What if Blizzard chose to focus on fun rather than a raw power grind for an xpac?
Let’s say we go back to a system where there is no legendary weapon, Azerite neck, sanity-preserving cloak. What do we replace it with? >>>>>FUN CONTENT
High end raiders love high end raiding, and high end pvp players love to pvp. The level of achievement does not somehow make these grinds more fun, the top end players are just more willing to do it because they are more dedicated to being at 100% potential. If we release players from the grind, both hardcore and casual players alike have more time to do more actually fun content. If you are a hardcore raider, maybe that means you extend your raid times or add a third night to your raid schedule, or maybe you level an alt so your raid team has options, or maybe you get to just participate in some of the more trivial stuff that casuals enjoy like mount/transmog hunting.
Here are some great examples of fun stuff to do:
Bring back the fishing daily like WOTLK had. Not “bring me 20 of this kind of fish you’re already catching”. No, ask for a specific fish from a specific place, potentially on the other side of the world, and offer up a random goody bag. Might have cosmetics, might have gold, might have fishing gear, might have grey items. THAT kind of RNG is good since it’s not directly combat gear/power related.
Bring back fun dailies with cool toys. Remember the Trial of Crusader games with a set of currency which you could trade for cosmetics? Jousting and that kind of thing for banners and followers? Fun stuff. Or like in the Storm Peaks in Northrend there was that Vykrul village where you could do like a little set of challenges and get a bag which potentially dropped a polar bear mount? Good stuff.
Faction city raids. Those were way fun. Yes there are concerns about making life hell for players whose city is getting raided, but there are some easy ways to fix that. Couple ideas off the top of my head is just to make a stacking buff where enemy NPC’s get stronger and stronger the longer the enemy faction is in their territory so that people cant just grief camp low players and quest givers, cuz eventually that quest giver will just 1 shot even a mythic geared tank.
Islands, warfronts, and horrific visions…but make them good. All 3 of these things could have been awesome, but they felt half baked. Warfronts and Visions both needed to have more than 2 locations in the rotation. And both needed to have random spawns that are mandatory clears and have unique/impactful mechanics (kind of like the obelisk mini bosses in M+). Visions could have used a much wider variety of affixes. Islands needed to have a clearer purpose and a risk of failure in even the PVE ones.
I feel like we are not talking about the same thing here. I didn’t say anything regarding the volume of abilities.
If anything I’m saying take a little emphasis of the combat mechanics of the game. But really they are completely separate topics. My point is to release players from the Artifact/Azerite/Essence grind and free them up to go do nonsense in the world of Azeroth.
I mean yeah, I think pretty much everyone agrees that it’s silly to have spells you will literally never use. But also equally silly to be like “Your whole rotation is now 4 buttons instead of 6”.
Having said that, I think you’re confused and are in the wrong thread. My post was about the activities players have options to engage in, not about class pruning or really anything combat mechanic related.
While Mists was not my favorite, it got a far better response than both the xpac directly before and directly after. So not terrible by comparison. People will always flame the current xpac.
Our ideas are still not related for multiple reasons:
A lot of our borrowed powers are expressed through passive abilities, not active ones. Right now I only have my Major Essence power and my legendary cloak added to my bar. My point is that borrowed power is still not fun, even if it doesn’t overload your kit. This being due to the chores that come along with maintaining said borrowed power. (and maybe a little all the complaining about how poorly balanced they are)
If you take away borrowed power, you don’t have to replace it with anything. You can just farm gear instead if you want to get stronger. I don’t think you need a second path to power up to unlock once you hit max level. You just kill the bosses, hope your gear drops, and move on to other fun activities. So the idea that we have to have borrowed power in some capacity I think is misguided. When I was in a top end raiding guild in WOTLK we spent our time outside of raid doing stuff like achievement runs in 5 mans and farming mats for the guild bank, and world PVP. We didn’t “have to” do our vision runs for the week or do Islands to get our big influx of AP for the week. When raid was over we were essentially off the clock. And now that we have M+, 5 mans drop just as good of gear as raids do. So even super casual players have bosses to kill and ways to power up without mindless slog/grind tasks.
WTF does the number of buttons on your bars have to do with the types of activities you choose to engage in outside of your weekly raid lockouts?
Well, they didn’t technically have borrowed power in mists, but they did introduce new powers in Mists, which they removed in the next expansion. These were baked into our class, but they were effectively the same thing as borrowed power.
I’m a huge fan of my games feeling more like fun activities to do than a job. BFA has felt more like a job than doing fun things. I think that’s due to all of these power borrowing game systems.
Exactly. Personally I like the idea of super unique trinket abilities. So like even if you are BIS everywhere, maybe you also need like 4-5 trinkets to swap between based on the fight to be optimal.
Yes. That is by design. Do you have any idea how bad the average wow player is? There is a huge gap between the levels of players. Most average CE guilds can barely hit checks now, even with the borrowed power. It exists to soft nerf content, instead of nerfing the world by 30-40% to let players clear content, like they used to have to do.
I’ve been in a few guilds, that have multiple CE’s, that never would have cleared ashvane without wf/tf/ power creep.
Yes. That is why we complained about content droughts. Why the memes about subbing for the first month of the tier, then unsubbing started. Outside of pvp, there was nothing meaningful to actually do. That worked when WoW was new and shiney, it would not work now.
Are all called forced grinds now. Even if they were actually fun, people would complain. Hell, people complain about having to do 1 15 key a week.
The reality is that none of this content is forced. They just actually have character power rewards. It’s just power creep. It makes things easier. If they didn’t actually reward gear, ap, useful currency and only gave some pets/ tmog or a mount or two, almost no one would do them. And no one would do them more than once. Then they’d complain about drought.
You mentioned ToC dailies, which is odd, because that raid/ dailies are considered one of, if not the worst ever.
I mean that’s kind of my point though. I think you might be the exception here.
Most people would rather spend an extra 3 hours in raid each week, then spend 3 hours each week doing chores.
And whatever you find enjoyable, the idea is to add in other things to do for fun outside of raid. My list was just some examples, but I’m sure you can think of stuff you like to do outside of raid.
But we had that already, it was WoD, people hated WoD.
And nope, I don’t do anything that isn’t character progression, I don’t transmog, mount farm, or play pokemon. I play this game for character progression alone.
