Everything you post I’m in full agreement with, it’s essentially the issue with WoW Retail now. The fact that what they did to the leveling experience to “streamline” it has proven to be an Achilles heel. We’re looking at now an experience that was originally designed to be shared amongst the player base now an experience that’s over in what 2-3 weeks of regular story quest grinding in any given zone?
What has happened is every decision that this MMO has made has led to this which is to say that they decided that the endgame is the content that players want to play and everything else is just a stop along that journey. Further example of this is to question what does leveling up from 1-60 actually teach a new player? They don’t learn how to play their class really until heroics and really begin to grasp their rotations until M0 which is arguably where the game actually begins now.
I think I’m in agreement with you more and more because I’m thinking back to my days in EQ. I did end game content in Velious toward the end when SoL was about to launch. But for the most part the game itself was a world that brought me to that point. Grouping in the frontier mountains at giant fort to finding my guild in the dreadlands after leveling with a few of them for a few weeks, granted we didn’t hit max level at this point either, we were leveling.
What the game has now is straight path that says these three items which are M+, PvP, and Raiding is the only content that we’re going to develop. We’re not going to work on content that’s designed on how you get to 60, but it’s designed on when you’re 60. I mean the more I think about this I’m questioning why even increase the lvl cap at all? I mean players hit the cap in a matter of hours from launch and there were no new spells, or talents, or skills from hitting 60 so what was the point. Maybe it was an attempt to go back to how leveling used to be but the problem is that system hinges on players being present while leveling and not acting as if everything is solable. And I can hear how people are saying but you want more soloable content—but I think I want more of that because the game has conditioned players to expect solo play to be rewarded because from 1-60 there’s no need to have anyone with you.
Then you finally reach endgame where the content radically shifts. Now you get to ilvl 180 and the game is not the game you’ve been playing or the game they advertised. It’s a game that’s set by top players because the content is designed for them but the devs created a system in which these top players have been aiming to do while wiping out the grind to get there and now we have the systems we have now.
I don’t remember running out of content during TBC.
One particular reason for that, character customisation. The old tallents trees allowed different playstyles to exist. You could farm gear for different builds: full haste, full AP, full resilence, full agility and different kind of weapons. Your character rotation would be different with each build and each had advantages/disadvantages in certain situations.
The current wow has no such options anymore, you run raid build, M+ build and pvp build, very plain and boring. You will be punished for playing against meta in most cases.
OP is right though, M+ evolved from challenge modes and nothing new came out since. Alike, very often I catch my self on a thought whether I should waste my day pushing the key and it makes me uneasy, like it’s a chore. I have to do it or I get no reward, but it’s not fun anymore.
I’ve found different weeks really change up talent and gear choices. If I need to be able to kite (necrotic fortified) I’ll bring snares, or coordinate with the other players for things like trees, earth elemental, etc.
Same with switching between tyrannical and Fortified wrt dps focus, though multi target does seem to be king in most of the cases.
The end of BFA with the stat based corruption was amazing for it’s ability to play different styles (with the right gear). In fact, I don’t recall a time when we could have two top rated players, same class, same spec (prot paladin) roll entirely different builds: one was full verse, the other full mastery. Both pushing high 20s.
I think that’s a really cool state to be in, but that came too late (corruption vendor) I think.
Funny, I do. Pretty much everyone who wasn’t raiding ran out of content pretty fast, unless you consider farming Elementals for Motes “content”.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA no.
You change talents more often in modern WoW than you ever did in Vanilla/TBC. There’s no singular build. You gear up and build for what you’re about to do. Different Mythic+ affixes can even make certain talents shine that you wouldn’t use otherwise.
Current WoW has way more customization than TBC ever did.
I’m with the OP. I don’t mind a challenge, bring on use of CC again and a good dungeon slog. I don’t mind the difficulty but I’m tired of everything having a timer as a push mechanic. Everything doesn’t need to be a race.
Just add a heroic+ if you need another term where things can get progressively more difficult. Keeps it relevant even as gear scales.
Those same people who spam invite me in Retail and in Classic receive the same response : “Declined”.
Then I tag their mobs. In retail, they luckily don’t lose out.
Besides the point. Vanilla lacked a lot of polish of modern WoW for sure.
You don’t even know what the words you use even mean. Like I said, pretty much every change in WoW can be traced back to a forum rant. “Developer discretion” isn’t a rebuttal, it’s an agreement.
That’s the problem with big words, if you don’t quite know what they mean, you might trip yourself up.
No, since your vocabulary has toned down quite a lot since we started. Apparently, it’s getting harder to find those big words.
These talents are simply no match to variety, you switch between a little more aoe or a little fewer aoe, the gear serves the same purpose, expect people that push high keys prefer versa to absorb damage. The difference between the choice is whether your class can survive without versa on high keys or not. Also, let’s be honest; at some point after dungeon number 100, you play like a robot, everything goes as planned with the occasional oopsie moment. In any way, let’s not go off-topic.
I do think that M+ is a little outdated and it needs to evolve to something more interesting than mindless routine grind and RIO peepee comparison.
I would really dig it if you entered a dungeon, pop in a level of keystone, and the dungeon and affix is randomly generated. Like Torghast without the anima powers but with the no timer.
If that’s all you switch your talents for, it might just be you don’t quite understand the breadth of customization available or how to optimize best for content.
Good thing Vanilla wasn’t full of only one type of player. Anyway, like I’d said, they shouldn’t go back to it, since your player type is more dominant today. Gotta come up with something new.
Nope, it was my point, and the point was that sharding and phasing were destructive to the original emergent group play design. No going back, so they’re trying to figure something out with “dangerous zones”. Not sure it’ll pan out.
It’s most definitely a rebuttal. You’re trying to tell me that because there’s a rant for everything and the developers picked one, they always picked the best one. No, they picked the one that best suited their idea of a better game. Their perspective has shifted, if recent interviews are worth anything.
Our topic of discussion has grown considerably more shallow.
Emergent doesn’t mean what you think it means. There was nothing “Emergent” about group play design in Vanilla WoW. It was well established from Everquest.
See what I mean about using big words ?
Nope. Me : “Player feedback can be traced to every change”. You : “But the devs have their discretion!”. Discretion just means they didn’t put in everything that players gave feedback on, they vetted it. But that doesn’t rebute the fact that all changes can be traced to forum feedback.
Even the current Mythic+ loot nerf can be traced to forum feedback for cripe’s sake.
It never was deep. You just misuse words like “emergent” to try and sound deep, but really, you’re way out of your league.
That could be an interesting option. No timers, hard-hitting mobs with sensitive threat, etc… The thing I love most about sensitive threat is that if you made the wrong move then they would turn around and one-shot you, it didn’t matter if you were dpsing or healing. (You could spec into reduced threat levels, but at a cost.) I personally would find that fun.
Yep and this M+ fetish has also lead us to the laughable class imbalance and juxtaposition of class boundaries: healers doing more damage than DPS and tanks doing more healing than healers (Prot Pali dumping Holy Power on Words of Glory to off-heal); Sub Rogue doing way more single target than any other class across all ilvls and irrespective of Covenants. Who even looks at Holy Priests anymore as first option of healer for M+?
It’s like masochists have taken over WoW - HIT ME HARD AND FAST, DONT STOP, and hopefully I get the only piece of gear after all this - YAY ME
Agreed. It doesn’t need to be easy, but the timed nature of mythic+ just turns many people off. That doesn’t mean mythic+ needs to be removed or changed, there just needs to be an option without the timer.
Heck have a key system if you must, use the Torghast system if you want, just let people have the time to plot out their next moves. If that includes an extra pull or a different path then who cares?.
