How can follower missions be so poorly developed in bfa?

Community General Discussion
21

It isn’t a brand name. Meshuggah isn’t a company. Try again. wah wah

22

It is kind of crazy how they changed so heavily, and I think is good evidence for just how rushed this expansion was.

However, it can also be said that they were intentionally dialed back because the increasing criticisms of so much power being tied to the table.

Frankly, I think the table should be removed from the game entirely.
You should not be able to gain any passive benefit from being offline or waiting, and the fact that you can do it so easily with the phone ap is not good for the game.

But it would seem they disagree, so it reads as very odd that this expansion’s table features so little, especially without the rep repeat rewards being there from launch.

I think its pretty safe to say they just ran out of time and resources on the system, and this is the best they could do.

Sadly, if they would explain the features of their expansions and patches better, we wouldn’t have to worry what is and isn’t safe to say!

Maybe some day :blush:

23

I still have difficulty understanding their design for the follower equipment items.

Given the large amount of mats required, particularly expulsom, those items are hugely expensive to make, making you think they must be very beneficial. Yet their return in giving the rewards is apparently around 5% at most, with not a whole lot of the mats gained when they do give you something. I’ve asked in my guild and in trade about people’s experiences if they’ve used the follower equipment, and the resounding reply is it is a complete waste of resources and time to even bother with them.

Thus, a high cost, low reward item was designed, which makes follower gear essentially worthless in its current state.

In a recent gold roundup post summarizing a discussion of the “cost” to gain expulsom from scrapping crafted cloth bracers reaced values ranging from 350g to 450g per expulsom, and that is based on cheap tidespray linen on high pop realms costing 2g to 4g each. So a piece of follower gear with it’s 30 expulsom cost is 10.5k to 13.5k to make on those high pop realms.

But on my mid-sized realm, getting tidespray linen is way more expensive, typically in the 10-12g range at best, it would cost around 3 times that, or nearly 40k. And what would you get? A whopping 1 in 20 chance of a handful of mats on a given mission.

Seems to me they need to do three things to make follower equipment even remotely make sense: (1) drop the expulsom required dramatically, to like 5 expulsom, (2) increase the rate of returning something from a mission to 25% so that you would seem something on average about once a day (assuming you run all your followers each day), and (3) increase the amount of stuff you get if you get anything.

I’m not saying they need to make mat factories ala the gold factories of missions in Legion and WoD, but they need to make crafting the items have a reasonable cost in terms of the required mats and up the rewards to be a much more commonplace occurrence instead of just once in a blue moon.

And that is this big dumb cow’s opinion.

/moo :cow:

5 Likes
24

I can understand what you’re saying but I’d also temper it with:

  • First, the tables were never purely passive. In fact they required a significant up front active investment, which in my opinion is good for the game, because that’s what motivated me to play a lot of alts in Legion. The reward for all that active investment is then paid off over time. That’s the part you’re calling passive but even that does require some attention to the game.
  • Second, the idea that there is some limited amount of very high return activities each day or other time period is a fair, democratic, and well-worn mechanism for providing some balance between those who can play little and those who play a lot. There’s a ton of activities in the game set up in this way and for good reason.

Overall, I can now say I’ve tried the WoW flavors with WoD, Legion, and BfA tables and I’m quite clear that BfA is by far my least favorite of the three. Of course, individual tastes may vary.

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25

You mean how there’s exactly one piece of follower gear that helps with success chance, and no piece of follower gear that isn’t ridiculously overpriced to make?
Agreed.

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26

It’s also Yiddish expression and you can’t copyright common parlance or slang.

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27

I agree, I don’t think they wanted people to feel obligated to log in just to do follower missions once they were exalted. Personally I’d prefer if they just did away with the whole mission table/follower experiment.

28

and turn them into actual world quests
I’d love to be going to Ashenvale every day to kill Horde

29

I heard the next expansion will be phone only, no more wow on PC. Good thing we all have phones!

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30

My favorite is the bug where when you put in the proper counter your success rates plummets…by sometimes 75% or more.

They still haven’t fixed it.

Yah, they really dropped the ball on missions.

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31

That’s a stealth mission. Can only send heroes on those by design. Not saying it’s a good design but…

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32

ya but then they put 2x cursed modifiers which heroes can’t overcome, those are ones I just ignore, that is seriously some Beta for Azeroth levels of inattentiveness :rofl:

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33

I think having the follower system and mission table in place is a good thing. From a fantasy point of view, it’s doing a decent job. We’re no longer characters killing boars and wolves to help farmers, we’re champions of our factions and respected leaders of our classes. So it makes sense that we would have our own allies and troops to command over. I think followers/missions are one of the only sources to fulfill that role outside of quest dialogue.

In terms of mission balance, there should NOT be missions that spawn with multiple of the same affix that you can’t possibly counter. There should NOT be stealth missions that require a troop to counter a bonus loot affix. These things just don’t make any sense at all.

In terms of followers, there should be a better progression system like legion had, where followers gain access to new abilities and equipment slots as you use them and level them up. The legion equipment system was perhaps a bit too robust for the average player, but the bfa equipment system is so trivial and expensive, that most people don’t even bother with it. That is just broken if you ask me. Personally, I loved having a bodyguard and outfitting them for ap gain, gold gain, order resource gain when I did world quests. It gave me more freedom to choose what bodyguard to bring when I needed to restock various resources.

In terms of mission rewards, the ap rewards are fine. The gold rewards are a joke and not even worth doing. The rep rewards are fine as you’re leveling and for a few weeks after hitting 120, but as soon as you’re exalted they should have just auto disabled in favor of other missions. If the follower equipment system was better, we could have interesting follower equipment reward missions to pursue.

Things they don’t have that I would like to see:
More follower equipment options.
Missions that reward war resources, but are difficult to beat, so you need the right team/equipment combination.
Missions to scout a zone, with a reward that grants increased bonuses from world quests in that zone for, idk, 1-2 days. Or maybe another reward could be increased player stats in that zone for 1-2 days (playing off of the pvp war mode feature). The point of a mission like this is to play off of the fantasy of being a commander. Send troops out (passive play) and gain some feature to take advantage of when you go out into the world (active play)
Profession specific missions
Expulsom missions (had in legion)
Raid missions (had in legion)
Pvp missions (had in legion)
Follower equipment missions (had in legion)

At the end of the day I guess one good thing to look forward to is that come Tuesday, those rep missions will be viable once again (at least until we achieve those rewards and begin ignoring those missions again).

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34

They’re not poorly developed. Players insisted they didn’t want the mission table to be important. So. This is what we have.

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35

What’s worse for the game is people quitting altogether. The mission table prevents that.

The mission table gives people a reason to log on even when they only have 5-10 minutes to play. Therefore it keeps them connected to the game and stops them from quitting altogether in periods where they are’t actively playing.

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36

Worst part for me is the missions that require counters but penalize you for using the counter, aka stealth missions that require troops.
Oh it’s cursed but it’s also stealth so if you wanna go over 100 you have to decrease your success rate basically negating the whole thing.
I get nerfing the gold factories, I really do, but please fix it so we don’t get curse and stealth on the same mission.
Also would it really be so bad if we could control what type of troops we have? At the very least let us dismiss troops so we can reroll the type we need.

37

Why try? Blizzard knows we’re all hooked, so they can just slop out anything they want; they lost their pride long ago and traded it for ca$h.

38

lol obviously not enough people because look where it’s at now.

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39

It shouldn’t be so hard to hit a middle ground. They went from super OP to completely worthless. How about instead of 100 gold per mission, you give 500.

40

Hopefully this means the end of that damnable table that must not be named.