I think this is probably the first completely valid complaint amongst many “I don’t like this” or “I was excited for something else”.
I am! I don’t want them to be happy!
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Happy, happy, joy, joy!
Happy, happy, joy, joy!
I’m really not a PvPer, but I play one on the forums.
I am sorry to see that there is such a mixed reaction to Plunderstorm. From a WoW POV I would think that Blizzard would try to stay away from blunders like this “patch”. Especially if they’re trying to regain new and old player subscriptions.
I am struggling to understand the goal Blizzard has regarding their legendary MMORPG. I want it to succeed.
It seems to me like blizzard thought this would just be a fun mini game to play for a little while as we close out DF. I hope they do more stuff like it in the future, but they’ll need to say what they’re doing so we know what’s coming, at least in general terms, and maybe add some facets to the event so that it appeals to more people. It would be nice to have some NPCs in the actual game world to address that it’s happening. And maybe add in some pve world quests and a world boss or event so everyone feels involved and not like they’re playing a different game. If they learn from this, whatever they do next will hopefully be better. Maybe.
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Got to 3 on a solo and killed the gold monster on the same match. Probably the best I’ll ever do. Pretty happy.
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It just seems so antithetical to the whole point of Dragonflight though. Lore-wise DF was about bringing people together and, outside of the game, we got cross-faction guilds and soon we’ll have cross-realm stuff as well.
But with this-- I haven’t seen the community so divided, so at each other’s throats in years.
I have come in 3rd, 4th, and 2nd in my last few games and it’s driving me nuuuuuuttttssss.
Screw the transmog set. I want the Feat of Strength!
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Definitely a great point. It would just be nice if Blizzard would stop trying to reinvent the wheel or rediscover fire. Give us some major catastrophic event that completely changes Azeroth. I loved Cata for that. 
Oh well. I’ve heard it said that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Wish I could remember where I heard those words.
Now that toys are patched, we shouldn’t see anyone landing with abilities from the starting spot.
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Yeah, I expected something to be more within the game. Something new and exciting. Seeing that we got this was disappointing. Disappointing that this was all there was too. Even if I don’t find anything in a new patch that I like, there is always plenty to do in the game. I do things at my own pace. Kinda have to as a GL and an adult.
I really do feel I wouldn’t have been as disappointed if I had a hint of what was going to be released. But my criticism is valid and other people believing it isn’t doesn’t invalidate my criticism.
Most of the garbage that has been hurled at me is from people that didn’t read a word I wrote. “QQ, cry harder cuz you didn’t get PvE content! Let PvPers have a win!” Twitter really is a cesspool. As for the forums, this is the only thread I have been in. Not as bad here.
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I made a thread:
Some great thoughts in there so far.
I do hope they iterate/improve and make this a thing that returns.
I think we’d see it next between 11.5 and 11.1, for example – season 4 has the pre-patch instead.
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Where and how you land can make such a difference. Ideally land on a group of mobs or an elite near a chest on the outer edge. So good.
There’s such a difference between landing and getting a good AOE ability vs. getting nothing. A lot of RNG.
Love the parrot and the mechanohog.
About to hit lvl 12 so over 25% done with the renown fwiw.
I fully appreciate your thread and there’s some good/great ideas in there to improve the overall experience. I hope someone that can make an actual difference reads it.
That said, it’s still not a game I personally would ever play.
I am playing, because I want the transmogs. That’s it. I’m not enjoying anything about it. I’ve given up on anything after level 15, because I’ve decided that’s as far as I can stomach this. Once I hit 15, I am done. No Plunderlord regalia for Norman, and frankly I don’t care.
Queue in. Complete the quest. Run into the stormwall and die.
Idiotic.
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I don’t post a lot here anymore, but I wanted to chime in on this discussion from the perspective of someone who enjoys PvP. This is going to be long, so I apologize in advance.
I don’t know that I would consider myself what typically comes to mind when thinking of a “PvP’er.” I enjoy getting my full conquest set each season. I don’t really PvE at a high level anymore since MoP, going only so far as to complete each LFR wing once while passing up any real raiding or M+ at all. I like battlegrounds, and I main them for content. I tend to do pretty well in them when I’m not in one of those roflstomp graveyard-camped matches. I’m no AWC contender, and I don’t even really love arena. My highest rating ever in 2s was somewhere in the 1700s, and I just barely managed 2k in RBGs back in MoP. So when I heard about this mode, I went in with an open mind. I don’t typically like BRs, but I’ve played many of them. I even have a handful of wins under my belt in Fortnite Zero Build.
