Has Blizzard ever acknowledged this being a thing? I think one of the special parts about the first couple of iterations of WoW was that people still raided all the raids routinely.
Patches are relatively short now.
We get 8 dungeons and 3 raids per expansion. While they’re always good, if you miss a raid tier-that’s too bad. You won’t be finding many if any groups for previous raids and likely won’t see any of it until it becomes legacy content.
No matter what level of play you find yourself at, everything you did in a patch will be obsolete the first week into the next patch.
The open world is boring and pointless. There’s no reason to be in it at all in terms of character progression. Weird rules apply now that mobs stop dropping loot after a couple of minutes of being farmed-and those same mobs are ridiculously trivial at every stage of the game.
I’m torn here. The moment to moment gameplay in modern WoW is fantastic. There’s nothing like it. Any class I pick up I usually find myself either having a great time or wondering why in the world I haven’t played it sooner.
However, when I start the M+ grind and watch my rating climb and my ilvl grow (something I very much enjoy) I become very aware of the fact that I’m raiding only for trinkets and achievements…and all of it will be completely irrelevant next patch cycle.
TWW has been a fun expansion for me without a doubt. However, I hit my gearing and rating goals within the fist couple of weeks of a given patch.
So then I just go play classic and enjoy the world but miss the modern class design.
Anyway. Some thoughts I had.
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Patches are shorter now because expansions are shorter. We’ve gone from four seasons to three seasons and from single expansions to trilogies. So it would make sense it would feel like last time. The benefit of that is we don’t have the 8 to 13 month content drought at the end of the expansion while we are waiting for the next one to show up.
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This stopped being a thing in BC. Blizzard has further enforced it but it’s made up myth that it hasn’t nearly always been this way.
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To fix this in my opinion:
- Remove lfr for “newest raid”
- All raids from all previous expansions become “lfr” difficulty (like timewalking raids) (keep story mode for current raid)) (cycle through raids every 3 days to make it feel fresh)
- “Normal difficulty” is in order of the current expansion raid tier. Example raid 1 to raid 2 to raid 3
- Heroic resets this sequence , so Raid 3 to Heroic Raid 1 to Heroic Raid 2 to Heroic Raid 3
- Maybe repeat for mythic? So Heroic Raid 3 to Mythic Raid 1
I am not sure. But i agree with you. I wish all content from the expansion is somewhat relevant. I feel like we play the patch. Why do expansions matter anymore?
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Imagine if they didn’t do this.
Do you really want to be forced to work your way through Nerubar Palace, LoU and MFO every week now?
Or maybe MFO is the only one that still gives relevant gear, but without catch up systems, you’re forced to go through NP and LoU before you can do MFO? As it was in TBC (needing SSC/TK gear to do BT, etc)
No thanks. Planned obsolescence is needed here.
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yeah, this was much more appealing when we all had endless hours a week to raid.
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What you describe as planned obsolescence the dev team would probably describe as easing access to new content.
When you keep older raids relevant you’re creating a staircase that players need to climb to get to the new content, which is the content people want to play the most.
But you can’t climb that staircase alone, and if there aren’t enough new people trying to climb that staircase at the same place in the staircase, then people have to go back to help you up it.
Which means if you can’t find helpful players to assist you, you’re just stuck.
It became very apparent to devs even in vanilla that a catch up was needed for those new players and the alts of experienced players.
That’s why the burning crusade had the first great reset, where questing greens replaced all but the very best vanilla raid gear.
But once again, as the first expansion went on, the same sort of problem reared its head and by the end of TBC only a small percentage of guilds on the more populated servers managed to clear the sunwell, even with the help of catch up mechanics on the isle of quel danas.
There were more iterations on the catch up system trying to ease the access challenges of the newest content until we’ve arrived where we are today where basically anyone can at least experience the end game to some extent and the majority of players get to appreciate the hard work put in by the devs.
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Wow. I’m surprised that there’s so much support for this design philosophy.
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I am pretty sure they are aware of and acknowledge this.
Blizzard developed the current system and pushed the entire switch from raid progression to seasonal progression. This switch means you can’t make new players do old raids for gear in a new season. They even tried to eliminate Tier Sets as a thing to better facilitate the gear upgrade system but there was a large outcry from players.
Because of bad game design. Why would you want to raid ansurek and then galywiz and then dimensius
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idk, I find gearing models to the other extreme like that of ESO pretty boring, because I can wear the same gear for eternity and be viable.
They used to do this in Everquest, way back in the day. You’d have to work your way through the all the expansions’ raid in order to gear up for the current tier. Tons of people couldn’t even play new content for months after it was released, and you had to find a guild at your current step in the progression. It was crazy times. It really wasn’t much fun trying to grind gear that had been released years ago, just to get ready for more old content.
That is because you have to pay real money for transmog tokens. Per slot if I remember right
It doesn’t sound like very much fun, it sounds like you’d lose a lot of players on the way.
That’s because you didn’t actually play before seasons, and/or have not put enough thought into why they exist.
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On paper, I miss the relevance structure. In practice, it doesn’t really work anymore. We’re all only young once.
Midnight feels like S4 though
Wow launched with this design philosophy, before they were called seasons they were called tiers. What drove people to do older raids was the lack of anything to do in this game aside from raid, there weren’t any m+, delves, dailies, weeklies, events, world quests, etc to occupy your time you did the raid and if you wanted to keep playing you did more raids.
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Spoken like someone that doesn’t actually know what an expansion looks like. We haven’t even gotten into it and people are already dismissing it. Personally, I’m excited because it looks like it’s going to have a similar solo experience that we’ve already seen in this expansion. If people are absolutely unhappy with the expansions as they happen, maybe they should just unsubscribe and uninstall 
