This is also why I’m resentful of Last Epoch. When it came out, I played a Forge Guard (like, an ACTUAL Forge Guard, not a Forge Guard with Paladin abilities like everyone else did) and while the spec was fun, it was woefully underpowered when you got the endgame.
Everyone kept talking about how much fun they were having blasting away with the other classes, like the Runemaster and Falconer (I think at least half the playerbase was playing the latter because it was so OP). Meanwhile, I was stuck between content that was either too easy, and therefore boring, or too difficult, such that I would frequently lose out on gear that I was farming as a result.
So, yeah, you cannot blame players for wanting to play decent specs that won’t gimp them at endgame. The devs really need to take balance far more seriously than they currently do.
This is honestly why I don’t understand why we have talent trees in Retail. What’s the point? All those numbers break down to basically 2 “right builds” for almost every spec, at least for DPS & Healers: Do you want to be good at single target damage/healing or multi-target damage healing.
All the other supposed options are inevitably just behind and make no sense to take.
If they got rid of talent trees and just made each class as good as they’re going to be at AOE & ST at the same time, I wouldn’t complain.
I feel so lucky to not do any real competitive content. I take what I like (usually as many passive ability choices as I can OR aesthetically pleasing ones) and roll with it.
I do not care what numbers I do. Am I alive? Is the monster dead? Rock on.
Sadly, no Warlock spec has that - there’s an optimal Single Target build and an optimal Multi-target build (which is often just 1-2 talents switched or flipped). There are so many dead talents no one takes. More to the point, it’s even worse because some Warlock specs like Aff basically cannot do AoE viably without certain talents, so it isn’t even a matter of changing them to be optimal in AoE - it’s changing them to be viable… which is just obnoxious.
“Ah crap, went into this fight with my ST build - forgot to flip 2-3 talents. Therefore I will do less damage than the tank.”
I would rather talent trees didn’t exist than have that stupidity going on.
I feel era is a better MMO, and I greatly enjoy it, but since it doesn’t get new updates and expansions (not SoD reskins) I still end up gravitating back to retail for the new dungeons and raids.
Yea there was a father on one of my posts who said the same thing. His 7 year old found retail too easy. Which is very funny because his 7 year old wasn’t even familiar with simple things like facing the right way to hit an enemy.
It’s like modern pokemon games. Even kids don’t like being treated like babies.
I’ll throw in the perspectives of a family with kids under and over ten. A family who likes to play together and enjoy story and levelling rather than dailies and repeatedly running the same dungeon for drops.
It is just too easy.
Heck, it is too easy for a seven year old, and she is terrible at basics like turning around to face the target. She loves the exploration and the world but they all think the gameplay is boring not because of rotations but because there’s no challenge. There is no risk.
And I don’t want to just be stuck in classic, I want the new story too.
They asked for Terraria instead, so they could be challenged.
I’m not going to be putting them in hardcore grinding raids to get a challenge. Nor put up with hours of being pretty much unable to die to reach 70 “where the real game begins”
I was here at the beginning, and raiding was never my focus or my objective. Wandering the world to find new quests and bits of lore was. And now skyriding is epic fun.
The world doesn’t need to super hard. It shouldn’t be a face roll with bugs for months in the dragon isles where you get invisible heals so you can’t die in combat under 70 at all! There should still be pockets of danger, things you get frightened by and avoid (oh the hogger days, lol). And if you pull too many mobs, there should be a risk reward pay off.
Without that, you are not going to pull in the next generation.
Thats devs fault, humans are driven by incentive, if raid provides best rewards and world content provides NONE, we already know what will happen. Players has no reason to explore the world.
While this is true, there is a difference between classic and retail. The scale of the game in classic is spread across all the zones from Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. Retail is 4 zones. Sizewise, the two original continents are still massive. Back then as a like 12 year old dork playing WoW, I saw that there was a map to explore. Now, because of flying mounts and the triviality of the mobs that we fight, the exploration gets finished in hours, not weeks or months. Leveling from 1 to 60, or any variation of 1 to X max level is a larger feat that requires more perseverance than “hehe let me just sit in this dungeon queue and auto rail myself to latest expansion”.
Your post is correct, but even though I am a 30 year old person now, I can go back to Classic and “min/max the fun out of it” and i’ll still be more engrossed, more immersed, and feel far more in tune with the game than I have ever felt with retail because the systems of retail don’t help you to play the game. It helps you to run the treadmill of gearing.
You log in, goof off in Dornogal, and can get mostly Heroic track gear without needing to human interact at all by running delves. You can play the entirety of the expansion while sitting in the capital city and twiddling your thumbs waiting for queues to pop for some instanced content and then you loop that forever until your checklist is crossed off and we sign off until Tuesday.
The same is true for classic, but that’s after shoving your face into countless hours leveling your character through like 35 to 40 zones, seeing every theoretical biome there is, traveling both continents at a normal pace instead of mach jesusing around on my lightning chicken. Classic WoW was an MMORPG designed to feel like a living, breathing world with it’s own limitations. Retail WoW is a gear treadmill that only is there to feed your addiction to flexing your epeen OR finding a hyper specific niche that you and your friends like to do, do it, and then log off for the week.
100% this.