SL Season 4 must have gearing for casual/solo players

Community General Discussion
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Millions of players have gotten off that hamster wheel of raiding over the years, due to changes in their personal lives and in their gaming preferences. Declines in both sub numbers and raid achievements over the years confirm as much.

Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but I for one and several people I know in my personal life used to raid. As we quit raiding over time, the ones of us that found another hamster wheel stayed on in the game and enjoyed it on a more casual level.

Meanwhile, that old hamster wheel of raiding has a bad reputation and is not attractive to enough newer and younger gamers to replace all the players that have left.

Blizzard has the metrics and surely understands this, which is likely why they came out with LFR when raiding metrics went down, and why they came up with a new hamster wheel of M+ when subs went down.

But M+ is obviously not the right hamster wheel for everyone. A lot of players want something more casual, or something we can just log on and solo as we please. Torghast could have been a new hamster wheel, but devs refused to do that, probably because they realize that many raiders would have hopped right off the raiding hamster wheel. So instead, Torghast became compulsory content for raiders to avoid wasting development costs.

You seem to understand that players need a hamster wheel to enjoy WoW in the long term, but you don’t accept any hamster wheels other than raiding? Why is it your place to decide that this game needs to downsize its playerbase by only having the outdated hamster wheel that you prefer?

You have to keep in mind that the concept of raiding has already changed a lot over the years, so change can be a good thing. Would raiders be happy doing raids like Molten Core every new season?

The game itself also needs to evolve. Other options for gear progression do not hurt you. No one is threatening to dismantle your hamster wheel. You don’t have to do other hamster wheels just for downgrades or sidegrades.

Unless you are afraid that any other options are going to be so overwhelmingly popular that it becomes blatantly obvious that WoW no longer needs raids and can scrap them in favor of other content?

Or, deep down, does it bother you seeing other players get good gear for doing “braindead” content while you are doing the hardcore stuff?

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If Season 4 is to be a success in terms of sub numbers

Season 4 will likely have the lowest amount of Subs. Players are generally tired of shadowlands, and the whole replayability of prior SL raids isnt the most popular, even with mythic first guilds. I have gained AOTC and KSM in every SL season, but will not personally be partaking in season 4. Im just holding out til Wrath drops.

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So I was curious to know the numbers based off warcraft logs.I did a ranking scan on any damage that was done to Normal Vigilant Guardian. As he is the first boss, and would have the highest number of character completing him. Also when I say any damage I mean dps/tanks/healers that were present to the boss kill even to include players with 0 dps. While it took a long time to reach the exact final page, I finally arrived at the last ranked player. That rank number relating to the highest number of characters that beat Vigilant Guardian on Normal, had the fight recorded, and have warcraftlogs set to public.

That number is 711,197. Things to consider are alts, characters that did not kill Normal Vigilant Gurdian, kills that were not logged, and players that have warcraftlogs set to private. I’m not certain that number would drastically increase enough to reach over 2 million.

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What about the number of guilds that have killed it, but didn’t log it?

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269

Fixed, thank you.

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If you do the same search on normal, but set it to all bosses instead of just vigilant guardian, you get 1,120,353

All bosses heroic returns 904,741

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If Wow was expanding or thriving Blizzard likely wouldn’t have been sold to Microsoft.

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We’ll start here. Your response as usual is ridiculously long, so I’m going try and work through it. M+, Raiding, and Arena are the hamster wheels I accept in terms of the best gearing, not just raiding.

I’m glad you made this point. This means that you have outgrown WoW, and you should find something else to play, simply put. There are people who don’t have much time to play (me!) who don’t want to be bogged down by endless progression systems being tied down to the worst gameplay the game has to offer. Titanforging is a wonderful example of this.

My time is limited, so I want to spend it actually playing the best parts of the game. If I’m forced to slog through emissaries, turtle puzzles, dailies, weeklies, etc to keep my character optimized-I can’t. I don’t have time. I do have the skill and ability to progress my character in the traditional means of gearing however.

This is an intellectually dishonest statement. If M+/raiding rewards are made obsolete by WQs/torghast/other brain dead easy boring content-players are naturally going to gravitate that way.

Look at classic with all its boosts and rampant gold buying. Players know it shouldn’t happen, but they do it anyway because it’s the path of least resistance.

