Would you rather spend more time flying or more time fighting?
I find this topic amusing, because one reason I hate Shadowlands is due to how much mandatory traveling they require of me.
But it’s not even the amount of travel, it’s the value of both the travel and the destination. Why do I have to take a lengthy flight between zones? Why have a zone that I have to do on foot? Like, a good amount of a gaming session feels like it’s spent waiting for something and not actually playing the game.
I know they did it so they can then make rewards to undo it, but the whole time spent working on those “rewards”, the game feels like crap. So much so that I gave up before even obtaining any of them. The portal network, the Torghast mount.
It was a little too tedious. And this comes from a person who will suffer through the tedious travel of Classic without complaint.
I can’t tell you what’s different between the games, I just know that classic’s travel tedium does not bother me the same way retail’s does. Maybe it’s because I don’t even like what I’m doing when I get to the destination in retail.
I’ll agree, however, that the combat feels less interesting as well. The changes to AOE, the changes to the GCD, etc… I’ll admit, it’s not very exciting. But that’s not the main problem for me.
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Classic made it feel like part of the core game while SL seems designed to waste your time and obstruct you.
There is also added mob density during travel as well. It is hilarious how many times going from A to B leads to aggroing mobs. Like why? It just sucks.
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For me the problem is not combat (although I do feel like it’s less fun than in MoP or even Legion). For me the problem is that quest content is irrelevant and simple, so it feels like I’m wasting time if it takes too long.
In Classic, Onyxia quest line felt interesting, because there was no expectation for you to finish it. Like, it was okay if you hadn’t got access to the raid. Same with fast mounts. Etc. So if you finished it, it felt awesome.
In retail, you are generally expected to finish everything, except maybe top hardcore content. But because they want you to finish everything, everything feels a chore because it’s not expected for you to fail. This is the problem I think.
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That and there is basically no challenge to the WQ at all. Even the most fervent Blizzard loyalists agree that WQs feel like a chore. I even chuckled when I saw that Bastion had a wq where the quest is to literally do chores, and it says “Chores done 0/5” in the objective tracker. Why they think chores should be in the game is a mystery to me.
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I want more CONTENT and less time wasting mind numbing cereal filler (combat with slow/stun/root) in between the quests.
At the very least make it worth my while to fight all that crap.
I am STILL getting BoE mog drops from CLASSIC thru MISTS content, for god sake. The onlything I get in WoD thru SLs is pocket lint crap…so of course i dont want to WASTE my time fighting crap that aint worth it.
in ESO you are BOOM…across the game map without even having to stop to ask directions.
ESO doesnt even have flight and world travel is light years faster than WoW…and its BETTER.
literallly lmao…yeah…having to run thru the same route ive done 77000 times is so fulfilling and rewarding 
well…it worked for me…i literally quit playing the game nearly 7 weeks ago now over this very thing.
So…was it worth it?
Doesnt seem so on my end…
more QUESTing time is what I want…not so much the bland crap in between.
Honestly, blizz thinks their game is more fun than it actually is.
This is one reason why they refuse to open up more alt-friendly things, because they think ppl want to play the same boring storyline 12 times.
Guess what blizz, we don’t. We do not care about the story line after the second alt. We do not want to grind crap out on multiple toons. No, its not fun.
Let me say it again. No, it is NOT fun.
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I agree. I will quite often pop an inky black, don the headphones and walk to my destination. I love travel and seeing things often missed by running, mounting or flying. As you can tell from my profile, I enjoy that far more often then all the super fast paced activities.
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One of these is completely wrong, and one is correct. Can you figure out which one is which? Because the rest of us already know. Hint: It’s not the one you probably think it is. Please, second guess yourself.
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Personally I think it’s a little more complicated than “WoW’s combat is boring”.
WoW’s combat excels in big, long fights with a lot of mechanical variety - because you have a large toolkit and a lot to work with at any given time. Where it falls flat is in shorter fights - usually ones in the open world - where an enemy is dead before they can even say “hi”.
We all know how annoying it is when you find an HP sponge enemy without any real mechanics save for big HP, though - so it’s not like this can be fixed by just making every open world mob a long, tedious slog. It’s just not quite as satisfying to use one ability and watch an enemy die, as it is to say … swing your sword in another RPG, and have them cut down before your eyes. At least IMO.
I think some of this could be alleviated if fights took longer, but quests were shorter, and xp gained was better. You’d spend more time in combat, but your rate of leveling and the engagement from combat would be heightened. Theoretically.
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lol nahhhh
Stick to the roads and “paths” of travel and you don’t have this problem. Taking a shortcut or trying to make the shortest distance between your two points adds mob density. As it’s always been. As it’s designed to be.
And why? Because then the world would feel completely and utterly empty with only having cluster of mobs where they need to be at to die. 5 mobs huddled in a group here, and nothing in between them and the next cluster of mobs over there?
Immersive. Why not just have mobs and quest objectives appear before you. All quests and all mobs done in 1 single spot throughout the game. Level 1-60 and gear from greys to 233 without having to move your character.
You’re a genius
If they actually made the combat better, this would be fine. Pressing one button every second or so and not moving isn’t engaging enough to make it the focus of questing. It works in raiding because of the coordination and varied and dangerous abilities while doing your rotation. It will never work for wq.
I get this a lot, but I’m not. Nice strawman though.
There are many areas in SL where there is no route through without aggroing mobs.
Agreed. I’d rather kill one interesting enemy than waffle around in an area doing 50 menial tasks - especially when some WQs don’t have the audacity to tell me which tasks I’ll be doing upfront!
The single enemy bounties in BFA honestly had the right idea - and some of them were even a fun challenge, early on (that one fire mage dude near Boralus springs immediately to mind…) - since it’s a single enemy, you can focus on avoiding their mechanics, but since it’s only a WQ, they’re dead before they outstay their welcome too hard.
… Really, the only issue with those single enemy World Quests is the fact that power creep turned us into gods. I was easily farming the elite WQs by the end. It made all the other options seem like a waste of time in comparison.
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And those routes lead to mobs.
Do you play this game as a travel emulator? Combat time being increased is a good thing.
Why do you play then? Forms of combat make up the hugely vast majority of all gameplay here.
So your preference doesn’t fall in line with the direction WoW has been going since almost forever. It’s still a valid opinion I suppose.
What would make the combat better, to you? Because reading your previous posts, I can’t agree that Diablo’s combat would be desirable at all. I played it enough to get through the campaign, and never touched it again. It wasn’t enjoyable to me.
All RPGs are essentially travel simulators.
They do now. As I said, in prior iterations of WoW, you spent a lot less time directly in combat. The combat frankly isn’t that great. Especially not in SL.
Yes. The game continues to move in the wrong direction. I also find it funny that MoP’s rotation and combat was far better than SL’s. SL just feels terrible. Gimped secondary stats + 10 button rotation + movement penalties. Super fun. It’s so great having an AOE that takes over 2.5 s to cast let me tell you.
Why am I laughing at this?
What happened to the “immersion” argument?
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