Mages would be least impacted (of course).
Druids…i suppose those natural-themed portals in dreamwalk can still be useful. Warlocks? I’m still baffled over this:
Can someone - anyone - explain what ‘unique means of transport’ does warlock have?
We’re classifying Ritual of Summoning as transport now?
Or they are referring to Demonic Gateway? Seriously?
For the record - after witnessing what the Legion and Black Council can do with gateways in the Legion expansion, one would have logical expectation that at the very least, playable warlocks should be able to open gateways to major cities, or even their own class hall. But nah, they rather tease us by forcing us to run into the sewer instead.
Arguably the single unique means of transport that we had was Glyph of Nightmares (a cosmetic glyph, in fact. Not even available innately!), which allows us to run on water on our beloved Dreadsteed instead stuck with the same bug like everyone else. Even that is removed, for no apparent reason.
This thread is huge, as is the other one, and the other periphery topics probably get us close to the 10k mark. This is one serious issue in the community.
But I realized something. This isn’t a subscription based game to Blizzard anymore. It’s a free-to-play. For those of you paying a sub think of it as a 110k~ish gold fund. Blizzard is going full-on F2P model on us. (Now, don’t get me started why they shouldn’t be F2P as they double dip on tokens and subs… but whatever).
So yeah, they’re going this route and have been for awhile. This inconvenience introduced to us by removing certain portals is exactly the behavior of free-to-play games - they want to keep you logged in longer.
You are saying that you’re against the portal removal, but because you don’t like how other people have expressed their opinions, you’re going to support removing portals?
I understand the old thinking of removing portals. Especially once you introduced flying to the world. Flying helped shrink the world so portal removal was somewhat helpful pre-Panderia. However the world has drastically increased in size and content since LK.
I agree that portals should be organized better. There should be a portal from each faction capital to the main city/hub in every expack. Throw them all together by the Cataclysm portals. Get rid of the alliance Kara portal, we can fly our lazy butts there. But add an alliance portal to Kalimdor (Darkshore). For horde leave Kara portal as a means for EK travel. Keep the CoT portal, and put them in faction capital city.
Yes, there are rings, cloaks, scrolls, etc for travel. Many of these take a fair amount of time to obtain on one character. I play 12 characters and primarily 5 classes. That’s a ridiculous amount of time spent obtaining travel pieces. Which doesn’t include any of the flying grind.
Speaking of flying… Your community told you not to remove this from the game. Thankfully for now you have listened. The day you remove flying is the day I forever stop playing WOW. I have spent too much time, money, energy obtaining flying/mounts and its capabilities. The ridiculous grind for flying in the last 2 xpacs is painstaking.
I have played WoW on and off since vanilla (check your records)! When you break the game I take a vacation. When you fix it, I come back. STOP BREAKING THE GAME! Maybe instead of an XPAC every 2-3 yrs you should switch to 3-4 yrs with double the patches, content an fixes. Lich King was my all-time favorite when current. Legion became great towards the end, and then you scrapped everything that eventually made it good with the release of BFA (let’s not forget about the Stat nerf). I am now a middle aged man with many things pulling on my RL time. I don’t have the opportunity to play like I did in my early 20’s when Wow was released. My hope is that I can log on, pick up where I left off and do as much as I can in the time alloted to gaming. If I don’t feel any progression in that time, I get the desire to log off. Or worse yet for Blizzard, play another game that gives me progression.
Please keep in mind that while many of your new subs are young people, the older generation that has stuck with you is what paved the way for today. I also realize I may be a minority on this. People will disagree with things I have SAID. However, there seems to be a resounding “No” from your community members regarding the removal of portals. I am with my community and will be unsubbing as the patch to remove portals goes live (account expires 3/11/19).
If my community agrees with me, please use your wallet to show Blizz the error of this decision. Enough drops in the bucket, makes a full bucket!
Exactly! Liven the world up so we don’t mind taking the scenic route(I still think there should be more portals but still). There is so much potential. You want to keep us logged in? Hint hint… Make the game merit it’s name.
The last time I looked at the “post read” count for the CMs that post here and have their profile public none of them even met the 20k read requirement Trust lvl 3 requires for us peons, so no, not much faith its being read. The fact most of them have that data hidden shows how much transparency they are willing to provide in how the view and communicate with the forum community.
This is it for me to… A change like this isn’t enough for me to quit over - hell I knew this was coming and just purchased gametime - but it just speaks volumes to me that they are essentially saying its in an effort to make the world more immersive, when all it does is make it more inconvenient, and hence more irrelevant.
Its the same thing that had me so pissed when they talked about removing level locking at 110, then nerfed the time it took to get to 110.
It really does seem like they just want to force people into the latest content at the expense of the game as a whole. Its just sad they try to convince us the opposite is true with justifications like in the OP.
This 100%. Most hubs you level thru as a new player are ghost towns already - even on full servers with crz/sharding.
Or just leave the Honeydew Village/Paw’don Village portals where they are for leveling toons, and link to the Shrine in the portal room. Which would be the solution I’d advocate for most of the affected portals. Let the portal room link to the various expansion capitals, leave non-capital portals (and portals in other cities) the heck alone.
Water striders? Too convenient, remove their functionality and, coincidentally, slow players down.
Freezing XP? Well, thanks to Blizzard’s broken scaling, 111s can clear content faster than even geared 120s. Better fix that!
Portals? There’s that pesky convenience again, and even worse, players seem to prefer old content to the BfA slot machine. Two reasons to remove those!
But, while all of these do have a side effect of slowing players down, I think most of the changes are simply that these devs have a real need to control players, and I think it’s because they don’t want to create the kind of open-world game WoW used to be. That’s why player controlled flight is such an anathema to them. Their new on-rails game needs them to control where we go and when we get there, and if we won’t hop on the rails we will pay for it with our wasted time.
The other obstacle to creating engaging open-world content is that if you keep adding land masses to the game world, instead of using the abundant land masses already available, you’re intentionally shooting yourself in the foot in being able to create such content with the limited resources and time given to development of new content.
This is why mission tables were created – to give a semblance of yes it still matters to all the game world outside of the current expansion’s 5+ zones where all the development time is spent.
Here’s an idea! Have a bank of npc mages in every city that will portal anyone anywhere for a small fee. Like using a flight master! Gold sink! Blizz should love that.
Well, I’d prefer they add to existing world instead of taking away. The barrens and 1K re-imagining was and still is junk. They should have rolled out Cata as a value-add and not a George Lucas crud-show re-imagining.
I remember when deathknights threw a fit when they Blizzard to take Army of the Dead away from 2 of 3 deathknight specs as part of Legion’s class identity changes. That decision got reversed.
![:+1:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/+1.png?v=6" ":+1:")
