SL Season 4 must have gearing for casual/solo players

Community General Discussion
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Because 80% of paying customers in every successful MMO are casuals. If you want to pretend there have never been any casuals nor content for them to do, and they only subscribed for the glamour of paying for development of content they weren’t going to do, then dream on. But there aren’t enough hardcore players to keep a game the size of wow alive.

And that’s why other games are gaining market share while blizzard games are uniformly losing MAU’s. Blizzard had a big earnings drop last quarter. Because they are catering to a tiny audience that is going to continue to shrink, players whose fun is more interested in preventing others from having fun, because you see the overwhelming majority of players as undeserving.

PvE gear is better in PvE than PvP gear is, because they nerfed PvP gear in PvE. Only top PvP gear didn’t get that nerf. People in honor gear have more difficulty breaking into PvE content because of this.

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That doesn’t explain why…

I don’t pvp so forgive my ignorance, but what ilvl are we taking here? I just have a hard time believing that anyone can’t do well in raids with current season gear, regardless of where that gear comes from.

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Tons of casuals quit playing the game on a daily basis and yet WoW is still thriving lol. If you think casuals are what keeping this game afloat then you are dead wrong.

This game has always been about the hardcore players. Who cares if one person who pays sub once a month quits, if they can keep one hardcore player who buys 5 tokens a month happy.

Like I said, if youre not happy go play lost ark and ff14 and be braindead there. Most veterans are here because we love raiding and getting gears from it.

Its already easy enough to just run LFR, get gears from it and do M+15s easily for ilvl 278 gears from vault. What more do you kids want? WoW to turn into an idle mmo with auto everything? Loool

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There is Cosmic Aspirants gear levels 1-7 and Cosmic Gladiator gear 1-9. The Cosmic Gladiator gear level 9 is the best and it isn’t as good as the best PvE gear. I guess I don’t know what your comment means.

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Shrug - it’s just not that important to me. Blizz can have it.

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Don’t be obtuse. Of course it explains why. Granted, if you aren’t a PvPer you would not understand. PvE just bores me to tears.

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No

No

No

No

No

No

No

No

Lmao, no

The majority of the player base is engaging in actual end game content. There is no need to offer mythic raid gear for doing absolutely nothing for it.

The gearing progression is accessible to everyone. If you make the decision not to engage in content that grants the rewards you want, then you won’t get the rewards.

I’m not mythic raiding this tier, and so I won’t be seeing any mythic raid loot. Fine with me, the commitment isn’t worth the reward to me.

TL;DR

This player wants free gear. Don’t listen to this Blizzard.

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Yes, of course!

Fun fact: Endgame content includes world quests, daily quests, covenant callings, covenant campaigns, weekly zone objectives, elite rares, and world bosses.

Of course not!

That is why I suggested doing various endgame activities for Normal iLvl gear.

Dear Blizzard:

You have a few players who are bothered by the concept of millions of other players earning rewards and growing more powerful by doing various endgame activities in your MMORPG.

Some of your players are even so elitist as to call any gear earned outside of Mythic raiding “free”, and to call any endgame content that is not premade and instanced “doing nothing”.

I know that you will listen to the elitists, as is your recent trend as of late.

However, you did have the elitist players sign a legally binding contract saying that they would financially compensate you during the huge Season 4 exodus of casual and solo players, right?

And you cleared this with Activision shareholders first, right, so that the drop in MAUs despite “new content” being released won’t be an issue?

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There’s no new content in season 4 for raiders, either.

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I know. But the FOMO mounts and other rewards are real. I would rather just have a super-long Season 3.

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You’re conflating what is your idea of endgame with actual endgame.

You are demanding mythic raid gear pieces be put on both bosses in Torghast each week, as well as having it put on matchmaking content. At a certain point, your demands become unreasonable.

If Blizzard were to implement the changes you demand, a character would be completely or nearly completely BiS in a week. From doing nothing.

Right so Millions of players are actually engaging in actual endgame content (M+, Raiding, and Arena) and gearing themselves up. Millions. The overwhelming majority.

People who refuse to engage in three pillars content yet demand three pillars rewards should not be taken seriously. Trivializing actual end game content to cater to the handful of players who won’t engage in that content is bad game design.

