What annoyed me about cata heroics is doing a random pug you’d get anything and at the start CC mattered so if you got a dungeon which benefited from a lot of CC but your team didn’t really have any like Poly, Sap, Frost Trap, Entangling roots, then have fun burning mobs down and dying and burning another mob down and dying lol
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If I recall correctly there will be an emissary like system in SL, it’s just not going to be as it is currently implemented.
So i wouldn’t worry too much about them not having a higher world content reward system.
I would expect this to be right if they do decide to change something.
The main issue with LFR now is that they really increased the quality of world quest reward items which while nice for players also makes the LFR rewards lack lustre.
Why do LFR for 445 gear when instead you can just do 4 world quests? It’s kind of the problem with accessibility of gear. Ultimately if something is easier (which is typically is by removing the need to rely on other people) but still has equal rewards it becomes the default option.
I know people like being able to do solo content and get decent gear rewards, I certainly understand that but the unfortunate situation of modern WoW is that by allowing that it makes other rewards so much more insignificant.
All the way until WoD (and a bit of Legion because it wasn’t quite as bad as it is in BfA) heroic dungeons counted as end game progression for a lot of more casual players, as was LFR because that is where they could continue to progress.
People would get to max level, do some normals and get gear, jump into heroics and get gear, and jump into LFR to get gear.
But now the process is streamlined and much easier into hit max level and do WQs with scaling rewards, then hand in emissaries.
This whole process is also infinitely worse with TF/WF as it grants another way to invalidate available rewards.
Honestly that’s why a deterministic tiered reward system works. Now should solo players have access to good gear? Absolutely.
But it shouldn’t be as easy as world quest content, and honestly that is where things like Visions did a great job, and I can imagine other similar things like visions or mage tower doing so in the future. Offering challenging solo player content that grants good rewards.
Heck visions currently reward one of the best ilvls rewards in game. It only falls short of mythic raiding and completing a +15 for your weekly chest and even then only by 5 ilvls.
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They won’t remove LFR.
IMO, the main issue with these systems are rooted in social interactions. If you watch clips of GM Players in Overwatch, a lot of them play against each other often. (By virtue of the pool of players being smaller.)
I think it’d be interesting if they made a priority queue based off players from your realm. (You get into a virtual group with players from your realm, and if your group fills out the roster, you get a queue pop). After 5min, your virtual group could be dropped into the larger pool. (Sometimes like that, just spitballing.)
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I mean that is the unfortunate truth, although honestly I believe lack of difficulty propagates a system that doesn’t incentivizes players to grow as well.
Personally I think it’s pretty insulting to players in general to say “we don’t think you’re capable of doing this so we’ve made it impossoble to fail”. Like to me that’s pretty condescending.
I honestly believe that players have the ability to grow to overcome those challenges, but ultimately as I’ve been told some people just aren’t interested in improving.
They want to be able to play the game half engaged whilst doing something else which is also a fair point. We can’t hold everyone to our own standards or expect them to react the same way we do 
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My only issues with visions was how intimidating it was due to the all or nothing feel of it and how much you had to risk. It took a lot to earn those tokens to run the visions, and you had to beat the boss to get the loot. Making it scary to really do anything but just go right for the main objective because you didn’t want to lose the chance at loot. idk. Honestly I quit early so not super sure if how the system felt like it worked actually worked that way or not. The entire process was just too frustrating. I would of liked it more if it wasnt so bloody hard to earn a chance at going for the loot. Losing an entire week just sucked balls.
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Technically, no. But, in the immortal words of South Park, “Let me tell you how it works in the real world”:
WoW is designed around the “gear chase” model. If people don’t have gear to chase, they quit. And if you put the gear behind content they don’t want to do, they quit.
So yes, WoW needs to make gear progression available to every person they want to stay subscribed. If that means that “scubs” get to eventually earn good gear, the elites will have to just swallow that. Or WoW goes the way of Wildstar.
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This has to be a top 5 repeated thread since Dragon Soul.
Not sure if that will happen. WoW has something Wildstar didn’t. A group of people that are already deeply invested into the game. It’s super hard to just pull away from a character or account you invested a lot of time in.
