Does anyone remember playing Doom or Quake I, how spooky those games were?
Earlier in the game, Stitches roamed the road in Duskwood, and a drake was in Blasted Lands. Both could roam all over the zone, and you could “train” them, so to speak. I saw someone (was it me? guess we will never be sure…) drag the drake all the way to the gates of Stormwind. It was a hoot
There is no shortage of elite mobs that drop gear. If anyone thinks I’m talking about that you are mistaken. I loved the time when there was actual “danger” involved in playing the game. Mobs were tougher. There was real struggle to get ahead. PVE was more exciting in general.
I just wish that some areas in the game were just hard. No flying around. Mobs which give everyone, even highly geared players, reason for pause and teamwork. I’m not talking about show-stopper quests. I get it.
I get that money talks and bs walks. If more players are in the game because of the trend over game’s lifetime, then my thoughts are just nostalgia and won’t see the light of day.
That’s an unpopular opinion. They tried that with the Maw and most people hated it
And most zones have elite areas that can’t really be solo’d by most players when they are initially added. So what you are asking for already exists in some form.
Might be cool to add a complex cave network in a zone similar to the caves in Nagrand with the Gronn and Ogres. They could add a huge NPC that traverses the entirety of the cave. No mounts or flying due to it being in a cave and perhaps make it part of some end-game quest to gain access to the raid. I’m thinking they could do a huge spider like the one in Naxx.
Hell if it’s a spider it could even drop from the ceiling on unsuspecting players
You want threat? Withered Army Training’s earliest weeks in Legion had threat. His name was… Leystalker Dro. Leystalker could jump you from stealth, no warning, anywhere mid run through the crypts. If you were not ready for him, he’d gut your minions like a fish, and destroy your run, no questions asked.
That’s what this game needs. Roaming giants like the Fel Reaver; like Elden Ring’s Furnace Golems. Stealthed murder-blenders like Dro. Just sprinkle a few in the areas that are supposed to be oppressive.
How do we define what “hard” means, and more importantly, for whom do we tune this difficulty around?
If something is difficult or dangerous for a Cutting Edge mythic raider, or a title pushing mythic + player, it will be impossible for average WoW player to overcome.
One of the challenges with replicating these particular threats is understand what made them so difficult to begin with. It wasn’t just that they hit particularly hard, but that the player characters themselves had relatively few tools to deal with mobs like these. Classes today have vastly more tools to deal with difficult mobs, so in order to emulate this difficulty it would require mobs to not just do more damage, but they would also need to force players to use more resources like interrupts, stuns, slows, and so on.
But again this is all moot, because the enormous player skill gulf that exists in WoW means you can’t really ever have hard open world content.
The biggest problem with the Maw was the vibe. I know that is a weird take but the Maw was designed to look and feel depressing and crushing and be a miserable place to be stuck so shockingly it was a miserable place to experience. Argus did not have that kind of negative reaction, nor did other zones like it, because it was not that depressing and soul crushing.
Basically if you are going to ask players to spend hundreds of hours in a zone do not make a depressing place to be because then no one is going to want to be there.
Lol i was just thinking of that. Cruising around Helfire Peninsula bopping along, doing quests, killing boars etc. then suddenly you hear that Fel Reaver noise Right Next To You!
It would be cool if there were flying dangers. I’ll never give up Dragon riding now that I have it. For a world that is very airborne, the skies actually feel empty, like they aren’t using that space, maybe it gets used more in TWW zones?
I see this point of view as similar to the POV of people who enjoy PVP servers. Maybe it’s the tension of never knowing what’s around the next corner. Maybe it’s the exhilaration of escaping a certain-death encounter.
The problem with putting those kinds of challenges in common areas is that different people enjoy different things in the game. Someone may have only a few hours a week to play, and they don’t want to waste time getting murdered by something they have no hope of defending against. Someone may have a lot of interruptions at home (like say, toddlers…) and they want to be able to leave their character at a moment’s notice and come back to them without wasting time on a corpse run. Someone might have enough surprise challenges in their life and they just want to unwind in the game and have fun killing monsters without worrying about occasionally getting stomped.
Yes, there are still PVP servers, but it is the player’s choice to play there. If there were a similar straightforward way to avoid getting Fel Reavered, it’d be great to offer surprise challenges to people who enjoy them. Giving people options is good. Unpleasant surprises… not so much.
