No Solo Gearing Challenge Path in Dragonflight Is Mega Disappointing

Community General Discussion
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We heard confirmation earlier today that no small-party instanced content is planned for Dragonflight. This thread speaks directly to the solo portion of “small party”. It feels awful now knowing that there are no solo challenge gearing paths planned from Dragonflight.

Vision of N’Zoth was amazing in that a solo player could go in, smash out the appropriate challenge and get gear. You also had to progress throughout the patch to obtain better and better gear - five-masking on Week 1 wasn’t happening, but when you finally reached 5-mask clears much later on, the gear felt very, very worth it. Gear progression was not only great for content outside of Visions, but within progression through Visions itself as well. It felt very stupidly amazing getting the Mad World achievement after all of it too. I was beyond thrilled with how solo gearing worked.

Many of us hoped - or should I say, expected, a similar mechanic in Torghast. That never happened. We got the Adamant Vaults for cosmetics instead, a patch later. Don’t get me wrong - Torghast is, IMO, a fun experience and even moreso when the rewards were appropriate. Cosmetics scratched that itch, but only until all cosmetics were obtained. The boss-rush mode is a blast, but it’s a “one-and-done” thing. A gearing path was never provided in Torghast, other than the mandatory Soul Ash/Cinders runs which were spent on expensive items - that didn’t feel good.

Dragonflight is announced, new direction is announced, etc. Many of us hope for a reversal on a solo challenge gearing path, only to be disappointed today after hearing there’s nothing planned for solo (or small parties).

Open-world content is necessary, and Zerith Mortis does a good job at it, but it can only do so much before it feels repetitive.

Being provided a challenge path to mix things up and gear up as a solo player felt great in 8.3. I’d argue the entire ticket admission system (Coalescing Visions) itself added to the fun in obtaining gear from Visions. It just felt good.

I miss how solo-friendly and fun 8.3 was. I thoroughly enjoyed getting gear solo in Visions, and I sorely missed not having that in Torghast. I had hopes gearing would’ve been introduced in Torghast, but it never happened, and now I’m super-disappointed after hearing that there’s no plans to bring back solo challenge gearing into Dragonflight as well. We had a good model in 8.3 and it was just thrown away, never to return.

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I just want blizzard to not mix fun and mandatory, but that would be asking for too much. At this point I seriously doubt blizzard knows what fun even means. You know your customer service sucks when you introduce flying at the beginning of a new expansion and the FIRST thing players can think of is “what is the catch?”

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Naive while Ion still leads. Better wait/hope for MS takeover.

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after how torghast was received in 9.0, who in the right mind would dedicate development time to another similar system?

scroll a year and a half back on these forums and you’ll see why there is no new torghast. we, the players, killed it.

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I’m still in the wait and see. Torghast was a bust and Island Expeditions were abandoned way too early.

They tied both of these activities to player power which made them mandatory. That just makes me hopeful they’re simplifying the gear progression. I can ideally spend less time thinking of what I need to do on my daily checklist to keep up and spend more time doing things just because I want to.

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Quoted for truth.

:cookie:

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Pretty much this

Community trashing Torghast = no more Torghast

Well done team

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It was almost like they randomly decided to tie in player powers to the system forcing mandatory participation instead of leaving it as a fun little side game. The beta of Torghast where it was an infinitely scaling thing where you’d just go and have fun being op would’ve been much better than what we were given.

Blizzard needs to stop being afraid of their side content not being used.

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it’s almost like there won’t be that problem again in 10.0 now that there is no Torghast. well done, everyone.

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Good riddance.

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May I add an addendum to this? Yes, the players killed it but only after Blizzard put a giant target on it and pointed the players at it.

Putting in something they spent so much time on with the only rewards being a limited use currency and not much else was a very poor decision.

:cookie:

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Grumbles have you had Crumbl Cookies

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I hear you, but SL didn’t have one, Legion didn’t have one, and BfA only had one in the last patch.

Would be nice, but I don’t think it’s ever really going to be a thing - solo gearing as you describe.

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No… but… there is one not too far from me so I will soon lol.

:cookie:

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Humanbeak plays the game? I thought he/she just bought carries for everything.

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I don’t like Zereth Mortis.
Visions were annoying and Torghast was also annoying with a lack of variation.

They have nice ideas but weird way of implementing 'em.

No solo stuff is a deal-breaker. The open world they are talking about feels HUGELY uninteresting. I’m sure raids, dungeons will be fine.

Meh 10.0 is a pass for me.

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If it was anyone else posting this I would be surprised.

Blizzard released a dud and got called out.
We wanted Horrific Visions 2.0 and got Torghast instead, a poorly balanced bland set of dungeons full of trash mobs with a single use currency and no other form of progression. They slapped a bandage on it in 9.1 but it had been eviscerated so it didn’t help much.
By all account it also got majorly changed right before release because to many people were actually having genuine fun in there.

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Good. Torghast sucked.

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Open-world content will never be challenging because it is designed for grandma, not to mention that we’ll have flying/dragon-riding to get around many of the major challenges.

I’m really, really hoping when they said no small-group stuff, they just meant specifically small-group, and there will be some solo activities to engage with. While I don’t think Mage Tower scratches the same itch everyone is looking for in this regard, a new set of Mage Tower challenges would go a long way to deal with this for me specifically. There’s still so many issues but at least some solo class-tuned content would give me a reason to play alts.

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I see this said a lot. what was different on beta that blizzard changed last minute to make players hate thorghast so much?