this.
