Alright, we’ve hit day 3 of this mode and all I can say is: This is one gigantic clusterf-.
Let me go about this in a chronological state to my personal journey.
First, allow me to show my toon.
Something to note: Yes, I did the infamous “frog farm” on this character but more on that in a bit.
So the leveling process for me was actually quite nice. I started right when the event went live and started to queue dungeons as a healer right out of the gate as questing zones were too populated at the time. I got to around 30ish and waited for my bud to catch up to me because we were going to do LFR together.
We queue LFR, get into Mogushan, everything good to go! We complete one wing and discovered it was a complete waste of time. We gained absolutely no experience whatsoever like it was in the PTR. Many people hyped up LFR and me, a casual Andy, thought this could be something I could relax and just enjoy as part of the leveling process. Nope. I didn’t even get a bar of experience. I got some threads and that was pretty much it. I personally feel like my time is being respected in this regard. There was a huge outcry about this from the community and frankly, I don’t blame them. I know they did a little bit of a fix for it but it was already too late.
So, with that, I resorted to questing. I hit 42 and kited a Zandalari Warscout for about a half hour with my friend and we eventually killed it! Came back at 48 and was able to solo it fine. Anyways, I was zooming and actually having a great time with it… then came 60+. I was questing as a guardian druid. I had good gems, stat blues, still rocking out and killing things but I noticed that mobs were hitting me -much- harder and DoTs were doing an absurd amount of damage. I slowed down how many mobs I pulled and utilized my cooldowns when necessary. At 65 I noticed the threads of experience were no longer dropping. I didn’t think much of it since I was close anyways and already at 134% on my cloak. More on that next. Either way, got 70 (yay!) and started to work on questing zones and reps. It’s generally the content I personally do.
I continue on my questing journey. Mobs were hitting me just as they were and I had adapted to pulling smaller and using my CD’s more but then came the Dagger in the Dark scenario. This scenario took me entirely way too long to do. Each boss fight felt like I was fighting a raid boss. Their health pools were incredibly high and I was doing little to no damage to them. Some of their mechanics would chunk me or get me really close to death without having any time to react to said mechanics. It took me way too long to kill them. This is a normal scenario mind you. In the end, I got through it.
Then came dungeons. Whoa boy here we go. As many, -many- people have pointed out, scaling is a huge, HUGE issue. While I was able to clear all heroic dungeons, it wasn’t without more difficulty than normal. We didn’t wipe too many times but it was hard. I was getting chunked and close to death almost every pull and on top of that, I had a hard time holding threat, especially to a low level healer. I’d press every button in the world and mobs would just be ready to eat the healer. Apparently, I was not the only one having this issue.
I will say that, while it’s funny to see the low levels performing significantly better than you, it also feels extremely bad being level 70… unless you were a frog farmer (again, more on that in a bit). If you were the simple casual player just playing the game, you feel incredibly underpowered and disheartened. The difficulty jump because of the scaling is just unbearable (no pun intended since I was playing a guardian druid). From my understanding, there was some interview where Devs had said they are working on the scaling or something like that but I don’t know the source or anything. Though I am pretty sure they are aware either way.
Now, frog farming. I personally did it for about 2-2.5 hours before I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore for the night. For those who do not know what exactly the frog farm was, it was pretty much: Kill frogs, get a ton of lesser coins. Lesser coins can be turned in to gain rep, each turn in gives you a box and a random gem as well as bronze. Each said box gives you a chance for gear and a guaranteed thread for your cloak. The gear could be scrapped for bronze and of course from the frogs themselves, you got a lot threads and bronze too. This farm was nerfed this morning as frogs will no longer drop the lesser coins.
In the time frame that I did my farm, I was able to get close to 3k lesser coins. I got all the reputations to exalted that I could, a lot of that thanks to having the commendations from my main. Though of course I had a huge surplus of coins left, which I promptly spent them all in fear of the nerf hitting in some shape or form. I didn’t know how it was going to get nerfed, but I just knew it was. It was too good.
So here we are the next morning! I wake up to seeing that the frog farm did get nerfed. Along with that, caches got their bronze buffed. This actually really ticked me off. Not so much of the frog nerf but the caches being buffed. I had done a ton of timerunning achievements pre-buff and now, I’ve completely missed out on a ton of bronze with no compensation for it. The majority of my bronze came from these caches. I personally do not raid anything above LFR due to personal (and medical) reasons. I used to back in the old days but I mentally cannot handle it anymore.
Though herein lies the biggest issues. Now with the frog farm gone, you’ve created a HUGE disparity between the more hardcore players and casuals. You have imposed that players have to raid in order to get the rewards. “Ok? So what’s the problem?” you may think… As far as getting into raids, people are going to take a frog farmer over someone who didn’t 100%. There are people who knew about the frog farm before Wowhead posted the article and there are people who farmed endless hours before the nerf hit.