Blah blah blah blah conjecture speculation and nothing much.

You’re trolling at this point, and you’re not arguing in good faith.

You aren’t getting mythic raid gear for shooting yourself out of a cannon or playing Torghast. It doesn’t matter what label you give me because it won’t happen regardless of how much you pout and threaten Blizzard with millions of subs.

It’s an MMO. Their sub count is and always has been cyclical. I’ve played since fall 2005 and I’ve read countless “WoW is dying is gonna die if Blizz doesn’t give me my way

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I agree with pretty much everything here except for queuable normal raids, the existence of LFR allows blizzard to delete mechanics that need significant coordination that random players struggle at without voice chat. Instead I would propose blizzard adds back raid “currencies” like sanguicell and breath of bwomsamdi from bfa but rather than make feasts they are used to upgrade raid gear up to eventual mythic. You’d get more for the higher difficulty raids. Normal and Heroic alt runs have been dead ever since titanforging got removed because running anything besides mythic is pointless.

The rating requirement on conquest gear upgrades is silly when it’s already limited by the weekly conquest cap, if they removed it there wouldn’t suddenly be full mythic geared players week one who spammed normal bgs, it would take months and months of work for people to get any significant amount. Blizzard could also balance it by giving higher rating players a higher weekly conquest threshold as a reward.

I disagree with callings giving great vault rewards I’d rather they give a great vault coin that lets you purchase mats and sockets like the coins do now, and potentially adding back the mythic 0 bind on account lootboxes for them too. Torghast giving weekly gear is a no brainer it’s disappointing they removed it in the shadowlands beta. Queuable timewalking raids and daily valor from heroics is a great idea as right now they’re both completely dead.

This is coming from someone who has gotten cutting edge before and currently has 3 characters 274 or higher, I never understood why gear is so inaccessible. I’ve always thought that mythic raids and high dungeons/pvp should just give the best gear faster and casuals should be able to work their way up over months. In a game about progressing your character it isn’t good to lock the majority (yes the casual community is bigger than people who raid and do dungeons) of the community at capped gear so quickly. The excuse of “you don’t need content that requires that gear” is terrible, everybody wants to feel stronger based on the effort they put in.

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i have done several of SL’s dungeons solo on normal mode, if that helps. only tried prot paladin so far but it was cake, even if it took awhile

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The overwhelming majority of people who purchased this expansion are no longer playing. Falling participation in all content, dropping earnings, MAU’s down, loss of market share, yet those who want to think wow is all about them and their content consider these signs that wow is thriving.

Nah. that’s a lie. The game was originally created to compete with truly hardcore games of its time, to attract players who didn’t like that. that’s why it succeeded so well. Raiding during vanilla may have been all you did, which is merely a sign you didn’t like much of the game and avoided associating with those who played in other ways. The actual fact is that most players didn’t raid during vanilla, and raiding participation fell off as the game progressed to the point where next to no one cleared naxxramas.

There aren’t enough hardcore players to support a game this size. MMO’s are expensive to keep online, and driving away 80% of players who are casual to cater to your whims is a bad business decision that will make it much less profitable.

There is no mass wave of hardcore players waiting to join after you have driven off all the casuals.

“If you’re not happy, here, go play some other game I know you won’t like but people like you are too stupid to tell the difference.”

Oh gee, gramps. You forgot to tell us to git off your lawn. Do your chores, “kids”, and pay for development of the content I deserve, though I’m personally glad antisocial people like me have managed to turn wow into a safe space where we no longer have to worry about running into people who aren’t like us.

Good thing this is a vanity game where profits in the tank don’t matter, that there is a god who approves and doesn’t care that the quarterly reports to investors are starting to look bad.

Typical “you people don’t play the game because you don’t play exactly like I claim to play” dreck.

HAHAHAHA, there aren’t “millions” of subscribers anymore. The number is probably closer to 1 million, and a lot of them now barely log in to your paradise where you have ghettoized yourself so you can imagine that 99% of players are pushing high keys and doing mythic raiding. A lot of those players you despise for tainting your game are just doing old content.

