GCD changes. Slow the pace of combat to make it more viewer friendly.
Smaller “core” rotations. Fewer buttons to press again to make it more viewer friendly.
Arcane Torrent nerf. Not a problem for several years until eSports MDI and lots of Blood Elf characters. (NB4 Shadowmeld is nerfed to not work in instances!)
It doesn’t. Some people actually believe they balance the game around them, when in reality it’s a very minor aspect. People just need something to blame
Uhhh…it has other stuff too. You just listed esports content. What about LFR, 5 man dungeons, pet battles, BGs, world quests, achievements, transmog, duels, professions, world events, etc, etc…
It’s like saying is WoW just PvP only now.
Class balance is the best scapegoat!
Or maybe is to make it so the gap in performance between a good and a bad player is not so massive??
All the pruning and things that “dumb down” the game are in no way catering competitive players, they are precisely the ones that would take full advantage of those, while the more “casual” portion of the playerbase that is not too keen into min/maxing won’t… The result is that the difference in performance between a great player and a “bad” one becomes massive, even more than it already is.
In fact this expac they took it a few steps further even by removing masterloot, slowing down the game through GCD changes, and also giving so much “free loot” to everyone so casual players can somewhat keep up in item level.
Raid tiers took this formula in WoD. Dungeons had more variation until MoP.
TBC still had degrees of length, trash, style, and bosses.
I would say most are three bosses in TBC but it wasn’t ALL of them. EDIT: Every single bfa dungeon has four bosses.
EDIT: I take that back. There were of dungeons in TBC that had, two, three, four, and five bosses in a single dungeon.
I think in the case of professions it was because they wanted to uncouple them from power progression and make them optional, but kinda flopped in that sense due to Alchemy, Herbalism, Cooking, and Fishing being the top 4 to do and the rest being ether meh or nigh worthless. Esports wasn’t the reason.
They can strike a balance, they just haven’t found it yet.
People don’t let me heal keys anymore because I’m not a druid healer. I applied to two groups and both denied me! EXPLAIN THAT WITH YOUR RATIONAL, FACT BASED OPINIONS!
What keys are you applying for? I can get into keys just fine and I’m not a druid healer either, in fact I play Disc which according to RaiderIO is currently the weakest healer in M+.
If you are expecting to be insta-invited or get accepted 100% of the time then it’s just you having unrealistic expectations it doesn’t work like that (even if you were a druid it doesn’t)
Sounds like good old fashioned community perception. People take what is perceived to be the best and ignore everything else. In practice Mistweaver is fine for healing keys (I do my weekly +10 with ours) as are all healing specs atm.
Best way to circumvent that problem is to find a guild or a group to run with, or make your own group.
I was just trying to fit in with the cool crowd on the forums, I forgot I wasn’t supposed to mention how easily I gave up.
“Fixed Deck” (ala hearthstone) mentality. Can’t even swap your weapon out in a Mythic+, because they want you locked in for ‘competition’ reasons for the whole run.
They’re taking away mid-run adaptation to level the playing field. If you want AoE, you stay AoE the whole run. If you want Single Target, then you stay that way the whole run. No going back and forth.
If it weren’t focused on tournament / championship play, who would care if you changed gear in an M+?
How have raid tier formats (layout, # bosses, etc) change in WoD compared to previous???
what variation in MoP? that they only made 6 new dungeons for it and used 3 reskins?? Both are mainly 3-4 bosses thar are glirified hallways, the same as since TBC. You could more easily argue with Kara and Mecha that the last 2 expansions have released dungeons most like vanilla since…vanilla.
waycrest has 5 bosses. Last expansion we had 3 with MoS and it got a lot of flack for being so short.
Which TBC dungeon had 2 bosses? (nvm crypts, always forget that one because it sucks).
Having it locked though adds a bit a strategy to it though, since it makes you plan what your gonna bring in before you start. Plus you can leave the instance during the timer to swap stuff around. And M+ (And Challenge Moses Before it) has Leaderboards for each server.
Probably because it is ranked on a leaderboard, and they want it to be a different experience from a regular dungeon, encouraging preplanning helps with that.
Nah, that has nothing to do with Esports, it’s just another example of “dumbing down” the game to make it easier for “casual” players to try to keep-up…
Since only “hardcore” players were doing it and it was giving them massive advantages, they took it away, there’s already a big gap in skill with the best players being able to complete +22 keys (and up) while some struggle to even finish a +10 in time, allow for gear swapping and the bottom-tier players would see no difference but the gap between them and the competitive players would be eve greater.
In reality, it’s probably a bit of both (and perhaps other factors too), but hey if people are going to start blaming everything on competitive play, it’s equally easy to blame it on (let’s say) entitled millennials wanting everything to be “free” and “easy” and not having to work for anything
I said until MoP, not including MoP. So yes, MoP dungeons had style they were still mostly the same.
Love or hate MoS for being short or spammable. But what makes dungeons bad is that they aren’t interesting anymore. Dungeons are meant to be spammed and run as quickly as possible in a weird arcade way. They are more like playing a old side scrolling action game with a couple of people. Face rolling your way to the end.
M+ makes it worse since you are just gunning non stop.
But does it really? What’s more strategic, settling on a compromise up front and not having any flexibility, or planning two gear sets up front and being able to switch between them as needs dictate? I’d say the latter is far more strategic.
WoW shouldn’t pretend to be strategic, it’s a tactical game.
And endure even more loading screens? ugh.
And so what if there’s leaderboards? Let people swap gear… it’s when it comes into ‘cash prizes’ that people want things locked down tight so that the playing field is more predictable/level.
agreed , hardly mmoRPG anymore.
yep as soon as they made dungeons an esport thats was it.m+ will always be around sadly because its an esport.
wow is a esport rpg…lol.
I think alot of people that have left is because of the esport focus and its the reason wow keeps getting worse and worse is becuse its esports focused.