I did the Sons grind too so what changed? And do keep in mind that the big complaint on the forums was that raidlogging peaked in WotLK as even when players wanted to do something, as there was no way to progress their character outside of raids. The next most frequent complaint was that players were forced to run violet hold until their ears bled because it was the most easy badge farm.
In every expansion in Wow, by the time last patch of the expansion rolled out, there’s been a decent chunk of a grind to get on par with everyone. Looks like those players imagine WotLK to be some legendary utopia of game balance and design, forgetting that people were bored out of their brains with the AoE fest and the badge farm. It’s those complaints that provoked the Cata Heroics.
You sure can, because the available gear you have access to is significantly higher than we had access to when it was current content. New players and alts can do the story with no limitations and have higher gear\damage than we did.
I agree with this…too easy and too many folks who dont understand or know their class or how to even gear properly for maximizing their potential for higher end content. I see way too many folks who have not even socked a single jewel or enchantment on their gear yet and wonder why they are only doing 1.9k DPS in LFR.
I loved raid-logging. It gave me free time to level alts, gather and craft, fish for drops, or just play something else. Part of what drove me away from the game was the badge grind and constant gear resets. Vanilla and TBC largely put catch-up gear in new dungeons and the 10-man raids - ZA, ZG, and AQ20 to some extent - and that was fun. There was some degree of badge grind, but mostly if you weren’t raiding actively. My guild mostly ran two Kara speed farm groups for 22 badges a week. You could also save up BoJ between tiers, so badges you got from the first set of badge vendors were relevant when they introduced the T5 catchup.
By T9 instead of introducing small raids, they had settled on a model of introducing a new badge every patch so you couldn’t save them. That forced us into the dungeons every single raid release, whether we wanted to play them or not. There was gear in the new dungeons, but as you mention fast farms like VH took over. When Firelands released and my guild went in with our T12 and got our asses handed to us because we hadn’t done the latest and greatest badge grind yet, I lost all will to play.
I mean, apart from the Unity leggo there really isn’t that much to grind.
Gear is really the big issue.
Unless you have a dedicated group of people to funnel you gear (not all guilds will do this), then you have very little chance of getting into S4 content.
LFR’s base requirement is 240. IDK if Heroic Dungeons moved from requiring 155 ilvl, but if you farm enough anima (500 per slot) you can get to about 220 ilvl. Going through ZM, and all of the loops can get you to that 240. But unless you know people who specifically want to carry this person, they’re likely missing out on the bulk of S4’s content and that slimecat if that’s what they came back for.
The issue isn’t how much effort it is to catch up. Personally, I like that they actually made you work for everything right now. It’s got me playing my alts more. I’m running LFR, which is seeing pretty short queues even on DPS regardless of faction. It’s quite nice.
But them adding a limited time reward without a direct way into the content for a returning player was a pretty dumb move if their goal was to draw people back.
If it was exclusively to keep raiders and M+ runners that were already playing logging in without any consideration for anyone else, then I suppose their goal was accomplished.
Sorry for your friend. But I honestly hate the “catch up immediately to this patch content” design.
you only need to do this once too and it’s like 2 hours worth of quests if that lol
this has objectively been one of the easiest seasons to gear up. ever.
From the ground? IDK. Maybe it has.
It’s also unprecedented to have such an involved FOMO reward. There’s a lot you have to do to get to the level of player gatekeeping for this thing. And if people believe guilds aren’t also gatekeeping, they’re mistaken.
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This is not it for all MMOs.
World of Warcraft is the most known who has this kind of grindy system that is terrible for new players though.
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i dont have any skin in the fomo stuff because i pretty much got slime cat by “accident” but realistically the gate keeping excuse is silly because you can infinitely keep your key at a +2, and get geared
Best thing, focus on their campaign up until ZM unlocks, and immediately get the 226 Anima gear for catchup. They can also get the initial 226 Conduit token at Friendly (which is usually a few quests) for their Soulbind stuff.
Tell them to avoid and skip Korthia as much as possible, and unfortunately, spend as little time in the Maw as they can, unless they just really want to grind to finish that campaign to unlock riding.
The biggest gripe is definitely how crappy the Rep grinds were this expansion. They are painfully time gated and often at the whim of RNG how many World Quests are available. They -CAN- grind them for the cosmetics and things, but mainly just focus on getting to 80 Renown for the full unlocks with the Covenants. At least those were bumped up to be far more easy to get.
Another thing to factor is how convoluted the systems are. Even if you could keep a +2 key and find people willing to constantly run with you, which has a mixed results for every player, that information isn’t easily available.
I feel like one of the largest drawbacks of Shadowlands is how difficult it is to find out how most of the expansion works. It requires a lot of hand-holding from other players or a lengthy amount of external research to figure it out.
Look at Zereth Mortis. A lot of people were incredibly upset about the gearing there when the path first launched because so many people weren’t aware of how the Cypher system worked, or that you could speed it up with a random dude outside.
And there is still a lot to juggle for a new and returning player.
- They have to get the key (luckily you can get one from a quest)
- They have to run Torghast enough to get the items to craft a legendary
- They require the gold necessary to buy a legendary piece and missives (assuming the AH is up)
- The unity legendary is a full day of questing to unlock, made significantly harder by their item level.
- If they’re not aware of the Renown BoA thing hanging in an arbitrary location near the flight vendor with no actual indicator that he’s there or what he sells, they probably feel they have to grind renown. Probably a lesser focus, but the soul binds are important.
- Same guy sells a thing for 200 ilvl conduits, but getting them beyond 200 ilvl is a lot of work. You have to grind a rather complex rep for it.
- They have to hope they can get into enough mythic plus 2s (god I hate Mythic Plus being such a focal point of the game) to get their ilvl up enough to being accepted places or to join the matchmaking systems.
The only easy catch-up right now is that you can buy 220 gear with 500 anima a piece. Everything else is incredibly convoluted and often obscure.
I love how challenging it feels to gear up my alts right now. But if someone’s game doesn’t end at LFR and world content, then I can imagine this probably feels like one of the worst expansions to get back into.
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I’m gonna be honest all of these seem really tame considering what we have played with in the past. This is all light work to gear up.
u do a couple of hours of quests for ur unity (no rush btw you can do it at your pace)
do some torghast (you only need to do 6ish upper reaches to get the soul ash and cinders)
fly around zm and get rares and random 233 drops
talk to the dude in oribos he gives you a +2 key
invite whoever u want to ur key and complete it and get gear
drop ur key back down and repeat the process
we’re talking minimal amount of time investment if you take out the m+ part. and if u don’t plan on raiding or doing M+ what do you really need to be 270 for anyway
football season is soon, and i like the alts catch up mechanics
We can do that. New and returning players may not be able to.
Hope people will carry you for your key.
How to catch up in season 4: get gear.
How fast you do it is up to you. Nobody is left behind. This is an MMO. You have more than a few months to get geared.
It’s not that hard.
yeah and? this is what happens. people are looking for gear from dungeons, will spam +2s until they get gear. will give u the hand-me-downs. there’s nothing wrong with this, as you’re learning dungeons in the process as well as getting geared.
i suggest running ur own key in mythic plus also world bosses
u can grab ur own mythic 2 key from guy by vault and just invite who u wnat, kinda win
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