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Show your sources. Let’s see them.

Warcraft logs and raiderio support my position. Nothing other than “trust me bro” supports yours.

Im waiting.

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As someone that has been gaming longer than most people on here have been alive (started in 1978). Ever Quest was the game that defined MMO’s at the time and even to this day and 23 expansions later is still going. An EQ expansion is the size of all of Shadowlands through 9.2 and done on a yearly timeframe compared to WoW usually every 2 years (except this year looking to be closer to 2 1/2 years).

That said endgame content is what that person wants it to be. When I use to raid about 35-40 hours a week, one could run dungeons and world content that gave you gear that was on par with raid gear if you had the skill and knowledge to compete with people that just raid log.

What I found in the beginning of my time with WoW is that players lost the true skill because they became complacent on needing add-ons to tell them what to do and when to do it. They needed better and better gear because they constantly over tuned the game to compensate for these add-ons.

So, when a person who considers world content their endgame which is part of the story. Stuff being over-tuned to mythic dungeons and raids, those players feel they need some form of gear to help them survive.

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I’m not really sure what the point you’re making here is. In early WoW, addons existed. They weren’t the powerful addons that we know today, and so people relied on raid leaders to call things out for them. If your argument is that players were better back then than they are now-you’re wrong.

Again, I don’t understand the point you’re making. This looks like a bunch of different points wrapped into one. A person considering something their endgame that isn’t actual endgame doesn’t mean that it’s endgame.

I’m not sure what ‘stuff’ being over tuned means, either. If you mean mythic dungeons and raids…well okay that’s a separate issue. You can very quickly enter into the entry level raid and M+ with the broker gear from ZM. Spend a day out there farming mobs and picking up drops and relics for gear and you’re on even better footing.

If by ‘stuff’ you mean-anything other than actual endgame content (not what someone considers to be their endgame, but actual endgame) well I fundamentally disagree. The broker gear (226) is all you need to function in the entire overworld and you aren’t locked at that ilvl if you choose to not engage in endgame.

I appreciate your bona fides. Unfortunately, my family couldn’t afford a PC when EQ was the big thing. We finally got one in 2004, so while I do have experience with other MMO’s now, I didn’t back then. It was Runescape and then WoW for me.

The core formula of WoW is special. It’s insanely special, in fact. It has issues. Yep. That said, the hamster wheel of leveling and gearing has kept me here for a very long time. I don’t want to see that dismantled because of people choosing ‘Their endgame’ and completely abandoning what makes WoW, WoW.

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I came from EQ when WoW launched back in November of 2004. EQ didn’t have add-ons to help you with dungeons or raid and didn’t have them for a very long time after WoW started to introduce them. What I mean is if you compared an old school player that learned how to read encounters, they had more skill then a program that says move here or go there. Most players react then pay attention and do what they need to before the program yells at you to get out of bad.

Dungeons, PvP are not endgame content and raiding just completes the story that is being told at the time. So technically there truly isn’t any endgame content as it will always have a will be continue “Same bat time, same bat channel.”

What I mean by stuff, the content that we all play is always over tuned to until you get better gear. When 9.2 dropped I wore 226 gear that you say is all you need. The content was a lot harder for that gear until I upgraded my research to 6/6 and now wear 252 gear.

This is all the gear I need to do that content and fight all the world boss and not struggle. Would I like better gear yes, do I deserve better gear? Yes, but will I get better gear? No, because people feel some gear needs to be locked away even though some people put in more time and effort then a raid logger. What is the point of all that currency if you can’t use it because you don’t do dungeons, pvp or raid.

I agree, WoW means a lot to many different people and I will grind the game just like I have for over 18 years of WoW and 23 years of EQ. I do feel some things need to be QoL improvements or more alt friendly and hope you continue to enjoy the game for many years to come and share that experience with your children if you choose to have some.

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Must? no season 4 must not do anything. Should? a better word season 4 SHOULD have gearing for casual/solo players.

But must? You seem to have it twisted that blizzard must do anything a player thinks/feels/recommends aside take your monthly sub payment.

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You’re arguing with a guy literally named “Feldophile.” Something tells me it’s not worth it. lol

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