I’ve been playing on and off since 2004. I played heavily through WOTLK. I’m one of 2 people I played with back then that still plays. I used to pvp a lot, but every expansion did it less and less. I find there’s too much variation in player power, and as a solo player you are just fodder have try hards and exploiters.
I really enjoyed LFR as my endgame as a solo player, along with alts, and transmog hunting.
If I had a nice logical progression - normal dungeons to heroics to LFR I would happily play. Delves are okay conceptually but horrible in execution. I just tried a level 2 with Brann as DPS and myself healing and it was abysmal. I kept thinking Brann was stuck on healer because his DPS was so bad, and I kept pulling aggro off him has an item level 545 Holy Paladin. As it stands now, I plan on unsubscribing and quitting becuase of the wonky gear progression.
What kind of content am I looking for? I don’t want to do side quests to unlock renown or hunt for world rares. I want to spam dungeons until I can spam heroics, then run LFR with individual loot.
Solo player here since around Legion. I hate delves. They’re gimmicky and dull and Brann is an idiot. I wish I didn’t have him tagging along.
What content do I want? Challenging group-oriented (via GW2 style IG) events and world bosses. I don’t like GW2’s combat at all or its lore, or I’d be playing that probably – but it would make the entire world, not just the latest expac, viable again.
Also housing because it’s fun to be a little creative in any game.
Alts is a fair bit of “solo content” as it’s primarily questing… which, at this point due to being accelerated into oblivion, is one of WoW’s weakest points. I’ve actually been running an experiment of sorts with an alt, leveling without Chromie Time under the idea that it’d slow down the XP gain to keep things “sensible” for the experience. Hit level 35 in Northern Stranglethorn last night, and the insane damage multipliers kicked in and ruined EVERYTHING as I went from hitting mobs for ~300 to a whopping 30k.
Achievements aren’t content, they’re a checklist.
Transmog collecting is often done solo, yes… in content you vastly overgear and out-level. The insane damage scaling mentioned above makes it efficient, not fun & interesting.
For mounts, see transmog above.
Pets are a solo system, but it’s a mini-game that not everyone is interested in. As for collecting pets, it’s the same as transmog & mounts.
Role play is not really a solo activity, you need other people to bounce off of.
LFR is not a solo activity by definition, but it is an easier way to see the story which is otherwise confined to raid content. So it’s a band-aid solution.
Follower dungeons are… eh, not so great. It’s still fundamentally group content, but providing a way to do it with AI party members rather than dealing with actual people. It’s another band-aid solution.
Is this just me, or are you trying to make this about the gear?
There’s other issues with how WoW handles things, including absurd discrepancies between the power of gear from different tiers of content, but it’s largely separate from the discussion. That difference in the amount of power obtained probably has more to do with people asking for stronger gear in solo content than anything else.
Keep in mind, this character’s name is ripped straight out FFXIV, where the gap in gear is miniscule… and as such, NO ONE ever complains about different tiers of content having better drops. You’re more likely to see people complain about the lack of “meaningful upgrades”. But I’d rather see that than the endless squabbling of the WoW community over this issue ad nauseum.
As covered above, these are band-aid solutions to allow players to see the story.
LFR in particular is an AWFUL way to see the story because it’s almost always rushed through. Hell, that goes for most dungeons as well; you can only really stop and see the story when you’re soloing your way through it.
For follower dungeons to be workable as a solution, it needs to be implemented RETROACTIVELY into all old dungeons. It’s okay to test out the system in the latest expansion, but for it to be useful you need to go back and add it everywhere. And before you ask, FFXIV already did just that; “Trusts” (now called “duty support”) started with Shadowbringers, but they added all the old dungeons in the MSQ over several patches.
But for another detail, WoW has largely excised dungeons from the central story; they didn’t even seem relevant in SL and DF storylines. Heck, I recall it being fairly shaky in BfA as well. They get mentioned off-hand, but there’s no narrative reason to go into them most of the time. However, raids remain integral to the story.
I won’t disagree on this particular point, though it suffers between poor presentation (having to stop to read ALL the quest text, especially in older content) and a long line of terrible payoffs for the plot threads they build up.
WoW’s story is a surprisingly frustrating experience because of how much wasted potential it has. It may not be an obvious masterwork from the beginning, but you don’t expect to turn into a complete trainwreck either… but a trainwreck is what you often end up with.
I’ll second that soloing old content before the absurd level-based damage scaling systems were implemented in WoD were some of the most fun I had while soloing in WoW. Hell, I can trace that all the way back to Vanilla WoW, where I did things like solo the Deadmines at level 40-ish. I was also using various pathing tricks to solo level 60 dungeons during TBC on a pre-raid geared warlock. Things shifted to self-healing tanks (mostly DKs) during WotLK, but even then there was fun ways to push that envelope.
The Brawlers Guild and Mage Tower (during Legion) are prime examples of solo-oriented challenges in WoW, both of which were quite fun. Gearing up did help with them as well, but seldom to the point it made it a joke. Getting punted off the platform during the Kruul fight does NOT care what your gear was.
The art in this game is really good. It’s a shame we don’t have housing. I see filler items laying about everywhere that I’d love to put in my house. Alas, I have no house. At least in my other game I do, just built a deck hanging over a cliff on the side of one of my houses in ESO, gonna make it an outdoor kitchen! Would be awesome to be able to do that in THIS game.