Restored? What the heck?
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Open world gearing was pretty legitimate in Legion and BfA. Gear rewards were fully updated for all pre-existing world quests each season, in addition to some patches bringing in zone-specific gearing systems such as Veiled Argunite gear and Benthic Pearl gear.
SL sought to tear down open world gearing as a seasonal form of progression. Callings no longer offer gear rewards the way that emissaries once did. World quests in the original zones are still stuck at a max 213 iLvl. Season 4 didn’t update open world gearing options at all.
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This is like when religious people say gay people aren’t discriminated against because they have the option to get married to someone of the opposite sex just like straight people do.
Absolutely nothing about it being a multiplayer game stops it from also being a solo-friendly game.
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If Normal raid gear is available from WQs this will harm guilds that only do normal raids. Heck, if LFR gear is available from WQs, even fewer tanks would sign up for LFR and queues would skyrocket.
I don’t see solo WQ players and group players as having the same importance because wow has been a group-focused, instanced encounter with gear progression rewards game for 17 years. I have no problem with open world content, I personally enjoy it a lot but it should not give rewards that reduce the incentive for WoW’s core group based gameplay.
lmao what? Cata heroics were nerfed within weeks and people quit in WoD because casual-bait garrisons and phasing ruined the social aspect of the game and turned an MMO into a mobile game.
WTF. Devs listened to casuals for WoD ad gave altoholics and casual players everything they could possibly imagine. Gold farming in garrisons ruined the economy of the game forever. Legion WQs where you could hit a button, phase to a different layer, hover over a WQ and get credit for the quest completely trivialised the open world experience. WoD vomited so much gear at players they had to come up with the Scrapper to get rid of how much there was.
Agree 100% . Enjoy the content for what it is. Why do you want gear rewards that you don’t need for open world content at the risk of disincentivising the social core gameplay of WoW?
That may have been true in 2021 but the big drop was largely due to the fallout from the lawsuit and the harassment cases. I know you’ll be saddened by this news but the WoW population has actually bounced back. MMO-population.com shows WoW+WoW classic to have 2.19M players while FFXiV has 1.15M.
The game has never had more content for open world players than it has now. Torghast, four distinct Covenants AND ZM in one expac? All with countless rares, collectibles, recipes, mounts, puzzles and solo challenges. In SL, professions were a core aspect of gear progression, with all legendaries being player crafted. This has never happened before in WoW. In Dragonflight, this is increasing with professions getting an even bigger boost.
Given the amount of effort being put into solo players’ gameplay loops, before asking raiders to raid for the sheer enjoyment of it and disregard the fact that they can get the same gear from Tortollan puzzles that they would wipe on a boss for weeks for a chance to get, why should solo players not be asked to be happy with enjoying the content in from of them?
I personally think that the most attractive cosmetics, mounts, pets and transmogs should be gated behind group content in normal raids, low key M+ and starter rated PVP. Solo world content should reward gear that allows players to comfortably complete solo world challenges and start doing more challenging group content. And solo players who stubbornly refuse to try the group game should be satisfied with the abundance of content that they have … or should go mod Skyrim.
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Yes, the ole raid logers argument! Not a single person here asked for mythic ilvl loot to be the reward! We want thae change they did to be reverted! For the time commitment we have to put in, sorry but LFR ilvl gear after months of grinding is a kick in the groin to all the open world players in this game!
I hope DF fails big time because of this change! Bet you all my gold the sales on launch day do not even come remotely close to SL day one sales! It will serve them right with their one lousy gimmick, and nerfed to the ground open world rewards!!
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Oh I bet those open world gear can be transformed into tier gear via the creation catalyst.
Thats so false it hurts! No one is asking for raid level rewards from WQ’s! Also, raiders of any stripe will get their gear far faster than ANY open world player, so yeah, LFR and normal would have zero to worry about!
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I’m sure they’ve dismissed the idea. They seem to still have guild raiding prioritized.
Gear wise, yes, but BC and Wrath did have interesting areas and non-gear rewards for those that did world quests. It was not till at least Cata that gear started to be the primary/only incentive.
