It makes me sad that is what these posts always boil down to.
Personally, speaking for myself, I’m looking forward to new CONTENT. I want more CONTENT in the game. Not rewards, CONTENT. In some alternate version of WoW, every single spec has their own wholly unique Mage Tower challenge with Story/Normal, Heroic, and Mythic variants. A massive font of content to be gorged on for months and months and months, striving to finally complete the full roster of challenges and unlock that glorious prestige achievement to feel that sense of completion of the whole thing, maybe even with a message from Ion himself praising us on our accomplishments (spoiled by Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope giving you a message from the Game Director himself thanking you for playing his game to completion).
Wishes for content seem to be endlessly corrupted by the greed of many of us and it makes me sad we will never realize this glorious feature as Blizzard looks upon some of our wishes with skepticism.
Can’t you just do M+ and ignore the timer? The gear at then end and your weekly vault still scale just for completing the dungeon at all. So just bump your key down to a level you feel will be fun but not stressful, and then don’t worry about hitting the timer or not. There’s your “hard mode” dungeon
For me Legion was the best primarily because of all the spec based content. There was always something to do that was fun and rewarding when I wasn’t Raiding or doing Keys.
i really enjoyed the variant dungeons FF14 just added. the only thing lacking was the rewards, with some sort of gear system or other rewards it would work a lot better. you can go in with a full group or just yourself, the dungeon has a system where you choose 2 extra abilities out of like 6. there’s a heal, a tank cooldown, an aoe dot, stuff like that, to fill in the gaps depending on what class you are. they added a little puzzle system in too, and once you collect all of the notes you get a mount
For reals. I’d love to see the fishing daily from WOTLK come back. The one that randomly sent you around the world to catch specific fish and then gave you a random bag at the end. Sometimes it had gold, sometimes just some fun toys, sometimes crafting materials or very rare cosmetics.
I’d also like to see the original brawlers guild come back.
And then guild achievements for rewards. I think if you just make the rewards things like cosmetics and guild bank slots and stuff then you don’t have to worry about pooping on the solo/casual players, but you’re still providing goals/content for guilded players to do together between raids and stuff.
Also world PVP achievements like killing the opposing faction leaders would be fun to bring back.
I’m stunned, utterly stunned, that we just went a whole expansion without Brawler’s Guild. It’s so nuts to me honestly.
The problem is that Blizzard has sort of “done the math” and found that the players who would benefit the most from this type of content often just don’t do it. People like OP don’t play this game for fun. They play it for the skinner box element of mindlessly grinding away to raise their ilvl.
So that’s what we’re getting with DF. We’re getting our three end-game pillars, and we’re getting the open-world skinner box for OP and those like OP.
Real talk, horrific visions and torghast had so much squandered potential. Like if you just take the best aspects of each and combine them, and then make sure it’s not required for gearing for raid/M+…then you’ve got a pretty sick game feature.
If anything gear related comes from it, the mythic/raid community will always see it as required content.
That is part of what makes rewarding casual content hard to make. The second the ilvl gets anywhere near a dungeon or raid, even if its lfr, all the mythic/raiders will come out screaming “Im REQUIRED to so xyz content i dont like for gear! Delete it! Worst system since insert the last set of casual content here”
Imo horrific visions were far superior to torghast though. Torghast just didnt feel fun even at launch for me. I really enjoyed horrific visions though. Id rather see that expanded.
I don’t care a whit about M+ gear, but open world puzzles should have scaling difficulty with scaling gear. I want open world puzzles and quests to get to the point where you’re doing the Heigan Dance, over lava, while a giant head floats in the sky above you shouting “SHOW US WHAT YOU GOT!”
That should take care of a few iLvls.
Personally, I’d love ten man raids to regain player popularity, and become a more popular path for progression. I’m sick of everything revolving around M+, including our character abilities.
There is Torgast, mage tower, brawlers guild (if it kept scaling), solo shuffle, or any pvp for that matter. What exactly do you want other than ‘not that’?
I’d be so onboard with this. I’ve gone through several of the dungeons in Shadowlands. I love the aesthetics. I haven’t the slightest clue what the NPCs are saying, to this day. Nor have I had the chance to stand and watch the flavor stuff unfold around me.
And heaven forbid I use one of the covenant specific items in a dungeon, I’ve been kicked for that.
None of this was in M+, I don’t respect the mode. But I’ll be damned if people don’t treat normal and heroic runs like they’re trying out for MDI placements. I HATE what WoW’s dungeon play has become.
Step 1: Create Heroic+ difficulty. Higher than the current Heroics we have now, but lower in difficulty than Mythic+ (Or just keep it the same level as Mythic 0 but doesn’t give you a keystone or something.)
Step 2: Reintroduce the Heroic Daily Limit as the Heroic+ Daily Limit
Step 3: Reintroduce Badges, have them gained from doing Heroics+
Step 4: Introduce a Gear Vender that gives gear that does not invalidate PVP, Mythic+ or Raiding. Maybe give it a unique appearance so that there is a reason to get collect for fun.
Step 5: Scale the acquisition of the badges, so that reasonably, if a player logs in to do their Daily Heroic+ they could purchase at least one piece of gear every week.
This would be content that, in theory, would give people who don’t want to do the mythic+/raiding/pvp a method of gearing up, albeit incredibly slowly. New gear can be released per patch so that there is a simple and reliable gearing track.
And by spacing the gear out to 1 piece per week, if you do your dailies, then Blizzard gets what they want and have players logging in every day to potentially buy more WoW Token and keep the metrics up and happy.
I don’t think it needs to offer gear. I think you could just have the rewards be like cosmetics/mounts, crafting mats, maybe augment runes, goblin gliders, consumables that increase your mount speed for an hour in the current endgame zone. Quality of life stuff like that, and then a title for doing it at the highest level.
I remember in WOTLK since all the best food came from fishing, I knew I was gonna fish a lot. So when I got a fishing pole that increased your fishing skill from my fishing daily bag. I was super happy.
It’s not because of Raiders that you don’t see that type of content. It’s because of the complaints about difficulty with hard solo content from the players who don’t do M+ and/or Raid. For that type of content to reward gear comparable it needs to be hard and they don’t want hard.
Look at Visions, Torghast and even the Mage Tower for examples of harder content that could be played solo. “Casual” players flooded the forums with complaints about all of them.
I’ve got to agree there. Mythic raiders would probably not waste their time with something like this. They’d probably just jump straight into the highest level keys possible. Cuz at the beginning of a season the gear dropping from M+ actually matters. You’re not just relying on good vault drops.
