Maybe? He has his thumb on some shared pain points though. I don’t hate M+ but I do hate great vault and think a lot of downstream problems emerge because of how M+ is codified in the current model.
I laughed pretty hard at the treadmill with the broken belt analogy. Lived experience laughing hard there! Both with a physical treadmill and with a 5 hour BRD Emperor run gone sideways… there’s no way I could make the time for that sort of thing today.
I think Mists of Pandaria had it right: Slow down life is to be savored.
A LOT of the design today all seems to revolve around the ‘go go go’ mentality. You can see the game has, as an above poster mentioned, evolved into a simpler and easier to get into game over the years. Less naunced things like hit, expertise, armor penetration, spell hit, or whatever have been removed that were once also kind of in the way of you being able to get into a raid faster after meeting certain gear checks. But it didn’t stop there, from the streamlining of secondary stats, enchancts, gem slots, and more less was better. I think that over time we all go tired of the things that seemed redundant and were required for things like raiding.
After having to change gear we had to regem, enchant, and so forth and so that kind of changed over the years to be a bit simpler. Even dungeon and raid design and requiring a certain amount of interrupts, cc, and so forth to better control the flow of the damage output was adjusted. Things today are so sped up that the only place you probably see this is in high end M+, even in +15s or so I don’t see any cc going out it’s kind crazy. People don’t want to slow down they want to be able to nuke things down fast unlike the methodical actions in the past.
And so with that I guess I can shorten my point is that everything in the game from a design standpoint has seemed to evolve to this faster paced action rpg design moving wow away from the pure rpg aspects it once was. You can see this more nowadays when streamers or esports gamers have the camera so zoomed out it even looks like an arpg. This is the core problem of the game overall. It evolved too much to one side i think and altered too much what it once was. This is probably why you see people splitting off into classic or FFXIV because at least there the core fantasy rpg aspects are still alive in them. Even though you can zerg through it the game was designed differently.
So with that said I think the core game fundamentally has to shift. Perhaps even shift as radically as it did from Wrath, which is somewhat comparable to todays playstyle, to Cataclysm design overall. It needs to slow you down, healers need to triage heal, tanks can’t tank everything and have to better manage aggro, things need to be interrupted, bosses even in heroics can 2/3 shot you, and so forth. They tried to slow people down a bit in SL but they didn’t go far enough because we all had so much power creep. Now is the best time to reign in on this without the super power creep from borrowed power.
Am I making sense?
Edit: In closing I’d argue that M+ has only made this game more into an ARPG over time and has helped ruin the RPG aspects that were once so core to the game. So much so everything was affected by it including raiding.
The move from chest to vault was IMHO a really good move on blizzard’s part since it encouraged players to do a lot of different things while also giving them a lot of choices; there are of course people who think they have to go 9/9 but that should be seen as the exception, not the rule.
I remember running Maraudon back in BC. That bastard took like 6+ hours and I was at the point where I was trying to evaluate how much Green’s vs crafting mats were beneficial to me as I ran out of space really early.
“Exploding with content”? I just can’t with comments like this anymore.
Dude, the content that has launched, has been some of the most bare-bones, by the numbers crap they have ever released to date. All it has been, is farming rares and a bunch of soulless grinds. BORING!!!
Hunts, Time rifts, races, Zserka, djaridin keep, primal storms… this is a hell of a lot more content then players had in previous expansions kid.
LOL Maraudon /shudder
While going 9/9 every week isn’t needed, getting bracers two weeks in a row when you’re already sitting in capped ones is enough emotional frustration to quit for a whole season.
And when you’re at +16, you have to do Heroic to see the same vault yield. It’s at that point the “fun, gamey” experience turns into that obvious chore with a big lack of control over progression.
I’m unable to pinpoint exactly when this started happening to me as well, but it’s definitely something that didn’t occur when I was younger. Now I embrace it and eat before bedtime.
A lot of that content to me feels more like a prepatch expansion event. They can definitely be fun, but I’d be happier to see more content like the vault in forbidden reach honestly, or scenarios in the world, or anything new that doesn’t just feel like a bunch of reskinned prepatch events.
It seems like they spend a good majority of their time in dev on this game catering to the more hardcore crowd and giving the dirty casual softcore/midcore crumbs in content. In fact, I think I just clearly saw the entire focus of the game.
Oh believe me I get that; like I got so many cloaks and bracers back in BFA that I inferred that I could one shot Ghuun by stacking them into a pillar and pushing them over onto him.
And we’ll get more as time goes on. I can’t promise that they’ll be amazing or such but they will come with time. Like hell: we got forbidden reach as a sub patch so it’s not unreasonable to infer that we won’t get more.
