(Picks self off floor.)
Why haven’t I seen this before?
No, it’s never been a good idea. But, Blizz thinks the only way to “succeed” is to make most of their game a joke to appease people that refuse to actually play. Virtually every negative change in WoW’s history has been to that end.
Just a reminder, ZG came out AFTER MC. I think it came out after BWL too.
Also none of the things you’re talking about where one raid tier gives higher rewards than the others really approaches the problem today where raid tiers get outclassed by world quests.
Well the first tier in wrath had 3 mini raids in addition to the one big raid. Also OS had the option of doing fight with drakes up for additional achievements. So between 10 and 25 man, that’s 6 different raids compared to the 4 difficulties of Uldir. And in WOTLK you were likely to attempt both 10 and 25 man of all 4 raids. Where as now most people only do 1 or 2 difficulties each week.
Not to mention the size and level of interaction with raid trash in WOTLK. Naxx was just a bigger and more interesting environment than Uldir. And all but maybe 2 fights were as unique in mechanics as fights like Mother and G’Huun. Remember taunting the 4 horsemen around the corners of the room with melee dps tanking 2 of them? The safety dance? Then you had Ulduar which was again, a huge, very visually interesting environment. And the trash was the most interesting trash I’ve seen in my WOW career. You had those fire elementals that you tanks had to kite up and down Ignis ramp cuz of fire debuff, you had a hallway full of constructs leading up to Iron Council, which you had to cc at least a couple because among the 5 mobs there were like 4 different abilities, then you had those big dudes on the walkway you had to taunt back and forth cuz of the debuff while still tanking other mobs on top of that, then in Mimiron’s hallway you had to kill bombs next to robots and then you could jump in the robots to help clear trash. The whole raid was fun and engaging, not just snoozefest trash hallways between chain pulling bosses.
If you think back to the all the raids except TOC in WOTLK, they were very engaging between boss fights. You didn’t just cash out mentally, you actually had to understand how the whole raid worked. In ICC you had those hallway chambers that would fill with gas, or the dog mini bosses.
Blizzard trimmed the fat hard. The “fat” being literally everything that was not the boss itself. And even on that point I feel like half of the bosses end up having very generic mechanics. I don’t think the difficulty of boss fights is nearly as important as creating a unique experience where the fight is engaging and fits the flavor/lore.
Then just think of the vast size of Northrend. Think of how much more dynamic and complex the stat system was. There was just a lot going on. All professions had a necessary purpose in outfitting raid teams. Even now when I go back to Northrend for a t-mog run, I feel like half the time I discover a landmark or interesting npc I didn’t know about. And I played the crap out of WOTLK. That is the kind of thing I want out of every xpac, that level of complexity, uniqueness, and space to explore.
Yes, it is a very good idea.
This is entirely false man.
You can still run WF’s, LFR, BG’s, WQ’s, Heroics ( which are scaling up in 7.1.5) and other content and be fine.
Also using Emerald Nightmare to Antorus comparison is just bad. You skipped over 3 raids in between to make an il comparison. And at that you still screwed up because people still ran EN for Legendary items in Legion.
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I’m not convinced of the validity of this statement.
WFs: You cannot run the Arathi warfront and get appropriate end-game gear now that the max ilevel is being increased. Darkshore is getting its ilevel rewards boosted, but arathi is not. This effectively makes Arathi outdated content that no longer gives appropriate rewards. Why? A ridiculous arbitrary reason. The entire purpose of having multiple warfronts operating on different schedules was to increase the probability that at least one warfront would be up for you to do (since the full rotation took about 2-3 weeks). With less of a reason to do Arathi, and no new warfront coming in to fill the void, the exact same problems that were reported during BFAs first weeks will recur.
LFR: Yeah, you can still do LFR.
… and? Uldir’s ilevel rewards aren’t getting boosted. How does the existence of LFR mean more content? I’m not entirely sure why you bring it up here.