With all of that in mind, Plunderstorm infuriates me. Like, almost to the point of irrational emotion and irritation. After getting creamed ten or so times in a row and then forcing myself to step away from the computer for a run to get my mind off of it last night, I really thought about why it makes me feel this way. And so here are the things I take issue with the most.
1.) RNG. We deal with RNG in every game, sure. WoW has it in the form of proc chances, crit chance, drop chance, etc. Shooter BRs have it in the form of weapon types, attachments, weapon rarities, armor/shields, etc. But in WoW, I have a little bit of control over my stats and percentages. I can target certain thresholds and grind towards them over time. In shooter BRs, most guns are still very viable even if some are a little better; and they all do the same thing. They shoot. They are not spells that vary wildly from gun to gun.
In Plunderstorm, you are at the mercy of set of RNG variables I find nearly impossible to reckon with even in comparison to the examples I just mentioned from other games. You drop in and then furiously grind at PvE mobs hoping they drop good spells. You may get perfect meta spells right out of the gate or you may get no spells mob after mob. Most often, what happens is that you get spells that aren’t very good or aren’t great in combination with one another. And then when someone who DOES have a good kit rolls up on you, you’re toast. The variation in spells also makes it incredibly difficult to develop any real muscle memory. In WoW PvP, it’s so super important to hit abilities quickly, exactly when called for almost without thinking. It is uncomfortably difficult to do that when loadouts are so different from game to game. Sure if you survive long enough to build out a familiar kit, you might be alright. But most of the time you’ll get clapped before you ever reach that point.
This leads me to my second and largest gripe.
2.) Levels. Why oh why did they put levels in this mode? The way they implemented them is the way they’re done in MOBAs but without the ability to catch up if you fall behind. No other BR has a system like this. In those games you drop in, get your weapons, armor/shield up if you can, maybe call in a loadout of some type, maybe get attachments as you go along, and hunt. You might run up on that guy who is fully shielded with a legendary weapon in Fortnite. You might cross paths with someone fully-armored with a gun that better suits the engagement range than the one you have in Warzone. But you will have the CHANCE to outplay them with superior aim, skill, positioning, and tactics. In Plunderstorm, if you come up against someone just two levels above you? Forget it. Might as well just lie down and accept your fate unless you catch them wounded aftter just fighting someone else. Your abilities will tickle them while everything they have will take a quarter or more of your health bar away. You will feel useless just like if you were a level 10 fighting a level 20 in WoW. And then on top of that are the spell levels. When someone has a level or 3 on you AND multi-ranked spells? Lol! No amount of skill, positioning, or tactics is gonna save you from them.
So naturally the strat is to level as quickly as possible once you’re on the ground. This means grinding PvE mobs like a madman, because the sooner you get leveled, the sooner everyone else around you becomes fodder. But wait, it’s not that easy. Match after match I drop in, trying to round up groups of mobs while seeking out every elite I can find. And yet still, somehow, a minute or so later, someone runs up on me who is 2 or 3 levels higher than me anyway. And so I watch streamers who are doing well in this mode, and it just seems like they’re doing the same thing I’m doing but with better results. Like they’re playing in another dimension or something. And then that makes me even more annoyed because then I start to question if there’s just something in my brain that cannot compute this mode. Like I’ve finally reached that point where I just can’t keep up with the real gamers anymore and have earned the status of gamer boomer.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’d enjoy the mode much even if these issues didn’t exist. The BR format just does nothing for me. In WoW PvP, even if I get stomped in a BG, I respawn for another shot in seconds. In arena shooters, it’s the same thing. You get your dopamine lows followed by the highs. It’s a rollercoaster of challenge, triumph, and defeat that moves quickly but keeps you engaged. In a BR, what most often happens is that you invest all this time strategizing, picking a drop point, trying to get kitted out, and looting while moving around the map only for it all to end in seconds. Then you have to start all over again in the lobby, waiting for the mere chance of tasting triumph after another long investment period. The dopamine highs are few and far between. The crushing frustration of defeat is ever-present, and it doesn’t wear off as you’re dropping into the next lobby or the next one. You carry that annoyance with you, and it compounds every time it isn’t offset by some small victory. THAT is the BR formula, and I’ve accepted that it isn’t for me. But my god, no other BR has ever made me as crazy angry as this one.
To conclude, I also don’t love how nice things are locked behind the renown levels. That they’re only cosmetic makes it a little better, but eh… Renown is quickly just becoming the new reputation system with a different coat of paint. Seems like everything is tied to a renown grind of some kind these days.
But I dunno. That’s my breakdown from the perspective of someone who likes PvP and spends most of my time doing it. I’m glad for people who are having fun with this mode, but it ain’t it for me. I really don’t know how much I’m going to continue interacting with it. And if it’s going to stick around in some form after this limited trial, I sure hope they make some changes to address what makes it so tough to stomach.