Again: Wow has pretty much always been about what happens in the newest content which after an expansion is going to cater to players at 70 and by extension how you gear and what you choose to do. That you think this wasn’t the case at some point in the past is largely self delusion.
Yes, and there’s no placing that genie back in its bottle. It’s very clear that Diablo 3 being reworked with bounties and rifts saved that game. Blizzard replicated that success into WoW most strikingly during Legion when World Quests were built into the core game.
I think there’s something to be said though when playing, because the result of gearing is being able to drive big numbers and allows you to take off the limits to really “go fast”. Whenever given the opportunity to crawl or find a fast, fun pace, I will try to figure out the fast, fun pace. That is intrinsic to MMOs…
The entire community is built on efficiency. From the ground up, the person who hits level cap first is revered or reviled because of their efficiency and dedication. We can gripe and moan about “no life” or “probably account sharing” all day, but through all that grief (toxicity) we’re still fundamentally jealous or angry about someone else’s accomplishments.
That’s messed up.
What I look for within the game is cooperation. I would be the World of Warcraft’s biggest hypocrite if I didn’t actively stop myself from being that selfish. I like to tell myself that I hate competition, yet at every opportunity, I find myself looking for ways to compete with myself and with others subtly. I run meters but I don’t post them. I try to optimize (to an extent) to get a “atta boy” from my clan. I love competition, as long as nobody says I’m competing with anyone. Because above competition, I place cooperation. But both of these can exist, and I believe both must exist to maximize satisfaction.
But the actual issue there is that gaming has gotten far less social over the past three decades and has become far more personal. My skill says something about me, not my network. I should be using Discord or Twitch or YouTube to be constantly studying the broadest and most successful communities to emulate them, instead of promoting my in-group and learning and growing with them. To be completely transparent, Blizzard has no tools to fix this though they should share the ethical responsibility for it.
It’s a big problem. No game changes will bring about a renaissance. It starts with small, intentional interaction you and I choose to have every time we boot up the game. When you do a dungeon, use the chat. Even if you talk to yourself and the BR servers you’re playing with can’t read English. Be consistent and work to improve that mentality. If everyone who cared about this earnestly and honestly tried, gaming would look radically different, and radically better.
Really? Then why wait to release LFR raids over time? Why wait to release Dawn of the infinite to the heroics dungeon running crowd? Why add things like a farm to manage in MoP in the past, or Torghast at your own difficulty you can do solo and as softcore or hardcore as you want, or Horrific Visions, or any number of other very laid back much more softcore/midcore focused chill content? Contrary to popular belief this game isn’t all about the hardcore raiders, leet M+ pushers, and gladiators of pvp. Those have now definitely been there for years and years but the game does not revolve around them and never should.
This game is first and foremost for everybody and it seems by design it is exclusive rather than inclusive.
You can literally do all of those things. You just choose not to.
I regret that I have only one like to give.
Of course I could go back and do them til I’m blue in the face, but they aren’t new content. Torghast is years old and likely doesn’t scale, plus I already mastered it. I mastered Horrific Visions and did that when it was a thing. I could go back and do them ad naseum but they aren’t new content.
Even pvp’ers are getting the shaft with 0 new epic bgs or bgs at all. They get a new arena once in awhile oh joy, and guess who does arenas? THE HARDCORE PLAYERBASE…
It’s digustingly sad that Blizzard caters to the very people that don’t give a crap about their game at all. They make money off it and it’s like seeing two leeches sucking on each other trying to see how much blood they can extract from each other while ignoring literally anything else.
That is why this game is dying.
No. I meant The raid or Dawn of the Infinites.
You can do these things right now. Hell in the time since you’ve started posting you could have had multiple full clears on normal Abberus and maybe even Dawn of the Infinites.
You choose not to. Maybe it’s because raiding isn’t your jam, you are socially awkward or you are intimidated by the difficulty associated with Dawn. Which if that is how you feel is perfectly fine and I don’t take anything away from you for since I strongly feel that everyone should be able to play this game and pursue their goals as they see fit.
And beyond that, I’m going to explain the challenge of Dawn.
It’s the mechanics. Like the bosses have mechanics that require you to get them right consistently or it’s going to pretty consistently get you murdered (possibly your fellow players as well) with the biggest hurdles being a couple of bosses with weird mechanics or one raw DPS check during the fight with Iridikron. And for that you get 437 gear along with Aspect tokens (the best upgrade item in the game atm).
As to why this game is “dying” (which it has been doing for for then a decade 
) the reality is that the entire genre has been shrinking for ages and despite that WoW is still pretty much king of the hill despite what the asmon fan boys will try and convince you.
You are right this is content I can chose to do and even will likely try to do. I have even already joined Abberus pugs in the past and helped kill some bosses on normal mode. But again my point was not regarding this type of content, but rather the entire game and how it seems to be designed currently.
