I’ve been thinking a lot about what is "off "about The Maw. In theory it should be a really fun zone to skulk around in and complete missions while under threat. I think I finally figured out the issue. It’s not because it’s “Too hard” it’s because it contradicts basic game design.
Consider that the game is basically designed around killing stuff. Almost all reward systems involve “Kill x --> Collect reward”. The design of the maw is based around killing as little as possible but the rewards are still based on killing stuff. This creates a total dissonance in player motivation and frustrates the player.
If a zone is designed around “staying alive and avoiding attention” Then the rewards should also be designed around staying alive and avoiding attention. But that’s not the case, it’s exactly the opposite.
What do you think is does this jibe with your sense of play in The Maw?
The threat bands don’t line up with the quests. You have a week to do the main quests but you can hit max threat (or threat too high for a particular toon) with an unfinished quest and have to stop for the day and come back another day to finish it. That’s just so weird. I’m already knee deep in Perdition Hold, very close to the end and I have to stop and come back tomorrow and start over at the gate or risk losing all my stygia.
They could have just put a lower bar on eye of the jailer (e.g. Have it stop at Assassins) and that would have probably solved 90% the problem. There was really no extra reward for playing with extra threat - just extra risk. That was the problem.
With Visions you got better rewards when you put on more masks. With Jailers eye you didn’t get more stygia for playing with higher threat but you could lose more.
I wasn’t a big fan of the Maw playing it, but after the game disconnected me after dismounting, came back and was dead and my body floating in the air and not being able to loot my 1 week’s worth of Stygia from it, that’s when I started to hate that trash of a zone.
That is also a bug that was reported 5 months ago, at the beginning of the expansion and instead, Blizzard focused on milking the players of their money with store mounts, rather than fixing it.
Sure. Now it’s just a boring zone that I still don’t care about and have no real reason to go to. Barring the NEW zone that’s technically in the Maw but isn’t the Maw.
That’s not to say that I think the annoyances should stay unchanged. Just that I think the Maw was an incredibly poorly fleshed out idea on Blizzard’s part, and simplifying it doesn’t do anything to make it interesting, just make it less obnoxious.
I don’t find the Maw hard, I find it obnoxious. I could go in once a week to hit my objectives, but I piss off the jailor so I need to make multiple trips. Those multiple trips and the slow travel in the Maw makes the experience a time sink that doesn’t provide much reward for the effort. There are more fun things I could be doing with my time, like running a Mythic or Raiding. Why does the game make it so that you can’t focus on the content that is most fun? Because the small fun aspects are the reward for the grind, and the grind ensures subscription because the grind guarantees a time sink. Wouldn’t it be cool if the design was that the game was so fun people wanted to play without the grind and chore?
Maw already is a joke. Doesn’t need an additional nerf.
Stygia doesn’t buy conduits over 226 item level and the sockets only work on S1 items. Players will still run dailies and the twice-weekly “Assaults” in the original Maw area but collecting stygia won’t matter much anymore.
Maw’s current dailies and weeklies reward STYGIA. And if Stygia is obsolete to Season 2 items, why do Maw?
Unless, they would introduce another currency. If the new currency can be farmed 24/7 on Maw, it would be a disadvantage of Casuals compared to Hardcore no life people.
tbh the maw should have been 9.1 content so they’d actually have had time to flesh it out correctly
i think if they’d been able to actually develop the maw people would have enjoyed it a lot more, instead they bit off too much with an already rushed and delayed expansion release and players found it less enjoyable, when they could have had korthia and the maw together in a bigger and earlier 9.1
As of right now on the PTR (just logged to check, just for you) the weeklies give you a chest reward. One related to assaults looks to be just like our daily covenant calling rewards (maybe more anima/gold) and the other weekly awards gold and gear (according to item description.
The old Ve’Nari quests still award stygia at the moment, probably will get replaced at some point later in the PTR.