Summed up-the game doesn’t need to be made worse to accommodate people who aren’t actually interested in playing it. I read another response you posted about raid loggers. You went on to say that Blizzard designed the game around them and WoD and SL happened as a result and that millions of people left as a result.

You don’t know how many people left and came back, and you also don’t know the reasons for either. Period.

Raidlogging isn’t what the game is designed around. Never has been. The fact that people doing it bothers you so much while it has zero impact on you but you want to mess up the game for other players simply because you refuse to engage in endgame is rather telling.

You make a lot of emotional arguments and present them as logic and fact based. The reality of the situation is that your ideas are awful and intrusive.

The fact that you actively want to make the game worse by invalidating raid and M+ rewards because you don’t do them so it doesn’t matter to you is ridiculously annoying.

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273

Today I learned that Activision didn’t move to acquire/merge with Blizzard when WoW was still expanding back at the end of 2007. Wait


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So I did the search again, this time
Damage > All stars > NORMAL > All Regions > All Classes
That Number is 1,122,514

Damage > All stars > HEROIC > All Regions > All Classes
That Number is 904,741

Damage > All stars > MYTHIC > All Regions > All Classes
That Number is 258,777

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Casual players make up a significant portion of the player base. We like to play on our own schedule. Season 4 gives the casual player little if anything to continue playing for. Come on Blizz moves like this are part of the declining player base.

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It’s unbelievable how Blizzard had months to prepare for this, yet casual players get literally nothing this season, not even upgrades to crafted gear.

I almost wonder at this point whether Blizzard actually wants the casual players to leave, because the strategy is not to get as many subs as possible but as many token transactions.

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Casual players doesn’t not automatically mean “people who don’t do organized content”. It takes maybe 30 minutes to do a mythic+ and in season 4 even the low keys will have ilvl upgrades and vault options. Now if by “casual” you mean solo, well then you have a point. But typically solo players have always gotten the short end of the gear stick. It will suck that solo players will not have a new gear method to grind but there are still the world bosses that will be fated. LFR is always an option as it’s ilvl will be about +10 ilvls and it’s not really any different then doing the world bosses.

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casual/solo players who make up the majority of the games population? who pay the same subscription as anyone else? who buy the shops cosmetics? who are the reason the game even gets content?

nah. they don’t deserve a way to gear in season 4. only uber elitists can. those who pump and dump a tier and quit the game while the casuals and solo players play every nook and cranny of content.

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279

Season 4 will likely be an important moment for a lot of people in this game. But not as important as the launch of Dragonflight, assuming it’s as close as they believe it is.

It’s definitely designed to turn quite a few people away from the game for a few months if nothing else.

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Wouldn’t “every nook and cranny of content” also mean you are doing raids, mythic+ and PvP? Or is “content” only the things you deems as such? Casual players still have options in season 4, you don’t have to be a uber elite to knock out low keys or run LFR (all of which will offer an upgrade path and don’t have a crazy time requirement) and you have fated world bosses as well.

Season four is a wreck for everyone, do you honestly think raiders want to be spending one week slices doing content they already spent months doing in the past? This is nothing more than Blizzard trying to buy time for DF without having some massive draught. Your not the only one unhappy with season four


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every nook and cranny of content relevant to them.

transmog farming, mount farming, renown, rep, role play. the stuff they do doesnt matter, they pays for wow to make raids and mythic+

but blizz never cares for them

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282

Gearing is super easy in s4, pvp honor is really high so just cap 15k honor or as close as you can. M0 drop higher ilvl gear same with +2. Normal raids drop upgrades for most players sooo
 they already doing that for casuals and average players.

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Patch 9.2 was released on February 22nd. Even if DF is released at the end of this year, that would mean that the final major patch of SL would last 10 months, which is still considerably shorter than the gap between most expansions.

This just feels like SL devs relished this “experiment” as an opportunity to completely exclude solo and open world players, as if we didn’t have it bad enough throughout the entirety of this expansion.

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284

I feel like I’ve been saying it all expansion, but the ilvl/player power disparity is insane this expansion.

Season 4 makes it worse for casual/random content player.

I feel even through 8.2, as someone who’s done little more than LFD/random pvp, I didn’t feel this far behind in terms of power. Too many tiers, too many ilvls, just makes the game feel less rewarding than it did 2 years, 4 years, ago.

Season 4 gives exactly nothing to players like me who just want to log in and run a couple of randoms while doing a few quests. It use to feel better.

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