I will say the devs have started to try, as I think I mentioned above, to help with the crests and upgradeable gear. As well as easing down of the difficulty of raids in normal and heroic even which is a great start. But imo there’s still a lot missing that could exist for players like myself. I do however enjoy time rifts and other bits of catch up content, as well as story content when released.
I did also go a bit overboard with the dying statement, but alas when the company doesn’t even release sales numbers for its expansion let alone sub numbers something is probably wrong.
The game feels like a job anymore.
Unfortunately blizzard has officially broke my heart…and there no going back.
Ilvl has existed all the way since Vanilla, actually, and was never a secret to my understanding (it was first made part of the default UI during late Wrath - or was it the beginning of Cata? - due to being a requirement to queue in Dungeon Finder, but it’s always been exposed to the Addon API, things like Auctioneer would tell you ilvls without problem, unless it was actually re-calculating the ilvl from the stats but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case or things like trinkets would presumably have been wildly inaccurate).
What was a problem in early WoW - and becomes a problem off and on depending on the stat weights in a given expansion pack - was that ilvl (being merely a function of the stat totals on the item) only somewhat tracked with the actual relative usefulness of an item (this disconnect was even worse in TBC, where the ilvl math was different according to whether an item was green, blue, or purple: e.g., quest and dungeon greens and blues in Outland ranged up to ilvl 115, while the starter epics at level 70 were ilvl 100 despite being generally overall much better items. It wasn’t till Wrath that we even got the modern system where stat total was strictly based on ilvl regardless of rarity color).
So you had way too many cases where an actually-better item had a lower gearscore. If you were smart and wore the item with 40 stat points that all helped you, you were considered a weaker invite than the person who wore one with only 25 helpful, but 50 total stat points. But nobody ever listened to that stuff. Gearscore was gospel, even though it was actually inferior to reporting to the Orgrimmar Bank Roof for inspection.
Since then, some xpacs have handled it better than others, generally as a function of how heavily mainstat (because this always tracks with ilvl regardless of the secondaries) is weighted in a given expansion (it’s also why FF has fewer gearscore related issues; besides the much tighter ilvl brackets per tier, it has essentially always weighted mainstat and weapon damage - both of which track strictly to ilvl - to the point that such “lower ilvl item is better” inversions are almost nonexistent, and generally new tiers rebalance to eliminate such things).
The trouble with that is that the lesson learned is that secondary stats, which give gearing any real thoughtful interest in the first place, more or less have to be kept so muted as to be near-irrelevant to actively think about (other than perhaps Haste due to its effect on rotational timings) in order to satisfy the portion of the community that gamifies everything into quick metrics.
And it’s doubtless part of why there’s been so much conflict in the community for so many years: not everyone agrees with the “gamify everything into quick snap judgment metrics” mentality, but any such disagreement is brushed off with “c’est la vie” learned helplessness at best, and an assumption of bad faith (i.e., of people who actually shouldn’t currently be in content xyz trying to sneak in by attacking the selection criteria) at worst …
I think you are on to something here too. The Great Vault seems to be in particular consistently used as an excuse to be more parsimonious about loot earned during actual content. “You’re guaranteed one decent ilvl item from the vault, so stop whining!”
Also massively increasing the effort-level culturally required of players each week in turn, at that (“You need to be doing all these keys, the raid, and enough PVP every week or you don’t have the right to complain that your gear is falling behind” sentiments). Instead of letting you focus on the type of content you like, as advertised, it essentially requires you to do everything … including stuff that your character isn’t well suited for at that, which means you will naturally not readily be invited to it and need to purchase a boost if you want to fill in that row usefully … and yes, “spending the money on boosts” is considered “effort” by much of this dysfunctional community. Don’t have the money? Then you haven’t put enough effort into RL hustling and that’s apparently part of WoW now?! I thought we played this to get away from RL hustle and bustle, not to capstone it).
Similarly, I get the impression that Timewalking (at least, the weekly quest goodie bag part of it, TW itself with the badges and long-term mount goal etc. can stay) and the Mythic Dungeon Week event might need to go as well. (In fact, these are even worse, because if you don’t hit cap on a given character in time for all the season’s TW and MDW events - or, again, if you get unlucky on the goodie bags - you will be tarred with the “well, you see, your gear is kinda low” brush then too …)
They ARE pug friendly now, if you are good at the game. So the solution is prolly just get better.
Would you want the same quality gear? Cuz imo if this was the case, i would say no tier unless it is challenge mode.
Nah, these were lame. Pointless time dumps. More raids would be cool tho.
If you want to set your own pace, there are other gsnes for that. Of which, WoW is not one of.