Shadowlands Preview: Adventures

Community General Discussion
41

I tried this out on the beta and while the auto battler flavor is an interesting twist, my enjoyment of it was completely killed by how it retains the arbitrary time gating of the mission tables from WoD/Legion/BfA. In a real auto battler, you select your troops, then adjust each turn, developing your strategy as the battle unfolds. In this, you select your troops, wait hours, then watch a predetermined slap fest of icons with no strategy or adjustment to be made turn to turn. This is not an auto battler, it is lipstick on the pig that is the mission table.

Don’t get me wrong, the auto battler part is a cool idea for sure, but please, actually make it an auto battler and ditch the mission table part. Having to wait an arbitrary number of hours to watch your auto battle happen completely separates the enjoyment of planning a squad and seeing the results unfold. I don’t want to plan our a battle strategy then have to wait until tomorrow to watch it unfold.

If this must stay as a time gated thing, here’s my suggestion to make it feel better without actually changing the reward structure:

Do what you did with rested experience and flip the system on it’s head.

Instead of putting the time gating after we build a squad and send them out, do it before. Just make it a cooldown for when these spawn and let us watch the results immediately. That would also open up the possibility of turning this into an actual auto battler where there are interesting decisions to be made round to round.

As this feature currently stands on beta, it’s just a more obfuscated percent chance at mission success that some addon will inevitably automate and I’ll be glad to use so I can ignore this and get back to actually playing the game. I want to like this so much (Hearthstone Battlegrounds is AMAZING!), but the current iteration is incredibly boring and same-y to what we’ve been doing for 3 expacs.

5 Likes
42

Gets old super quick on beta. Not an “adventure” and not interesting in any way/shape/form.

2 Likes
43

Oh goody, more garbage to automate with an addon.

6 Likes
44

Meanwhile the prepatch is out for testing and some classes don’t even have all of their borrowed power in place yet. Some classes don’t even have all of their talents and others have talents that rely on abilities that no longer exist.

Blizzard’s project management and prioritization ability never ceases to amaze.

45

I hope this is something that will be relevant for the entire expansion and not unused for half of it like BFA.

46

See, that would be awesome, but that’s seems like way too much time and effort for Blizz to put into WoW these. Outside of art and music, they do the bare minimum. Just look at this xpac’s “features.”

1 Like
47

You would think, by now, they’d realize that no one LIKES mission tables, and they only have high utilization because they’re mandatory.

5 Likes
48

So, I mean, I know the Mission Table isn’t going anywhere and while I appreciate the work going into making it more interesting there is something the article doesn’t go too far in dept with outside a very very brief overview.

Rewards. I still stand by my belief that Legion had the best iteration of the mission table because it actively gave you items as rewards that would send you to a dungeon, or a battleground, or raid, etc. to actually do something. The fact that Legion’s mission table would give you rewards that would send you out into the world to do things made it, in my personal view, the best iteration of the mission table because the downtime activity that plays out in the background or while offline could give me something to do in game and that activity was rewarding.

While its cool to see strides being taken to make the mission table more “interesting” since its probably not going anywhere anytime soon, it’s still downtime content that I don’t know anyone who goes “I can’t wait to go do my missions!” UNLESS there is a good reward from it. For example, the Island Expedition weekly mission items giving a ton of Gold or Titan Residuum.

My hopes, and honestly I wish the article would have touched upon it more in depth, is that the reward structure of the mission table in Shadowlands leans more towards Legion than BFA or WoD. I get the insane gold income is not going to be a thing anymore but I would love items that send me into the world by starting a quest or even once a week mission’s that gives a free reroll token like what we got in Legion.

Heck, one thing I would LOVE to see is profession missions! Gathering missions rewarding a map to a “secret” cache of materials or to a location containing an abundance of materials that can only be accessed/harvested when on the quest and harvesting/collecting them completes the quest rewarding you with more resources and maybe some skill points. Then there are Crafting Writs that ask you to create specific items and turn them in and you get a nice chunk of gold, maybe rare crafting mats, etc.

Just more mission rewards that send you to do things in the game itself. Send me to torghast to go complete a specific set of requirements like “Free x number of tormented souls” or even something goofy like “Break X number of pots, that will show the jailer! He can’t have nice things!” Stuff that just gets you going out into the world.

Again, don’t get me wrong, its cool to see the system changing and compared to the old Mission Tables this feels fresh and I am excited to play with it but I think my biggest concerns/questions with the mission tables is going to be rewards. For me BFA really did not do it and had some of the most boring rewards outside of weekly event rewards (tokens) or weekly Island Expedition missions. The outpost missions were neat but being that they were one time upgrades and all, it was short lived. The average BFA rewards felt very underwhelming to me and I really hope Shadowlands moves further away from BFA’s reward structure and closer to Legions.

Just my two copper in terms of feedback.

1 Like
49

Just what absolutely nobody asked for… another mission table.

You still don’t have my preorder, Blizz. Better step up your game.

6 Likes
50

Who keeps asking for this? Where the people advocating for more of this type of content? We has the players should be the ones going out on these missions and doing them ourselves. But I guess that’s to much work for this indie company.

7 Likes
51

If they are so excited to bring this feature back, I hope we can make bank with the gold missions again (like Legion and WoD). I am not really a fan of this feature, but I did take advantage of it on my phone during lunch to make a lot of gold, lol.

2 Likes
52

It’s like if they have different teams working on different things, odd concept I know.

53

They wasted way more time on shadow priest, a spec they should have just deleted as it isn’t possible to balance.

I would sooner see them abandon your spec than abandon mission table. I always have fun with that feature, was only disappointed by BFA’s adaption because they didn’t spend enough effort on it.

1 Like
54

More people interact and use the mission table than do mythic raiding. They have the data, and have acted upon it.

55

More people play Candy Crush than all of WoW. Does this mean we should turn WoW into Candy Crush?

1 Like
56

Yeah tbh I think this is awesome, I always enjoyed the adventures. One of the first thoughts I saw when reading this was like “OOooOO a fallout shelter game in WoW”.

1 Like
57

more people play on their phone, maybe wow will turn into a mobile game?

1 Like
58

That applies to literally every activity in WoW. There would be no one at all raiding mythic if it dropped the same ilvl as normal. Just like no one would be doing keys past 0 of there was no reward but io score.

59

Dude what are you talking about?!?! It isn’t a “mission table”, it is an “ADVENTURE TABLE”! Completely different.

3 Likes
60

dsag

/10ch