When the hype train hit my gaming community for the relaunch of this game, I rolled my eyes so hard that I thought they’d disconnect from their sockets.
Been there, done that. Not drinking the blizzard Kool Aid again after d4.
Why did I come back? For some reason, this version of the game was pitched to me as …it will be creative fun.
But mostly peer pressure. I’m weak.
The leveling experience will take the classic landscape and fundamentally change it! The classic world will be more explored! The rune system will be a system of endless possibility!
New or redesigned dungeons with new loot itemization! Small raid sizes!
OK sold. Why not. I don’t have any regrets, However…
The reality?
Rune system cherry picked old ideas across all versions of the game. Hardly anything really new or creative. Just duplicates or reskins.
Runes predominately are just another dang stat increase. Whoo. big numbers. wooo.
Itemization? new sets? Stat sticks. wooooooo. I do 20 more damage. 30 more damage. 1000 more damage. You could make me do a million more and it won’t make me want to play more.
Incursions - instead of making more use of the enormous classic world map…you funneled us into very small tiny area(s) of it.
Rune discovery …yeah ok. The user experience of this entire discovery system is unsurprisingly poor that we all just install a mod like usual, and it just turns into an annoying time sink.
The greatest success goes to the marketing department who spun yet another ad campaign that tricked us sheep into resubscribing so you meet your OKR goals for a few quarters. Yet, not mad - $15 bucks was not a waste especially compared to the $100 I dropped on the hot garbage that was diablo.
2024 - is this all the best that game designers can do? Just still recycle the work and ideas of your predecessors?
And I’m embarrassed for myself as the game landscape has us eating dog food, and we do it because what else?
So if you will excuse me, I’ll go run loops like a bot because I need a million gold to not feel FOMO for next phase’s release. My gravestone will read, RIP - 20, 245 incursions loops, died from boredom.
Yeah incursions are the saddest part, IMO. And the lack of care around PvP balancing. I love Classic because of the World, World PvP and the social aspect. Now if you’re not doing the 100% optimal strat of grinding incursions you will have nobody to play with. I tried to find a regular non-WO spam ZF group to get some extra gold and gear for like 2 hours and I gave up. Almost makes me want to unsub.
I honestly miss SoM. I don’t know if I can trust Blizzard to make #somechanges without messing it up. I was happy with increased XP gain and the regular vanilla world.
If it wasn’t just 1 thing - it is easy to ignore. Things weren’t perfect in phase 1, but we were all still really enamored.
By phase 3 - they’ve collected a mound of old patterns that suffocated the playerbase, and yeah, definitely agree incursions was a rough, huge nail in the coffin they were building.
But Sets - no idea why this one upsets me as much as it does…I guess as a software engineer that has empathy for what its like to touch old code that was never designed to be extended, or perhaps not tested either (or limited) and it is just old…I have some compassion. But I have limits.
But gear sets - Sets are their own instance object. They are new. Its a system that they should have had a ton of freedom to do cool things.
instead - they gave everyone a blanket attack power, spell power, spell crit, and a gnarly static damage bonus of some form that perpetuates the power creep destroying PvP.
Hell, they could have at least gave some classes, like mage, a QoL increase like…increased mana regen out of combat.
But no.
Rune system - same deal. Just buff damage, with a few exceptions.
It is so hard to defend the game design right now.
I’m not disagreeing with anyone’s posts about how they feel. I am curious however what their ideas are for “rune discovery” that would make it better. We’ve had everything from doing long quests that take you all over the place, to kill this guy get this rune. Rogues get to do rogue things for their runes, healers do healy things…
I think the phases have revealed that most of the positivity surrounding sod is simply because people are still in love with vanilla wow.
The current team should just stick to revamping gear, bosses, runes. It’s pretty clear when they attempted to generate brand new content it has been a disaster.
More bread crumbs and seamless integration with existing quests and NPCs to find them? I have ideas, probably too many.
I tried to do it without googling in phase 1, and it was just frustrating while putting me behind my friends.
Plus it felt super solo play-ish (our fault because we cheated with mods and such…had we not, we would have probably grouped together to share notes and such) - not sure how I’d make it more group oriented otherwise.
Current implementation, without help, I think the players would never find them all. So given short phases like this, it would be impossible.
Due to the seasonal nature, I would have done a rune book that shows all possible runes (maybe not what they did), and when clicked on, gave a hint on where to start. A riddle, something.
Maybe I was just dumb - but it would have never occurred to me that I’d have to go into alliance zones at such a low level to look for runes.
We will never know how well the user experience was because data mining and mods ruined the experiment (which was a good thing tbh).
In the grand scheme of things, this is at the bottom of the list of issues. I know they had limited time budgets so I’d give this one a pass. However, I think the runes themselves, and what they do, irritates me far more.
What do you mean you didnt like bot simulator 2024? Running in circles in incursions is the most engaging gameplay since Legion dailies. You’re delusional! /s