Hello Community. I need guidance

Greetings all! I am in need of advice and I figured there was no better place to turn than all of you wonderful, intelligent, respectable, witty, beautiful specimens of gamers.

So here’s the deal (pickle)

My gf and I are in our mid 30’s, with kids and careers. We work 9-5 Monday through Friday and get the crux of our gaming in after bed time, which is 9-11 during the week and then 8-12 on weekends, usually.

We have been playing Shadowlands and have had mixed feelings about it.

We are both at around 200 ilvl and at this stage there are only really a few ways to progress our characters. We could do m+ but we wont really get upgrades unless its from a 7 key or higher, and they are starting to get really difficult for us. To the point where we are starting to not always have fun when trying to complete them. This unfun is compounded when we are rewarded with 35 anima, and that’s it, for our troubles.

We tried pvp in arena to gear, but the matches are over in seconds before we even know what is happening or understand where we went wrong.

We are in a heroic raid team, and are 4/10 working our way up, but I can’t tell you the last time we actually got gear from the raids. It’s mostly from the vault. We are having a lot of fun raiding, but that only happens one night a week. The rest of the week, no one else is online doing anything.

Yes, we could try to get better at the game, but honestly, we dont want to. We want to come home from a long days work, and relax. Not get frustrated over and over again because of how hard it is for us. We are very okay with not being the best, but the rotations are really hard compounded with the snowball effect of making mistakes and then we let our team down, and we get frustrated ourselves. We want easy mode. So that begs the question, is this really for us?

With very little in the way of a steady progress path, and the buzz of TBC classic on the horizon, we thought maybe now would be the time to get into classic. We heard that its waaaaay easier which is exactly what we want. A chill, relaxing social rpg game that we can make friends and join a community and be apart of a team.

However, finding a guild that has our limited schedule will be an astounding task and if our goals are to experience the end game content, we will more than likely be subjected to PuG raiding. Would this be miserable?

We only have time to play one game and cannot dedicate time to both. So the question is, which one is going to be better for our skill level and time constraints?

Thank you for taking the time to help us out.

/Signed two tired parents.

Edit: Thank you all so much for your help! You all have several great ideas and sofar the ones that I will be presenting to her are-

1-Stick with Shadowlands but change how we play. Stay out of content that makes us have a bad time. Accept our current gear progression, hope for the best in raids, play alts, do transmog runs, collect pets, play the AH.

2-Get the weekly stuff done (Torghast, raids) and play classic the rest of the time for a change of pace.

3-Play classic exclusively and go where the wind takes us.

I will update again after we have decided for those interested and again, thank you all sincerely for helping us out!

Edit edit: we went with option 1. Decided to yolo a +5. Success. Had a decent time. Pushed to+7. Kept up the momentum. Got to a +11. Took 2 hours and 68 deaths but we have finally completed our first ever prideful key and…had fun! We accepted that we suck. We memed. We dreamed. And did it! 2 hours and 35 anima later.

Now we just have to wait for blizz to fix the reward structure and we are good to go. But if they don’t, alts, mogs, mounts, and more random fun is to be had.

Thanks again WoW forums! You’re the best that ever was.

/signed two still tired but now happier with their choices parents.

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If the BC is the same is classic as it was in Vanilla retail then definitely SL, right now short of raids we really have nothing much to do… other than Torghast if you’re into that…

I think I’m not following. You are saying SL would be better for us, but that there isnt anything to do but Torghast? That seems contradictory.

Any reason you can’t just take a week to test out classic? You have access to both. On a non-raid night, just hop on and see what you think.

It is a different game than retail, imo. It’s a bit slower. Leveling your first lvl 60 will take a bit of time. So, go into it with that mentality. Money can be harder to come by, spells miss, melee attacks miss a lot, if you die, the walk back from the graveyard will likely be long. You’ll be running on foot for a long time… save up all your gold while leveling to buy mount skill at lvl 40! Don’t waste it :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m not bashing the game - just telling you what I think is worth mentally preparing for. I enjoy hopping on randomly to level, but it usually doesn’t last long for me. But, if you both end up loving it, that’s great! :smiley:

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With your limited game time. It’s gonna take you like 2 months to hit max level in classic.

The unfortunate part is that since classic is near its end, you’re gonna have a hard time finding groups for low level or entry level end game stuff.

However, if you enjoy questing and taking your time leveling and running on foot together then classic can be fun.

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No reason at all! We had considered that. Maybe leveling to 20 or so and then reassessing how we feel. But even if we love it, the final destination of what our plans would be after 60 (or 70 if tbc happens) is looming on the horizon. Would we be alright joining a guild for social purpose and then living our best PuG lives?

Both.