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I can only speak for me and ten other people on this forum (they don’t know I can do this), but I feel like Plunderstorm is a little dissatisfying because I’m honestly not sure what WoW is anymore and I feel like I’ve been waiting for Blizzard to tell me.
The aesthetics and conflicts that used to make up WoW have ebbed away and it feels like WoW is just kind of a lot of activities with no unifying theme. It feels less like a coherent game and more like a series of battlepasses.
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I just tried it and it’s not for me. I was hoping we’d get pirate content in actual Retail. Like some action down in Tanaris, some quests, some STORY.
Alas, we got this. I tried 6 games, I got ganked each time by people several levels higher than me. It’s just not my cup of tea. So good luck to all of you, enjoy the awesome Tmog. I think I’ll create some RP events about pirates to satisfy myself instead.
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The fury this is generating over on the general forums and stuff is sort of weird, with people characterizing it as a “mandatory” grind because it offers cosmetic rewards they want.
I’m kinda used to there being cosmetic rewards I don’t get because I don’t raid beyond 1 LFR and thus almost never obtain tier sets until they’re like 5 years out of date, so what’s up with this angle of criticism?
I don’t have strong feelings about the content because I’m not playing right now (quirky, experimental game modes and minigames expanding the game beyond the raid tier treadmill are somewhat appealing to me on principle, though). But there’s an awful lot of anger for not making a cosmetic universally easy to acquire, which is not a new thing
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LVL 15 achieved. I’m done. Have fun with this mess.
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I think the funniest thing I’ve found so far is people acting like you’re a horrible person for trying to kill them.
One match I had a person go “dude, really??” at me when I was chasing them down. Like yeah you drop lots of gold (especially after they buffed the kill drop amount) like of course I’m going to kill you lol
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While it is simply inaccurate to call anything of this nature “mandatory,” the difference between you getting something you want from a raid and anybody else getting something they want from Plunderstorm lies in the fact that with very few exceptions, the thing you want from a raid will still be available for you to obtain once the boss can be done alone or with a couple of friends an expansion or two down the line.
Anything anybody wants from Plunderstorm must be obtained within the next 6 weeks or (unless Blizzard has other plans they haven’t mentioned) be lost forever, and you must spend hours of your time on obtaining it even if you have decent luck and are relatively good at the game mode (which plays nothing like WoW). And if you aren’t good at Plunderstorm and aren’t prepared to think it’s funny to be murdered within 15–90 seconds of the start of a match (maybe two matches in a row, maybe three, maybe eight out of every ten matches you enter) while you’re trying to make progress towards a transmog you want, Plunderstorm is not a very good time.
I don’t even know what being good at Plunderstorm means, or how people do it. I have never once managed to kill anyone. I keep seeing people transform into speeding fire tornados and murder each other. In one match, I got super lucky and looted a purple-level fire tornado. Later, a guy came and tried to kill me, so I used my epic fire tornado on him, and it barely did anything, and I managed to live long enough for the cooldown to end and used the tornado on him again, and it tickled him a little bit, and then he killed me.
Some people have said that the best thing to do is land in an uninhabited place so you can grind mobs for a little while to level up before you encounter anybody (assuming nobody happens to come along too quickly), and other people have said that the best thing to do is to land as quickly as possible so that you’re not wasting time in the air while other people are leveling up and looting abilities. You can’t do both, and where you start out in the sky appears to be random, so you also can’t identify a good place and reliably go there. Also, the bird steers like a freight truck with all the steering fluid drained out.
I really, really want some of the things on this unholy long renown track. But I was already angry about Plunderstorm and various things connected to it when I got out of bed this morning, so I’m considering whether it’s simply the case that this isn’t something I can healthily do, at least not alongside all the other things that life is for me right now. Which sucks because I have six weeks to do it or not do it. It’s not something I’ll ever be able to go back and roflstomp a boss for after being patient for a while.
I think at the very least it would be better if you gathered plunder to spend on items you wanted instead of gathering plunder to progress at the pace of an actual inchworm along a renown track that’s full of things you don’t care about spacing out the things you do. I recognize that a boss’s loot table has plenty of things you might randomly get instead of the thing you wanted, but see again the fact that you can keep trying the boss as many times as you want, for as long as you need to, at whatever pace will keep you sane, and also you will not have to reenter the instance every 90 seconds because somebody else somehow has a better fire tornado than you.
Edit: I changed my mind. There is one way in which Plunderstorm’s combat does resemble WoW. Specifically, it resembles vehicle combat, in feel and in awkward dumbness.
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