BGs: At this point I think the reason you’re bringing up avenues of getting gear is because you think this thread is expressing a concern that the average player will be unable to gear up for the endgame if they don’t do Normal + Raiding. That’s not necessarily the case. Sure, there will always be ways of getting gear, but if you aren’t a PVPer and you enjoyed running Uldir or doing warfronts, you’re being discouraged from doing what you’ve been doing so far. In this expansion, where content is largely being seen as scarce, that’s a very bad thing to have happen.
WQs: Never a good thing to bring up in an argument where your perspective has to do with the available venues for ilevel gearing. Many players find WQs to be dull, repetitive, grinds.
Also, I’m not sure what the complaint about the EN-Antorus comparison is meant to accomplish here. If anything, it only illumiantes the problem BFA has with making its own content obsolete, because you can’t get legendary items from older raids; legs don’t exist! that might actually solve much of the problems if they did!
Speaking of obsolete Content, can we say something about the Island Expeditions and the insane drop rate?
I need people to vote on my question about Dubloons because I need the answer from Ion himself so I can stare at his smug little face and watch him try to dodge the question.
I want that awkward silence, this is your punishment, ION!
None of the credit for Naxx goes to Wrath. They literally ported a vanilla raid and adjusted the color on the gear.
Also it was 2 additional mini raids at launch with maly and Sarth. Both in horribly uninspiring locations, although at least 3 drake sarth was fun (because the rest of the tier was trash).
And the difficulty of it would be like normal now, except there was no heroic or mythic to do. You just sat around because the hardest difficulty was a joke.
The 3rd mini raid was onyxia (surprise reskin again!) Which was part of the ToC raid tier.
Ulduar and ICC were pretty cool.
You also failed to mention how ICC released over 2 months, 1 wing at a time, with shared limited attempts on all the end wing bosses. And since you needed an Arthas kill to start heroic guilds just sat on their thumbs for 2 months waiting. And them again, 10 attempts per end wing boss because lol.
I believe what was meant is that WoW, nor Blizzard alone form the stock pricing for ATVI. We are talking a corporation that has over 20 subsidiaries in which profits from WoW form a portion of.
It is illogical to state that a 50% share drop in a corporation that large comes from a single entity, never mind a single portion of a single entity.
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Content difficulty, scaling, and progression.
I will admit that given the current state of the game and how it is coming to work, there is not much defence of why having scaling raids couldn’t be an option.
However it is still feasible to form a defence on why it shouldn’t be an option. Unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of time to compose my thoughts behind my opinions, however I’ll still briefly make a couple of statements.
Firstly, it encourages players to participate in the new content. WoW is becoming more and more a game about ilvl or gear. It is entirely irrelevant where you get that gear, as long as your gear keeps improving. Without having that gear incentive, there are a large portion of players who will simply ignore the content.
“I have higher gear, why would I do it?” Mentality.
Hence why warfronts have such ludicrously one time quests each cycle.
Secondly, population distribution. In order to allow more people to access content there has to be groups available to do so. As per the first point reducing the incentive to do one form of content you increase the likelihood of performing the rewarding activity, you funnel players together giving them a larger pool of potential teammates.
Thirdly, it creates a story. It makes sense for us to be fighting stronger and stronger enemies. I feel this is something that WotLK did really well (which is why it was so beloved even if it introduced some design issues), whereas later expansions have started to fall short and that is creating a big bad.
Even aside from the questing, and dungeon which progressed the story, the raids also were very strong in representing not just a new challenge, but instead the steps we needed to take as characters to get to the point in which we could defeat the Lich King.
Who is the big bad for BfA? Game wise it’s super unclear, is it the Alliance? Is it the Horde? Nope it’s probably N’zoth. “N’zoth?” you say? Yes indeed, that character who has not been referenced once in the entire expansion up to date.
Previous story telling we would felt like we needed to improve our strength to face this foe which is why raids should have progression.