If heroic raiding is your only interest and thing you like to do on Retail, you’re not getting $15/month worth of content from the game. I realize that’s subjective, but think of almost anything else that money could go towards that you could get more out of.

When you’re not raiding or preparing for it, go level in Classic. Don’t get ahead of yourself thinking about a guild and raid times. Enjoy the leveling and don’t try to expedite it. Level your character and max things out. Once you get to cap, re-evaluate your situation. Besides, it’s likely that you’ll be able to transfer your Classic character to BC servers.

You’ll at least stretch your sub money out better that way.

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“However, if you enjoy questing and taking your time leveling and running on foot together then classic can be fun.”

We actually love this. We put on music lists like “best of the 80’s” or “best of the 90’s” or “lofi music to play wow to” and have a blast. We arent very good at pvp in SL but even thought of trying out a pvp server in classic just to see how wacky it could get.

you should start with bgs to get comfortable with your classes in pvp environment

classic is very sweaty. i guess there are a couple of “yolo” guilds but most require a specific class and spec (rip rets), youre required to get your consumes and buffs every week, and whatever time you have in between raid you should be spending it farming gold to buy consumes and buffs for next week

imo retail has a lot more chill raid guilds that progress casually and will run raids even with suboptimal specs just to not leave people out

classic takes drama over loot and drops to a whole other level. for casuals it’s basically better to not get loot in SL than to jump through the hoops of a guild’s soft reserves/hard reserves/reserved for gf of the raid lead/prioritized to the sweatier players who haven’t missed raid day in 60 runs

I’d wait until BC officially releases before swapping from SL

what if you did endgame content with your SL guild and on the days you’re not raiding you level characters on classic? non endgame classic requires 0 time investment and SL weekly upkeep can be done in a day

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Yea, I really agree with you here. The value proposition isn’t there on only getting enjoyment from heroic raiding. Typically a patch or some other content loop or hook comes out to circumvent this feeling and I have personally gotten AOTC in past expansions and felt amazing about it. But this time, something is off. I don’t really look forward to logging in as much as I used to.

My routine is basically:
1-look forward to playing all day
2-sign in
3-realize that I have to do really hard (for me) stuff to accomplish anything
4-think of what else I could be doing.
5-Decide to try anyway
6-It’s really difficult and I am done after 2-3 dungeon/arena (even if I win)
7-go to bed and repeat until raid night.

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Your kids go to bed later during the week than on the weekends?

I think Classic was integrated for your kind of situation.

People got caught up in the us-vs-them of it, but it’s there for something to do when Retail doesn’t appeal to a person. It should have never been thought of as a replacement. It’s a great supplement.

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You sound very much like the same life situation my husband and I are living. I’m at 202 and likely that’s where I stay. I haven’t played Classic, so I can’t really help you there, however… My hub and I like to level alts. I’m working on getting my next char to 200. I’m a completionist, so I love going for achievements. I’m currently working through current SL Achievs. We both go back through old content together for Achievs, mounts and transmogs. There is still more to do in Retail if you were looking for ideas.

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if you want to get better at PVP try doing BGs. Epic BGs are a great way to ease into PVP. most will still be lopsided battles but you’ll get much more time to figure out how to play your class and spec than doing arenas

knowing the battles and effective strategies can offset having inferior gear

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well dont listen to me, because i’d say switch to classic and dont even think about end game raiding, just relax and level and explore and craft and have fun, and by the time TBC comes this summer, you’ll be 60 and then you will love TBC and raid progression there is so much to do.

there’s nothing here for you in retail that you havent done casually.

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This is really interesting. So if we were to join a raiding team in classic, they would require min maxing instead of play what you want?

Is it really that difficult to find a casual raiding team?

We will more than likely be a team of me-pally/mage and her enh/resto shaman. I figured that our class combos alone would have gotten us into a team.

It’s not that bad. Especially now. People hear this stuff from a certain part of the community.

Just like in Retail, pushing the top content is going you have sweats. You can pretty much AFK in most of these raids, but the loot situation may not be much better.

That YouTuber had that video of angrybois, but that was pushing Grand Marshall. Of course you’re going to be crawling through the mud in pursuit of that.

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I was really hoping to hear from someone in our position so thank you so much for replying and giving your input.

So what you are suggesting is that maybe we should just cap ourselves at the 200 ilvl bench mark, and then call it good raiding and start working on alts and get them to the same benchmark, or work on secondary progression like mogs, cheeves, pets.

I like that idea in theory, but the problem will still be there that the content we want to do is really really hard, and eventually we will get to the same place with alts as well.

I wouldnt be opposed to it though and I will run that by her and see what she thinks =)

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bgs are fun when you use the buddy system. you can do a bunch of ganking just by staying together. you’ll still get owned by premades but its increases your odds dramatically

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