More of an emphasis on how the more casual players will like Shadowlands this time. But yes, there is some “F the meta sheep” sentences sprinkled in with a side of “you can’t be optimal at everything”.
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Is this true?
ah yes daily ralph thread
now GD might need daily clark thread and daily quest is complete.
bring it 
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Systemlands smells like BFA 2.0.
Change my mind. 
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We won’t know until it comes out. Don’t see the point of these threads. Mate, you aren’t a psychic.
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Except it doesn’t, while the covenants themselves are de-facto reputation factions the borrowed power mechanic adds nothing to the RP and actually detracts from it because it goes away.
Except it won’t, the feedback I’ve been reading is that the systems in Shadowlands are overwhelming even for existing players used to Blizzard’s convoluted borrowed power mechanism. The Borrowed power covenants will actually make the expansion significantly less accessible by making it harder to reason about gear and player power. If a player can’t reason 90% of their gear by eye… the system is probably too complicated.
Other than an inappropriate and trollish dig at other players this has yet to be seen. The feedback thus far is mixed.
Again… yet to be seen, while we know the Jailer is the end boss of the expansion Blizz loves to pretend they are M. Night Shyamalan and pull “What a twist!” moments (and fail at it badly).
Except no, many of the people that you term “try hards” are just casual players that use the Icy veins of the world to save time and make the game more fun for them by getting into content quickly because they don’t want to spend weeks grinding things out. Pushing out the casuals will actually massively hurt the game. The true “Try Hards” as you love to refer are actually a very tiny percent of the people that will be hurt by bad design decisions. The dev team is acutely aware of this fact and is actually trying to mitigate it.
Believe it or not… metas actually make the game more accessible. They make it so that players don’t need to understand every little detail of the theory of their class to do decently. Metas are usually not optimal ironically, as they are crafted by theory crafters to be good all around builds and not perfect in any one situation. That will continue in Shadowlands for the same reason.
The fact of the matter is that Shadowlands is going to be a horridly inaccessible expansion for a lot of players due to the sheer number of systems they are building. That will have a detrimental effect when players can literally just hop over to other popular MMOs that have fixed developer controlled metas and go. Respecting player time is a huge thing as well, retail players don’t play classic for a lot of reasons. So leaning into classic design decisions is dangerous at best and out right self-destructive at worst.
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Yes. Shadow land will be a success.
After they pulled the “ripcord” when even casuals realized that they had to level multiple copy of class just to try a different ability.
The sooner that’s done, the more successful shadowland will be.
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Only in Ralph’s mind is it a bad thing to try and make yourself a better player.
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He’s switched from “minmaxer” to “tryhard” as his insult of choice. But other than that, yeah, it’s spot on.
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[semi-joking]And this is why I don’t like daily quests, you have to wait for a rarespawn to come up. If this was a world quest it would popped and died already ten times.[/semi-joking]
He’s busy on the Shadowlands Beta forums it seems.
Dungeons are active in beta, they are designed to be far more open with specific strong packs instead of a million trash with different abilities where the only efficient option is to play mass cc mongo classes and just pulling everything, ccing and bursting things down
The bosses also look pretty fun and great. It seems they are back at designing dungeons for dungeons, not mdi
Crap, I have to upvote one of Ralph’s posts cuz it’s 100% logical and accurate.
It must be the end times! The End Times are HERE!
If it ain’t broke, mass-produce it for profit.
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At least once per day, every day.
With pre-orders, Shadowlands is probably a success already.
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I actually didn’t read the post, I am here for the cookies. 
But, yeah, I am looking forward to shadowlands.
Blizzard can do whatever they want with their brands and people will buy it.
Only outside influence will bring them down.
If I had to take a stab at what it is it’d be something involving China.
We love Grumbles, the cookie gnome! <3
So cute! You created a style.
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Well said!