Now we have a ton of content that rots or people just don’t do because of things like Titanforging and sub par world content, people have been conditioned to treat gear as the goal. Maybe it is time to return to the days when world content was fun and interesting, gearing is put back in the instances outside of rep rewards that can be bought.
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you take gear rewards away wow will truly die lol. they can even come up with new world content nothing exciting how long they gonna string out wq’s or zm go chase rares around that crap is so boring in 2022 and so overused. they had a perfect oppurtunity to keep alot of people happy by gearing in torghast like it was in beta but it always comes back to we wanna force you to endgame to have any gear progression .
season 4 no gear progression yet endgamers had it and i don’t want to hear well you don’t need it well endgamers don’t need inflated gear levels either when its proven there content can be done with way lower ilvls lets see how happy endgamers are with a capped ilvl like people in the world are cause you don’t need it inflated ilvls either it’s proven every expansion it can be done with 20 30 lower ilvls .
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Buff outdoor gear rewards plz.
Also, I would like to request that if ever I am successful at downing Hogger, I get top tier gear!
I’ve been trying for years to learn that guy’s tactics, and I just know I’m getting close to figuring him out. So… many… wipes…
I almost think if anyone but Ion was head dev, and Ion was head raid dev, Torghast would have provided gear. Ion would have been able to focus on his kind of content, raids, but the entire game would not be made with this idea of pushing people into one of the 3 pillars.
BC and Wrath were some of the best times in game, and they did not have much gear progression outside of instanced content, so if gear was the only incentive then, why were they so popular?
Fact of the matter is, the best times in game were when there was world content to do, not for gear per se, just content that people could do to take a break from the gear treadmill for a different kind of reward. When world content was added to the gear treadmill, popularity took a hit, it recovered when they made the gear or content decent, like in MoP, Legion and BFA, but took another hit when they made the gear worthless and the content boring.
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wow is alot older know and alot of the stuff it offers people are flat bored of. probably why so many just walked away from boredom. not like real new exciting things are really getting added to wow about all people have are some form of gear progression and blizz just stops anyone who don’t like endgame. i have no problem doing endgame myself but i know a bunch of people who don’t get geared best they can and quit alot cause whatever open world stuff they put in the game don’t take long. to me getting 252 cypher gear was more annoying than doing keys.
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Yeah, I am actually trying to use the time before, and likely doing pre-patch (when I am not doing the pre-patch event) to work on SL Achivments and mounts, just got 4 of the 5 rings I need for one of the nad mounts and only have torments to finish for that meta. These don’t provide gear for the most part, but it is content that can be done.
The most annoying thing? the heralds require 4 people to summon, I can likely KILL them solo but I can’t SUMMON them solo. So what is one like me to do if there is no one willing to do these things?
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The players that I personally know that spend months clearing Normal are more than happy to do world content or M+ for any gear advantage.
If casual guilds are having trouble clearing Normal, it actually helps them to have more options for getting more raw power. And if they don’t want to do world content, they will clear as many Normal bosses as they can and hope the Vault gives them something good.
It’s the Heroic and Mythic raiders that spend hours raiding each week, but balk at the idea of spending a few minutes to go out and do an emissary or calling. This is the only audience that Blizzard listens to feedback from.
I do believe that LFR participation metrics are lower when outdoor content gear rewards go up to Normal or above. Many players these days just do LFR once for a quest or to check it out, but don’t use it as a main source of progression.
Yet there will always be players who hate world content and would rather do LFR instead, and raiders who do LFR for extra shots at tier gear. LFR will always be there for those who want the actual gear rewards.
Devs need to make LFR more enticing if they want to get its metrics up, rather than force otherwise happy players into it by nuking their content in comparison.
For example, I personally would find LFR more palatable if drop rates were increased, the gold reward were increased, trash were removed, and boss fights were made shorter and more in line with dungeon bosses.
Yes, I know this sounds like I want more for doing less, but LFR hasn’t felt worth doing more than once because the rewards don’t justify the time investment when you are trying to gear up multiple alts.