Fourthly, progression. It gives you a target to aim for, something WoW is missing at the moment. Pre-2008 WoW had a way of really making you feel progression, you wanted to get better and you wanted to get stronger. That’s where you got all this cool gear you saw in your main cities, that’s how you got to tackle these stronger bosses, it was immersive. You didn’t do it because you were going to get an additional 15 ilvls on your ring. You did it because it felt meaningful to you, and the end result was you stood amongst a community of like minded individuals who had also made the climb with you.
Finally, balancing. It becomes an issue to balance multiple pieces of content to ensure, not only that they are relevant, but that the difficulty curve is kept intact.
Players and scaling don’t follow the same power curve, a lot of player power especially later in expansions occurs exponentially. You reach new break points, your secondaries interact better with each other or with your skills, and you become far more powerful than the expected increase.
This means you can’t apply a flat increase to content to scale it, you need to retune it over, and over, and over again. The more raids are current, the more adjustments required.
Just to clarify as well with BfA, I know people are saying there is little enjoyable content. However the content in general has not changed, there has only been more added. What is different is there is very litte rewarding content, because systems like Titanforging, and gear floods remove value from rewards.
The game is becoming gear roulette. There are so many “free” ways of acquiring even high level gear, instead of feeling rewarding when you get a piece, you instead just get 5 pieces a day and hope that one of them is good for you.
I like how in Wrath they brought in dungeons mid-expansion that had higher difficulty and item level, like the Forge of Souls series. This kept the old dungeons still relevant for new 80s, and you weren’t allowed to progress in the new ones until you beat the first that unlocked the next, etc. This type of progression keeps start-of-expac dungeons worthwhile for some and gives the players something new to experience.
Blizzard must think that merely bumping up the item level in an existing dungeon is going to make us want to run them, even though most of us are already past 340 in item level. Wouldn’t most of you rather have NEW content to experience than what they are proposing? They are not even making them harder to reflect the increased reward.
Also, in Wrath they made older dungeons still relevant by rewarding you with a weekly badge cap that you could then use to choose a piece of gear to help you get that one piece you haven’t been able to get otherwise due to bad RNG. This type of system is much more desirable than what we are getting now. We would get new content and more choice.
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My main stopped doing lfr over a month ago. My alts probably only completed it once. So personally for me at least, its already outdated and not worth repeating.
We can argue about the level of difficulty in Wrath raids all day, although again, I don’t think the difficulty is the most important factor. Also, VOA was the third mini raid in wrath, not Onyxia.
The real rub is this. Blizz should not be telling people that they shouldn’t be spending 8,10,12 whatever hours a week in raid. Whether you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing, Blizz has greatly simplified a lot of the elements of the game. Turning raiding into a one dimensional experience is one of those moves. For whatever reason it seems like M+ has become their new baby. I’m not saying anything is wrong with that.
But I think rather than force a single pattern of play onto all players but the most free-spirited casuals, they should instead have provided a depth of content for people who like to sit in raid for 12 hours a week. And a depth of content for those who would rather chain M+ , and then let players decide what to do with their time.
Sure maybe a lot of Wrath was not very difficult, and maybe the first raid was a reskin, fair enough. But it’s just plain fact that Blizz has greatly simplified trash across the board to where it’s just chain pulling snoozefest. And that choosing not to overlap tiers at all (like the OP mentioned) significantly reduces raid content out there.
There is this idea out there that raiding is like a chore to just knock out and move on to other stuff. But I think that is mostly for unguilded solo players. There is a huge population of people who play with guilds or friends who view it the exact opposite, with raiding as their primary activity, and everything else as chores. In a couple previous xpacs I think Blizz did a pretty good job catering to both crowds. And now it seems they are pandering more and more to the person who “doesn’t want to be stuck in raid 8 hrs a week”
This isn’t World of Warcraft obviously this is world of current patch content and everything else is invisible… except that name is too long so we will stick to WoW
Yes, I liked that too. It gave you a progression system to work through. Now we just have an excel sheet in which we are one input.