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$15/month doesn’t mean you deserve the best gear. If you want better gear, do more challenging content.
Don’t be afraid of wiping. Failure is expected, no one is born with infinite knowledge and physical perfection. Just learn and get better over time.
No one cares if casuals get good gear, they care if their efforts are made moot.
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I’m surprised that they would want to go away with it honestly. It’s a great way for the more casual player base to get to see the dungeons and raids. Along with if it didn’t exist then people would hardly ever step into heroics about a couple weeks after the new raid comes out for the expansion.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think the cost of entry was a bit high on visions, and having it be such a large number (even if acquisition was also large) makes it feel more significant.
Like why 10k? Could have easily been 1k which would feel a lot more affordable instantly.
But 10k is like man what if I mess it up, then I gotta grind another 10k and that is huge etc
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Well if it happens I’ll be done. I’ll just play the story out, check some stuff out, and bounce out to something else. It had a nice run. I’m not going back to the raid or die days.
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Hey friend, long time no see.
What happened to your colour btw? I saw you typing and thought it was you, but didn’t recognise when the post came up white.
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It will just take longer, but WoW is not unkillable.
There is a limit to what kind of content people will subject themselves to.
This is part of what killed WoD.
If you want people to stay, you have to give them content they want to do and rewards to chase.
Remove either of those, and those people go away.
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part of the reason I never levelled up my cloak past 8.
Took to long to enter visions and then it doesnt go as planned.
I failed my first 2 and reached a point where I need to do 2 visions per upgrade which is so not happening
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True but I’m not sure if WoW is going to die from anything it’s done. I think it’s more likely to die just due to entropy. Heck WoW is already past the age where it should of died out. 15 years is a long long long time for a video game to remain active.
If LFR is removed, raiding participation will decrease by half.
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I largely doubt they will ever scrap LFR, even though I don’t think LFR has ever served all that great of a purpose and it really should never have been introduced.
What people forget is that LFR was introduced in Cataclysm solely because Blizzard ripped the rug out from underneath the casual raiding playerbase. Guilds that messed around in WoTLK and cleared the easy mode raids suddenly went into Cata and were smacked around like rag dolls, not even really joking. I knew a guild from TBC that did Kara, Mag’s, Gruul’s, some ZA, etc and then in WoTLK did their 10 man raiding including killing the LK. Come Cata they got like two bosses down and just barely at that. They didn’t make it to Firelands.
So they introduced LFR because they had created a problem and the casual raiders were alienated from the game now. Except, if you all remember, Blizzard introduced Flex Mode by the end of MoP which eventually became our normal mode. Why did they do that? Because LFR failed its intended purpose. Yes, they had given us a raid that, save for a few wall-like bosses, was basically doable and even introduced determination to help push bosses down eventually but LFR failed to bring back the casual raiders because they didn’t want faceroll bosses that LFR gave with random players they didn’t know, they wanted an easy mode they could group up for with friends and not stress all that much.
Then by WoD they gutted LFR rewards, people complained, and back to regular rewards it went for Legion, but LFR continued to be this weirdly difficult chunk of content solely because the only people it attracts on a regular basis are the worst of the worst players while the rewards are largely not that alluring to higher end players (which is a good thing IMO), but that means that it relies on high stacks of determination and/or good players to carry them.
At this point I feel like the genie is out of the bottle and there is nothing to be done about it, but I would never say never. Ideally they would actually put time and effort into making the non-raiding game feel rewarding for casual players, but the reality is that for Blizzard it’s far easier for them to just slice up dungeon and raid difficulties 4 different ways so that everyone has content to do.
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Inserting my agenda for LFR being a solo scenario with emphasis on mechanics
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The content is there. The reward is there. They only one stopping you from being a Mythic-quality raider is your own effort.
In the past, I’ve coached some decent Heroic players and a couple of them went on to be directly competing with me for top parses. Just need to devote a bit more effort into this goal.
Hello Haavi!
To sum it up, new job, conflict of interest to be an MVP here and working with my employer, especially when I had access to privileged information.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/gd-lounge-reforgedinsanity/440796/10570