I’ve seen some topics on why the average/new player is bad at the game. The open world content is such a joke and mindless and not challenging AT ALL that the average/new player doesn’t even learn how to play their classes. Along with boosts and leveling being so easy to hit max level, no one really LEARNS how to play their class anymore. They just hit max level and then try to hop into harder content and just get absolutely smoked.
That’s where Vanilla and TBC shined. Leveling was slower so therefor you had much more time to learn how each ability worked as you leveled and gained more abilities along the way and you really felt the power gains with every single piece of gear you got and ability you learned. WoW players today who have played the game for years and know how it works are much better than the players of 2005-2008 without question BUT the game was SO MUCH BETTER at teaching new players how to play the game back in the day.
It was legitimately scary pulling more than 1 single normal mob as a warrior back in the day if you weren’t experienced at all. The reason why open world content isn’t good anymore is because it’s so mindlessly easy. It works hard at trying to put you to sleep. The only engaging content in the game anymore is mythic plus and raiding. PvP isn’t even fun anymore but that’s a completely different topic.
Make the open world scary again.
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Oh, this again, elite mob every 1 inch of every map thread.
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Unfortuantely, what you are describing is a consequence of something called QoL changes. Since the end of Wrath, Blizzard has made an insane amount of changes to the game that have resulted in the game being extremely casual friendly, to the point that the world is no longer dangerous. God forbid someone actually dies while pulling 2 or 3 mobs. Now you can pull 7 and easily survive. Makes the world a meat grinder versus an adventure. Sadly, I personally believe Retail will never be like the game used to be back in the day.
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Let’s take this to its ultimate conclusion and just make every mob Defias Invokers.
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I do miss outdoor dungeons like the troll area in hinterlands or stronguard (idk the name of it… in arathi) but i don’t think it needs to be brought back. It’s in classic now.
9.0 open world at 60 wasn’t fun. If your idea is making the open world more tedious than that, get lost.
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Yea! classic/tbc was great to learn all your abilities and what they do
And then you get into a raid/dungeon and push 1 button the entire time and get kicked if you even think about doing anything else
Plus plenty of dangerous mobs still, go around the maw as fresh 60 and enjoy dying constantly
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Dear OP,
Perhaps the issue is the fact that Blizzard has people start in BFA content and not the starting zones. Therefore they get thrown into dungeons that don’t build on current talents/skills that have been learned, but were built with the expectation that players already have those skills/talents.
The average player may be bad at the game… but I don’t think being new or not has anything to do with it. There are people who have been playing 17 years and are still bad at the game. If wading through elites years ago didn’t teach them, doing something that will annoy the piss out of other people isn’t going to teach them either.
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The game is too different at this point to go back to that style and most probably don’t want to.
One of the things I liked about vanilla when it launched is how different it was from Diablo 2 (which I was playing a lot of at the time). Instead of killing dozens of enemies at once the game was a lot more based on 1v1, and having a plan if there were more enemies. Either CC, kiting, etc. to handle it.
But those days are long gone, and it’s a different arcade type game now where instead of questing and sizing up a camp of mobs for picking off stragglers then getting to the main group everyone just runs in, mass pulls everything, blows it up, and walks away at 100% hp.
Maybe a game this old needed to change to be more like that where players are invincible? It’s hard to say.
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The issue isn’t the world being challenging, it’s a combination of how fast we gain power and how there isn’t anything worth doing in the world.
Even in TBC, by the time you’re clearing karazhan you’re able to faceroll 90% of the world as classes like hunter, mage, warlock or whatever else.
Same applies to molten core in vanilla. But that doesn’t really bother most people because there’s still a reason to go to these zones and do things, be it to gather, or obtain unique resources used for crafting that only certain mobs drop (like the fire elementals at the elemental plateau.
The certainty in the grind is a very appealing part of old WoW: “If I work hard for this, I WILL get it eventually.” vs “If I farm keys for hour per character all week, I get to pull the lever on the slot machine!” It’s a very linear form of character progression.
The amazing warlock cloak you got in t1 is still decent in t3. This logic doesn’t hold now, because gear levels spike violently high, and the catch-up is basically automatic. If you run a normal dungeon right now, you get a better item than mythic nathria gives. That’s insane.
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They tried this with The Maw. Everyone hated it.
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If you make it hard, then people will rightfully expect the proper rewards for doing it.
If you do that, the tryhards will scream and whine about being “forced” to do content they don’t want to do.
And they will fail to see the irony of their complaints.
Can’t have that now, can we.
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This is why players use addons. They need all the help they can get
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Just speaking for myself but things I hated about the maw were a) no mounts, b) no mounts, c) stupid Eye mechanic where you have to leave soon after you arrive, d) losing hours/days worth of resource grinding if you die and can’t get back to your body, e) did I mention no mounts
Overall difficulty of the Maw was awesome, except for mounting, the Eye mechanic, and losing stygia
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Didn’t blizz try to to do this by removing flying?
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The open world can be challenging and still fun. The Maw was just an awful design. The color scheme and mob types and the fact that it was basically mandatory to do is why players hated it. Same goes for Torghast. I don’t think it would have been as negatively seen if Blizzard didn’t make it mandatory to do for player power. As someone said, open world “dungeons” were awesome. Having really difficult areas in the game that require group efforts to complete and having quest rewards with rewards make it worth doing were cool.
In theory I love this idea but it isn’t practical with how much power characters gain from gear. Open world content that is difficult for LFR-geared character is still a breeze for anyone doing mythic raids or mythic keystones. If you tune it to be challenging for geared characters then it’s literally impossible for casuals. If you scale the difficulty up to our gear level then you invalidate the entire purpose of gearing up. There’s no real answer that works well other than for instanced content
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The outdoor game was never challenging.
A lot of people were just really bad at WoW when they started, since they had never played an MMORPG before.
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They’ve done this at the start of every expansion for the past few but it doesn’t really matter when the content is trivial to begin with. When the open world content is a snoozer and so easy to do, people will view not having flying as an annoyance.
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