I feel like a lot of peoples ilvl complaints come from not really knowing where drake crests come from and getting stuck in the 412-417 ilvl range because they can’t upgrade their veteran pieces fast enough, alongside not engaging with private crafting orders.
Yep and it’ll give terrible loot and be heavily nerfed into the ground. It’s difficulty splintered across 20 tiers of mythic plus where you literally have to run the harder versions to actually see the mechanics.
I mean maybe people do casually run heroic dungeons but they are basically more worthless gear wise than anything else. You do them a few times to maybe help an alt get a piece or two and that’s it. Unless there’s something I’m missing.
So then you have to do organized mythic plus where you have to group up with people that also don’t care about you like in RDF, pull like it’s heroic, and with little to no coordination cause you are expected to know everything before you enter the zerg fest. It’s not compelling gameplay it’s annoying and obnoxious gameplay. Not to mention all the grief you have to endure because of it like people dropping keys, trolling, or whatever else.
M+ was a cool concept that was interesting in 2016 or so, but nowadays it’s just a leaderboard chasing semi-esport and it makes the game feel worse off for it. Further fostering the go go go now behavior of the community and reaching new heights of absuridity. Before we have Heroic and no affixes and the dungeons were still hard and you could get loot off of each boss. You didn’t jump through hoops for a zergfest to end up at the end with nothing but gold for 2/3 runs.
It’s also weird cause you can just do a +15 and get 437/441 loot even if you fail every week. But it’s not a great feeling either as it just makes the difficulty seem like a joke. The loot just becomes an uninteresting stepping stone via ilevel to keep pushing higher and higher and for what?
Raids, unless you’re lucky enough to be playing with family and friends that want to play, are not usually interesting due to the community. Strange parsing and overanalyzing of peoples playstyles all testing to see if you press all your buttons perfectly. I’m pretty sure parsing wasn’t meant to be a weapon used against others but a tool to help players get better. Also, most of the community seems to have zero patience so if you take too long or wipe 1/2 x they all quit without a word. “Bye person I never knew who just flew off into the nether like hundreds before you.”
Idk I can probably keep going but there’s really something missing about WoW. I have a feeling that ever since they added in the Mythic raiding tier of difficulty this community has only doubled down on the elitism. So again it’s the haves vs the have nots. The people that are hardcore focused on Mythic raiding mostly and M+ to get gear and beat the Mythic raid don’t seem to care at all about anything else in the game. They are there for the raiding aspect mostly and nothing else. Kind of nuts if it’s designed so hard that you have to play that way as well or you won’t get anywhere.
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Come to Vanilla Classic, it is exploding right now.
I love this game, they have given all the expansions away for free now except the latest expansion.
There is a stat squish and a new class coming soon as well. They added several new low level zones as well, great time to level.
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I want to try this game because I keep expanding my Tolkien lore but I’m just kinda over the third age because it’s be explored in so many ways because of how Chris Tolkien setup the deals. Kinda wanting more First or Second age, and no I don’t think RoP is really at fault here considering the story details they need are in Untold Tales, and the Simarilion and Chris refused to give any of that up.
Here’s hoping that time and big paychecks weaken the estate’s hardline stance so we can get some more TV, Movies, and Video Games set in the first and second age with the actual source material being allowed to be used.
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Did enjoy those. Mostly because you didn’t necessarily need a tank or heals to do them. Sure, it was nice if you did group, or get grouped with one, or the other, but they were not needed for the most part.
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The game actually does an amazing job at expanding on Middle Earth in the third age. The Tolkien estate gave the company a decent amount of leeway with the IP. The game devs have done an amazing job at keeping the game lore friendly, though.
The only addition I remember causing some uproar was when they added the Runekeeper class. The class is range magic class that can heal or dps. The dps skills are magic based, and this kind of was skirting the lore a lot. Fun class to play though.
Lotro has some of the best classes I have ever played in a MMO. Their group sizes are 6 man, which gives supports in that game a spot. The classes are really unique.
My main is a Minstrel, healer/dps that plays instruments to heal and cast spells on targets. It is a riot to play. The game has like over 20 instruments as well, all of them offering different effects for the Minstrel.
WoW’s class design has been so stagnant over the years, mainly due to the extreme focus on the competitive difficulties. Hard to create and balance unique specs around the limited group sizes, and the niche systems like M+. There are 39 specs in the game now, and a lot of them don’t feel very unique, or they lack the utility needed in the harder content.
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It is easier to gear up now than it has ever been in the entire history of WoW. Also, nobody is forcing you to gear up with M+. You can do your one raid a week and one of each mythic dungeon and then wait until next week to try to get more gear instead of being able to infinitely farm and craft it all up so that you can play the game then move on to other things once you’ve had your fill until the next major content patch comes out.
You need 1 whelp crest per slot to get everything to 408. You get 2-4 drake crests a week from weekly content with the opportunity to farm way way more, you get a 424 spark item every 2 weeks that backdates and 2 free upgrades for those items to 437 (campaign and Loamm rep) and world content offers avenues to 424 catalyzable tier with a deterministic vendor.
Wow. This seems like so much fun. It was so fun to read, too.
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As opposed to the old days of do heroic dungeons for 187-200s and if you want higher ilvl without raiding then kick rocks?
You can literally reach the ilvl that world first raiders cleared mythic without doing anything more than normal, and out gear heroic without doing a single raid at all.
