You can complete them via lfr - a mode of raiding that doesnt require you to manually group with or speak to another player at all - you just click a button and essentially join a follower raid - a mode with minimal mechanics and a stacking buff system designed to overpoweer fights upon failure. You dont even have to tag the boss or cast a single spell, aslong as your in range you will complete it.
And im certain that all story mode completion from a delve, will be available from the lowest level of them, just like follower dungeons and lfr. Sure increased rewards, achievements and the higheest levels of gear will reequireee optional group content but the base game will not require it to complete thee story. Single player MMO with optional group content.
Delves will have 11 levels of difficulty called Tiers to challenge yourself. Tiers 1, 2, and 3 are available to players when The War Within Launches. Tiers 4 and above will be unlocked when Season 1 begins. Successfully completing a higher Tier unlocks access to the next tier for your Warband.
Just skimming through this thread, this question is very simple.
The game offers literally nothing else.
Don’t really have a glamour system as its completely tied to armor types, with the sole exception being store items.
Don’t have interesting RP mechanics, such as player housing. The only thing they can offer is collectable the vast vast majority of them coming as bonuses alongside the gear progression. I think the only real mini game that has survived that has nothing to do with player power has been pet battles.
Blizzard has shown they can’t make content unless they feel everyone + 1 is doing it, so they graft player power (gear progression) to it.
I like how your argument falls apart in your own argument with the fact you had to sneak in there “manually grouping” when that’s moving goal posts. Snoz said that the game has always been about group play with people you know and that has been true since Vanilla. WoW heavily leaned on guild and server reputation in the early days even if it is less so now. You can’t experience “all relevant story” materials without raiding, which you can’t do solo. The game relies on group play.
While not an incorrect answer, the question is more targeted the fundamentals behind it.
Why is there nothing else?
Why isn’t there a more comprehensive set of cosmetic items that aren’t linked to armour types? Well, I can see that it’s been slowly expanded upon over the years, but it feels like a snail’s pace.
Player housing has long been requested, but it never seems to come around for some excuse or another. And as many have said, Garrisons were not “player housing”; they are very much antithetical to the concept. However, there are times I have to wonder if the developers really thought it would be considered as such.
So really, why are the developers seemingly unable to break away from the precept that everything needs include some kind of gear and/or power progression?
Just to capture this phenomenon in a nutshell, I’m looking at this new “Delves” feature for the next expansion… which, in all honesty, I’m not planning on getting.
But let’s pull some stuff from the summary article on WoWhead: https://www.wowhead.com/guide/war-within/delves-overview
The FIRST TWO bullet points read as such:
Delves represent a form of progression outside of Raiding, Mythic+, or PvP.
Delves are meant to be parallel content to Raiding and Mythic+. You won’t have to do them to be competitive if you don’t want to.
From their inception, they are being framed as progression. They are being billed as an alternative to the primary modes of endgame content, but they’re being careful to say they aren’t required for those who aren’t interested.
But quite clearly, it’s being assumed that the player is going to do this content with the intent to progress their character first and foremost.
Conversely, there’s someone like myself, who legitimately doesn’t care about power progression beyond “the enemies I’m fighting are frustrating/annoying to fight because of wonky level scaling”.
I’m already asking – why bother with what sounds like another endlessly repeated grind for gear upgrades?
I prefer to do content that I enjoy for the sake of enjoying it. Progression is a secondary thought and generally a non-factor while doing the content; more often than not, repeating some content for a specific reward tends to result in my growing to dislike it (especially if RNG drops drag out the process).
So when rewards & progression are the main talking points, I’m automatically suspicious as to the content’s intent.
I actually do mythic+ for both the challenge and the chance to get gear. And i dont do mythic+ with only friends. About 80% of the keys ive done are with pugs.
That being said I feel the way youre rewarded by them is unethical, and highly controversial. I made a post before on how it made me feel like quitting, but i didnt actually quit.
I feel I answered that as well. Blizzard, for whatever reason, refuses to spend resources on things that players might not engage in at crazy high numbers. So they latch player power to it make it a requirement, and thus will engage with.
It’s, imo, dumb and counter productive because it greatly limits what they ever willing to do to keep people engaged in this game.
To make people cry, FFXIV will drop the most random bullcrap into their game at the drop of a hat to see how it goes, and more often than not, either leave it to rot or if there’s natural interest expand on it. No need to coerce players into it beyond the attempt at a shiny trinket at the end. And they do this basically every other bloody patch. It may not land, but it didn’t need to, because they at least tried.
I think Affixes exist because the dungeon content itself is too easy and the mechanics in dungeons are not difficult.
Like. The ‘hardest’ dungeon mechanic is recent memory is probably Chargath Chains. And that’s not even a hard mechanic, people are just generally so poor with their positioning that it becomes a ‘hard’ mechanic.
So I think Blizzard is at a tough spot. They can’t really remove affixes unless they make base dungeon mechanics harder, such as the kind of mechanics you would see in heroic or mythic raiding.
But if they were to just make base dungeon mechanics more difficult and remove affixes, the barrier to entry in M+ would be massive. People do M+ because it’s easy to get into and quick. I think we would see far more backlash if dungeons were just harder, and M+ devolved into extremely difficult content with huge barriers to entry as it would take away the entire mode’s appear.
Quite frankly everyone is over reacting to the proposed new changes. At worst, you play a regular game and at best you get a small 5-10% overall buff.
I haven’t really looked into it myself, but I recall someone mentioning story mode raids, where you can join in a group of 1-5 people, just to see the story.
I’ll do what I always do. I’ve quit for expansions before. If I stop enjoying M+ and world content continues the same trend that it has in DF, I just won’t be a WoW player anymore. Not hard. Already haven’t logged in for months.
Thank you for this. Maybe some of the otheer people in this thread might read it and decide for themselves if a story mode raid for 1-5 players would be considered solo gameplay or not.
Solo mmo with optional group content.
Says it all reeally: Alternatively, we know that out Blizzard plans to add dungeon requirements to the Main Story Quest in War Within, and allow players to use a follower dungeon for players who don’t want to group with others. In an interview with [LeystTV], they are planning to bring players into the initial raid zone for a story experience, and this could be representing that.
Not disagreeing with the fact Blizz is trying to rely on the “carrot on a stick” power progression as a way to drive up engagement numbers.
But I’m trying to understand why they’ve fixated on this need to keep players on an endless treadmill of endgame progression.
Does it all go back to them sticking their eggs in one basket with the flop that was Garrisons? Or some spectre of Activision coming in ages ago and trying to drive some obtuse metric-driven design focus?
That they definitely do, and they have a far better way of generating interest for them:
Cosmetics
Glamour pieces, titles, emotes, orchestrion rolls, and even just seeing the story attached to the content.
I’m really not a fan of the Eureka and Bozja content, they’re too grind-heavy for my tastes… but I still occasionally chip away at them, with the possibility of getting some relic weapons or armour sets.
And let’s not forget how popular Hildy’s questline is, despite it having almost ZERO gear rewards. And realistically speaking, the EW relics are just a case of a long-overdue collaboration between FFXIV two premier crafting NPCs.
First off, RPGs feature progression, but it doesn’t have to be the be-all, end-all of the game.
To me, it’s solely a functional tool. I’ve essentially stopped caring about the numbers over a decade ago, they are strictly a background element.
As for what I want? Mostly an enjoyable experience, and a modest expectation from WoW when it comes to the storytelling.
I mean, I’m not fooling anyone with this character name.