Times have changed. I am not a student anymore that can play WoW all day. I have a busy personal and professional life now, and every hour is every valuable. Daily and world quests feel rewarding because you can knock them out and know exactly what you are getting.
WoW has clung tightly to its traditions, and may even do well to stick to its niche of group instanced content, but it still needs to adapt to the times. It would be arrogant and foolish for an MMO to prune away well established endgame options for such a large demographic, when those options were developed precisely because metrics were so low for the main offering.
Cata Heroics were nerfed slightly, but were still significantly harder than they were in Wrath.
And surely you remember Ghostcrawler’s official statements about the nerfs? He said that Heroic dungeons were still meant to be hard and that he wanted groups to cooperate and solve them like a puzzle.
So you got your cause and effect mixed up. Elitist players and devs thought that Wrath Heroic spam gearing was too easy, and so they made Cata Heroics harder to bring back WoW’s social aspects. But it had the opposite effect of players leaving the game, guilds falling apart, and servers dying—which is what actually led to social aspects being diminished and the devs introducing LFR so that more players could experience raids and justify their development cost.
The garrisons were indeed bait to keep casual players subbed during WoD. Raiders were happy with the good raids, but why did so many casuals leave? The only PvE content available for players outside of organized groups was LFR, and LFR in WoD didn’t even offer proper tier set bonuses or Valor as it had during MoP.
Ion’s team was trying to create a separate version of WoW for the casual players—like keeping the kiddies away from the big kids—but garrisons and neutered LFR rewards alone were nowhere near as satisfying as the accessible progression and open world content that MoP provided with every single patch.
WoD saw further social deterioration due to the simple fact that so many players were leaving guilds and servers, and there was no open world content worth doing in 6.0 or 6.1 to get players out of their garrisons and doing content together.
So again, you got your cause and effect mixed up. WoD devs tried to bring WoW back to the good old days, but it had the opposite effect. Forcing players to either raid or leave the game doesn’t magically make everyone all social again. It just leaves players in empty guilds and servers, in greater need of solo content than ever.
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Well, to be fair, the end of wrath heroic spam was a little too easy, once everyone was geared, but they were hard to begin with, before LFD came into being. The issue was people were doing the wrath spam for so long, they expected dungeons to always be that easy. I found the Cata dungeons, pre-nerf, to be about right, were they hard? sure, but were you able to overcome their difficulty with a little observation, thought and planning? YES. So while it did have the opposite effect, it was more due to how people were conditioned in late wrath and how many forget that new expansion means everything is reset, which means the content that was easy will likely be hard.
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I miss when Crowd Control was more relevant. Well, when in stuff that does not include a Timer of sorts. Then again I have not done Raids since Season 1 of Shadowlands so did that change? Because I do miss being asked “Hey Gaff, mind sheeping that mob right there to help us out?” To which I replied “Sure thing boss man.” (Bloop), Mob has been sheeped lol.
Eh, just my two coppers.
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If you are lucky, you MIGHT get a time when CC is the way to go when M0s are being done by fresh 60s looking for gear, or maybe in higher keys when lynchpin mobs (I.E. inspiring ones) are CCd while you wreck the rest of the pull before creaming the inspiring mobs.
I mean I love it if someone sheeps a caster or other ranged mob that is out of my kill zone, but I don;t expect it anymore.
I mostly Tank nowadays, but I do like having the tools to help out me allies when I can. Such as on me Rogue I would try to stun or interrupt enemy mobs that cast stuff like hex, sheep and other annoying stuff.
Or Tank wise I try to keep my self healing going to help out my Healer best I can. When I play DPS but can also side heal I would at times to help out that way as well. Each thing may not be as effective as compared to the role mainly dedicated to it be that heal, stun, such and so forth, but every little bit can help I say.
Edit: Also if what I say currently sounds a wee bit off, it is probably because it is 3:30am in the morning with only 45 minutes of sleep. My brain hates me at times.
Ion saying that open world players need to “graduate” from WQ does not mean he thought open world was in any way, shape, or form a Pillar of End-Game content. There are three pillars and open-world has never been one of them. You are misrepresenting what Ion was saying.