I think all the addons available have made the game way easier than it should be. I get some of the UI improvements that you can get from ElvUI and Bartender, but things like DBM have made the game so “just tell me what to do when its time to do it.” Or even the rotation addons.
It just makes the game watered down where Blizzard is designing encounters with that in mind. Look back and Molten Core. You didn’t have a lot of timers you were trying to keep track of. Ragnaros has a submerge timer every few minutes. Then you had the fire debuff that threw someone up in the air. That was basically the most complicated aspect. Now with mods you get fights like Mother and Taloc (even mythic) which is absurdly easy with timer mods like DBM that tell you when everything is going to happen.
I digress, but I’d love to see a more purist approach to these games where we all have to rely on our own skills.
What do you consider jumping through hoops? Because based on this forum alone many people consider simply ‘playing the game’ as a hoop… like having to beat level 3 to get to 4, or having to do kill a boss to get loot. I can’t help but feel that a lot of people simply don’t want to be playing an MMORPG.
An MMORPG is a gaming architecture, it is not a prescribed manner on how to play the game.
There isn’t a rule book out there that says if you play an MMO you have to strive to be the best, min/max, and do every chore required of you. That’s just how some companies have used the carrot and the stick to get you to play more or longer.
Jumping through hoops to me is an unnecessary activity meant do nothing than delay your eventual outcome. Hoops for me are things like Pathfinder rep grinds, which are not only a reputation gate, but they also timegate how you can gain that reputation. That’s a hoop.
Yes low parses on an alt that I rarely play defiantly means I’m not a mythic raider and wasn’t trolling some guys pug normal with some friends you got me shirlock case solved!
When I started playing WoW over 12 years ago, I just liked to kill zone mobs. Quests were required to realistically advance with new expansions. Now that I am not interested to advance in Battle for Azeroth as compared to Legion being that this is a dumbing down version of Legion, I am paying my subscription to solo dungeon and raids to help balance my life. Having to pay $60 for new trivial expansions with recycled old content like BFA is would defeat the purpose of my gameplay. I will read when Blizzard wants to release a new expansion. I do not want to see another island expansion such as a large Fiji-like expansion in the Pacific-like ocean with a different element that is somehow magical to procure for another two years.
Congratulations you have found why lfr exists. People who do lfr generally don’t want to do progression. Lfr isn’t real raiding, and it wasn’t supposed to be.
I was doing a low level quest over the weekend where I had to find a chest of some sort and I was running around the area highlighted on the mini-map for about 10 minutes before I searched for it on wowhead and saw it spawned outside of the highlighted area. It really drove home how over dependent I’ve become on the mini-map quest indicator - and how it kind of makes questing a brain dead activity… just follow the arrows to the blue circles and do what the quest says.
It makes it so I don’t have to think, which some times I like and sometimes, well I wish there was more substance to the game.
Its part of the same trend of speed leveling and zerging dungeons. People seem to want to get what they are doing in game finished as quickly as possible.
But I get what your saying… if the whole leveling experience is designed be doable while people are watching netflix without having to think anything through or deal with difficult encounters, why would you expect most people to change that approach at endgame?
Then reply to me on your main and show me that Cutting Edge achievement you claim is so easy to get. Because all the evidence we have on your current toon shows you have no idea how to play the game.
Improving yourself has always been a part of gaming, don’t try to act like it’s some elite thing, please you’re smarter than that. Look at older games, they were hard as hell and the only way you could beat them is by improving. Fighting games? Same thing.
Acting like you can’t improve at a video game is just idiotic.
This was a huge problem for a long time after LFD was added and in WoD they tried to fix it by making Proving Grounds a requirement to queue for Heroic dungeons.
All you had to do was get Silver which was incredibly easy and yet a HUGE chunk of the playerbase couldn’t do that and just RAGED that Blizzard would dare to gate them from content just because they weren’t good enough to do it and that concept was thrown in the trash and never seen again.
Now we have a bunch of people who only want to play the game if it plays itself and they can see/do everything without putting forth more than a couple of hours of effort and since those people are the primary ones left then this is what we have.
Maybe, just maybe there are other resources and guides than just a YouTuber. I don’t watch Bellular or any other streamer on the regular. I do however, have every single class discord channel. I use the wowhead guides and Icy-veins websites. I have been a raider for a long time. I know how to sim my gear. I know how to use pawn strings. Lack of views on a video guide really isn’t saying a whole lot.
How would new players go about “Learning how to play”?
In the past normal dungeons taught players, which lead into heroics, which lead into raiding.
Dungeons now are a joke and the mentality is “Waste No Time” speed through them. The only dungeons requiring any skill would seem to be Mythic plus dungeons which, good luck getting into them with out the necessary scores required.
You could find a guild I suppose and hope that the people you meet in it are willing to teach you the ropes.
The game has changed so much the most simplistic way for any one is to just forgo bothering to learn anything and hope others do it for you.
I’m a firm believer that LFR should have gear drops on par with heroic dungeons, people claim it’s only there so people can see the story anyway.
You should not be rewarded for doing nothing, but this is coming from someone who also believes welfare and food stamps shouldn’t be handed out because people don’t want to work irl.
You have choices you can make… you can stop using group tools and find like minded individuals such as yourself to run content of your choice… That way you don’t have to associate with us of the unwashed masses.
I don’t look at welfare and food stamps “A real world issue” as being anything the same as a video game raid.
This notion that because players can just queue up and get hand me outs some how equals a real world issue is a nice word I can’t use.
Do I think LFR should change and require some form of skill to down the bosses in it, sure I do. I loved LFR during M.O.P. but apparently that era of LFR was to hard.