Here is a prime example of someone who did such a thing:
Please feel free to compare the stats to my char. This player in particular was seen doing 4 million dps on a stream. There was another stream where a hunter was doing even more than that. Sadly, I didn’t get the name of this person. Anyways, the amount of bronze these players spent to do this is at an insane level. Not to mention they are in the highest ilvl gear which in itself costs just as much bronze if not more to level up than the high ticket cosmetic rewards. How are people supposed to catch up to this? The answer is, they don’t. They try to find another farm but that’ll probably get nerfed too. A player will not get a raid spot over someone who did a frog farm.
I may as well be a level 10- wait, no, I can’t say that. Even with what frog farming I -did- do, I am still out damaged by low level players as a Boomkin. However, thankfully, as a tank with my tank gems, I am no longer having threat issues or getting chunked. I still do low damage compared to lower leveled players, but I am not necessarily dying to stuff now. Seems what farming I did do have some benefit.
So how is a casual player/player who didn’t get to frog farm supposed to get bronze if they can’t get a raid spot? Sure I could make a group myself, I get that, though some people struggle with that and even still some people will only join if there were frog farmers.
I couldn’t help it but this came to mind:
There is also a huge disparity between those who do actually raid and those who don’t when it comes to the amount of bronze that drops which is why raiding is lucrative. Not everyone in this game is going to go that hard. I myself am in between the pack. I will sit and do content grinds for days like questing, rep grinding, achievements, mount/transmog collecting, etc. but I will not subject myself to actual raiding. So I am genuinely stuck when it comes to bronze farming now. You need well over 1 million bronze to get all the rewards, which is what people are mostly doing this event for in the first place.
Blizzard needs to sorely understand that not everyone wants to/can’t do the raids.
This isn’t about being lazy and wanting the path of least resistance to the rewards. Raiding for some people just isn’t feasible. As I will reiterate a few times, this event is meant to be a fun thing for all of to enjoy before the release of TWW. As this event is to really get cosmetic rewards, I would much -much- rather spend my bronze on mounts and transmog than upgrading my gear to do raids. I know there are people out there who do want to reach crazy power levels and feel like gods in the different raiding difficulties but casuals are highly punished in this mode.
It’s almost seems like I may have to roll an alt or two to redo the achievements to get in on these cache updates. Which brings me to my next point:
Why the hell do our stats cap out to our alts starting out? I hadn’t read anything mind you but it was to my understanding, which I could be wrong, that stats would carry over from our main to our alts. So what if my alt would go extremely fast through quests and do even more absurd dps in a normal dungeon than they do right now for leveling? Remix was supposed to be like that anyways? Who cares if they have a 300% exp buff at the start because that is what % they earned on their main? Again, this was supposed to be a -fun- event for players. This is anything but fun now, especially from a casual standpoint.
This is a game mode where players are supposed to be overpowered. It’s a fun game mode that really has little to no impact on retail itself. Why restrict these gains over an event that is based around collecting new cosmetic rewards? Once again, Blizzard is failing to communicate with us the changes they intend on doing and just want us to deal with the fallout.
I feel the bronze acquisition needs to be increased quite a bit so that a casual player can really enjoy this experience as well to help with the disparities.
For the frog farmers vs non-frog farmers, let people farm the darn things for the coins. They are putting their time and effort in too. You all knew about this frog farm for years now. And again, this event is to collect mounts, mogs, and all that, what harm is there in it?
And for the love of- please do something with alts. Let them have their stats and let their bronze acquisition be on par with their mains.
Also maybe make bronze account wide too.
SPEAKING OF ACCOUNT WIDE THINGS.
The jewelry and trinkets for alts… The achievements were account wide and then were reverted? Why are you forcing a person to redo these achievements on alts to get their stuff? It just doesn’t sit right at all.
Finally, gold. My timerunner has about 20k gold. Gold as you know is pointless in this game mode. Now, I know that these timerunners transition into the normal once Remix is over however some people made timerunners purely for the aspect of collecting. I’ve got close to 3 million gold on my account, sure another 20k is nice but honestly, for a mode where you don’t use gold, perhaps there should be an npc that converts gold for bronze? Let the players have that choice. Let them either keep the gold going into normal TWW or let them convert it into bronze for the event. I’d recommend a 1:1 ratio.
I know you all are going for player retention and don’t want people to leave the game but these things are doing that anyways. Don’t you think if you made some more alluring changes, people would be more obliged to stay and be much happier?
I know this was a long winded post. I just felt I really needed to get this out there and vent my own frustrations and give my own criticism and feedback. I understand we’re only a few days in and a lot can change. I just don’t want this mode to be dead before week 1 ends.
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