A couple of prerequisites before diving in:
- When a customer says something is wrong, they are almost always right. When the customer suggests how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
- Ion has told us that the best feedback we can give is to tell them when something feels bad.
This then is my feedback of the current state of The War Within. Here’s what feels bad, but I’m not going to try to guess at or suggest solutions.
The War Within feels bad.
All through Shadowlands the game felt like it was barely holding itself together. Through the myriad of borrowed power systems and the multi-year neglect of basically every spec in the game, Shadowlands felt like Blizzard was constantly on fire with only FlexTape to stop leaks and a desperate attempt to keep the game from completely falling apart.
When Dragonflight launched, it was a huge breath of fresh air. The team spent a ton of time and effort rebuilding WoW from the ground up, making sure every single class and spec was revisited, rebuilt, and made functional again (and yes, Blizzard failed on some of these but this work continued throughout Dragonflight). With the game’s rebuilt core, playing the game actually felt good! Dragonflight was successful in what it needed to do: recover from the disaster of Shadowlands and set up the team for a solid foundation for future expansions.
But now we’re in that followup expansion, and I can’t help but ask: what in the world happened? The game, yet again, feels like it’s starting to fray at the edges. There are so many bugs, incomplete class, spec, and hero trees, and systems that just don’t feel good, that one has to wonder if the current team is capable of handling a game this complex anymore.
Something, somewhere, has gone wrong. And it’s not one big thing, but a constant stream of small and medium size problems that I run into every single time I play. The War Within is at a serious risk of losing a lot of players through a “death of a thousand papercuts” situation unless something changes and fast.
Combat feels bad.
There is something fundamentally wrong with combat. I play on a 1Gb fiber connection with world and home latencies consistenly less than 20ms, and yet world content is laggy. It doesn’t matter if there’s one other player near me, or 40 (though it gets really bad if there’s a lot), but combat at times is not responsive. When I press an ability, it doesn’t fire, or it fires twice, or it fires late as I’m trying to do something else. When I use a channeled ability, it randomly doesn’t fire, or it does and cancels immediately, or it goes twice as long and my character isn’t responsive. Even in raids and dungeons, with multiple classes (I’ve been playing Monk, Mage, and Hunter), combat just doesn’t feel good. And if combat, the core gameplay loop of WoW doesn’t feel good, then it’s really hard to make the rest of the game feel good.
Mythic+ feels awful.
I wish Blizzard would just tell us what they want with M+, because I sure don’t know anymore. Through the TWW beta my thoughts on M+ followed this track:
- If M+ is more of the same from Dragonflight, I probably won’t touch it.
- Oh?! Dropping all of the crap affixes? New singular affixes? This could be interesting!
- You know, M+ sounds like it could be fun.
- [Blizzard nerfs tank sustain, healing, and massively buffs dungeons]
- Actually, I’m never, ever pugging this disaster of a feature and only rarely running with guildies.
And that’s where I stand on M+ today. Blizzard continuously cannibalizes M+ but for what? Why is it so hard for Blizzard to let M+ just be itself (letting key levels dictate difficulty and giving players more choice)? Why does Blizzard repeatedly try to make M+ dungeons harder? This isn’t fun and it isn’t engaging. When are we getting Dragonflight Season 3 again? Because that was the last time running dungeons was actually fun.
Aside: I understand what Blizzard wanted to do with the M+ levels squish, but I think we need to admit that it was a failed experiment. Everything about M+ today feels bad.
World Quests feel bad.
This one boggles my mind but world quest feel so bad right now. Every single world quest needs to be revisited. Either there aren’t enough mobs, the mobs don’t respawn fast enough, or the interactable items aren’t shared. It’s like whoever designed and implemented these quests forgot that they were working on an MMO. For a team who’s been building world quests for almost 10 years, this one just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Blizzard knows how to make World Quests, why didn’t that knowledge apply to TWW?
Hero Talents feel bad
Not to say that all of the Hero Trees are bad. I’m fortunate enough to be playing Mistweaver Monk, and Conduit of the Celestials is awesome. However, Shado-Pan is ignorable and boring, and Master of Harmony is so fundamentally broken that it won’t get use until it’s rebuilt from scratch.
The fact that I have to say that I’m lucky to have chosen a class that Blizzard also happenes to have put some of the most time into is itself a major problem with how Hero Talents have rolled out. The majority of Hero Talents are bland, boring, uninspired, or completely broken and unplayable. And this is on top of the fact that many classes (e.g. Druids) still need a lot of work in their base class and spec trees to be up to par.
Blizzard had a hard enough time allocating enough time to revisit every class and spec in Dragonflight, and while they kept at that work throughout Dragonflight, they decided to literally triple the amount of work they needed to do for The War Within, and it shows. There are so many bugs, so many Hero Trees that are DoA, and too much failure to spread out the work across all classes (Why are Mages getting work every single patch, while e.g. Rogues and Demon Hunters have gotten nothing?).
Delves are ok
For the single new feature of this expansion, Delves need to be so much more. They are a good start, but the early, seemingly haphazard and knee-jerk scaling adjustments have left us wondering what Delves are actually supposed to be. What we have now is scaling via health-sponge mobs and one-shot mechanics, which really does not feel good, nor does it feel “difficult”. It’s artificially inflated to meet certain metrics, and Delves are quickly turning into a boring chore that we do to fill our vault slots.
I am thankful though that Delves are a legit way of getting Vault gear, it means I don’t have to touch the disaster that is M+ this season. So there’s that.
Please don’t Torghast Delves Blizzard. Do something with them. Make them fun, let people have fun, and reward people for enjoying your content. Don’t make them required chorse we feel obligated to run every week.
Blizzard’s Communication is non-existent
At this point, the only one you can really say here is “first time?”. But this could be an entire rant in and of itself.
The War Within feels bad, and the direction the team is going is not a good one. Dragonflight was a success on many fronts and it set up TWW to be awesome. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet, and I worry that the team is not going in the right direction to get there. There’s a lot of good stuff in The War Within, but if the core gameplay loop isn’t fixed, then all of that content, and all of that work, is moot.