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I wonder sometimes how the playerbase would feel if we still had Mythic+ and Mythic dungeons but they weren’t part of the gear grind. Instead they dropped cosmetic items.
That’s kinda how it works in FFXIV
In FFXIV -
LFR Mode = does not exist
Normal Mode = accessible to everyone. This is the canon story.
Heroic = “Savage” is more difficult and needs dedicated groups. This version of the story is presented as fanfiction written by a bard.
Mythic = “Ultimates” are also presented as fanfiction and what-if scenarios. They award titles and cosmetic weapons. Gear does not drop from Ultimates. If you are doing Ultimates at all, you don’t need the gear.
I should note that FFXIV raids are different than WoW ones. There are “Alliance Raids” which involve more people and work like WoW raids in that you are moving through a big dungeon and killing adds and bosses. The Coils of Bahamut were kinda like this too but with fewer adds and one boss per “turn” of the coil. Then after that most non Alliance raids were just single rooms with a boss. So what I’m saying is that at all levels of difficulty FFXIV raids take up way less of your time.
…Ultimate encounters can still go on for half an hour though.
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They would hate it.
It literally would break their minds.
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Content back them didn’t need M+ or Raiding gear to do. Everything scales now which is Blizzards way of forcing people to cry for higher gear.
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How so? An actual solo player can still be better geared than in vanilla and pretty untouchable in solo content.
If I swing through elwynn I don’t think the level 10s will be much of a challenge.
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I do agree world scaling has had a negative impact on the relevance / feel of ilvl progression and id like to see it toned down or removed, I do not however think that necessarily justifies feeling like the current system does not provide sufficient ilvl to feel content progression as a whole.
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It would cut into their M+ carry sales.
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Maybe I don’t speak to that because it’s just not my scene.
I really think that the game is just in niche mode now. It’s essentially just a speedrun game when you boil it down and you can’t break from that cycle because you have about 700-1.2 million active players who revolve around that.
You’re just too far gone down this road without any actual vision of how to expand or add to the game. To me having played MMOs since UO and EQ this is what WoW is now it’s just a speed run competition and that’s it.
The only thing going to change here is when MS changes the business model to meet their goals, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen as MS is probably more concerned with figuring out how to further monetize King, CoD, and OW. WoW to them is just a brand that has a self sufficient model so why disrupt it so long as costs remain relative and profit is still up.
Now if they’re exploring another MMORPG I can see them implementing a different system because it would be extremely stale to repeat it on an updated engine, but that’s for MS to decide. But as long as Bobby, and Mike are at the helm it’s not gonna change, so no use in fighting it. It’s clear the game just isn’t living up to your expectations and you probably should just move on.
I totally forgot I had a sub until last week so I cancelled and will be getting engrossed in BG3 and SF when they drop.
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I think the player base might even be smaller than this. I think SL did some real dmg to the game and the IP.
I think Blizzard is starting to realize that making the game this sweaty wasn’t the best for their bottom line. They’re trying to right the ship, but they don’t have the resources it seems to fix this issue promptly.
Edit: It is a fine line to walk for them now, they can’t afford to lose the tryhards that love repeating 8 dungeons over and over again, by implementing any changes that would disrupt their fun.
On the other hand, I think they lost a ton of their casual player base over the last 2 expansions mainly due to how focused the game is on competitive content. They know they need to service this audience, but I don’t think the current developers understand this part of the player base at all.
They have been bringing in new people, like the woman that worked on EQ, to try to fix the damage, along with Metzen to help fix the lore and the story.
I think they’re actively trying to bring in new faces that aren’t just raiders/M+/arena junkies.
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Nah see–I don’t see that.
I think narratively they were trying to fix the flaws of SL. They openly admitted to that.
They were also trying to cut down on the chores you had to do that didn’t offer actual gameplay experience. Hence why Dragonriding is a thing.
They did cite that the sweatiness of chores is what they wanted to cut down on, but not the sweatiness of the actual combat mechanics. The narrative pushed out by almost all the content creators is WoW’s combat is good, but the stuff you need to do to get to the good stuff was too much. Which kinda missed the point.
Now we’re watching content creators go back to the well again and start citing well maybe the game is too complex for people. You’re seeing more complaints on add-ons, and rotations, but I still don’t think that’s the root. They’re totally symptoms, but not the cause.
But this is largely irrelevant from my standpoint as I said earlier the game is what it is, that’s a giant dungeon/raid lobby based around speed runs. I’d recommend based on your posts you experiment with more survival, open world (like Bethesda, not Dark Souls “RPG”), and CRPGs because they seem to be more in line with what you’re looking for.
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In my case (with my only max character who is sitting at about that): I just don’t have the energy to farm the same content every single week (or do dailies every day) anymore.
I’ve been sitting there for a while.
I just go at my own pace now though. I’ll probably go farm it next expac or when I can solo it.
Game seems to be funner that way. I don’t even try to get into non-queued groups because they seem to always want a higher ilvl than I have.
Heck, I just figured out that I’ve been playing Twibiju wrong for years at this point. Now I’m all thrown off because I’m used to playing her a certain way that’s fun for me.
I wouldn’t subject myself to that humiliation nor anyone else. Queued content, no one seems to notice, since unless I die, no one really cares (I make to say something in chat though so they know it wasn’t on purpose).
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