The gear at the start of this xpac that you earn while leveling up in the last zone at max level and while doing world quest pushed you right to the level needed to go do Heroic Dungeons, which will in turn gear you for LFR/Normal Raid as well as Mythic Dungeons. You also can get high end crafted gear that fills slots as well.
You don’t need a welfare gear grind of catch up great at the start of an xpac. Just play the darn game. You don’t even have the difficulty of finding your own groups just auto join groups and grind the gear upgrades. How hard is it really? That for so many many years was and has been main line progression in this game. Now people expect to just run around and kill 20 pigs in 5 minutes and get heroic raid gear and call it a day.
I remember seeing that, and I believed it. But it only hit me when I was getting Renown and that first time unlocking a new piece didn’t give me the piece, it gave me the option to buy the piece. And I’ve been furious about that ever since. Awful design, just…awful.
yes but were talking about something people have already experienced that’s like hard nostalgia. like them good ol rose-tinted glasses. aging 30+ year olds trying to recapture the feeling of being 16-22 again.
And this is why there are so few new players who remain with the game. By the time an expansion is implemented, the devs are so into it that they don’t realize that new players that reach max level after dragging themselves over BFA terrain are going to be overwhelmed and decide the game is not fun. A lot of new players have come to wow. The “skip for alts” that comes later in the expansion doesn’t apply to them. For them it’s “grind for months” with no end in sight.
Maybe you and blizzard were planning on them buying carries to fast forward into end game. Well, surprise! Sunk cost fallacy that the entire game is designed around doesn’t impact them. If they were to look at the choice between grinding for months and spending a heap of money on legendaries vs skipping some of the grind and spending a month’s pay on carries, they’re just going to quit. They write the game off as a bad investment and move on to games that appear to appreciate the fact that they play.
It is silly that you can’t even conceive that there are many different ways people want to play alts. It makes you sound like a player who thinks even having alts is playing the game wrong.
If everyone who finds the game more fun because they have alts today quit, you would have next to no one to play with.
And in any case, Blizzard relies on people rolling and leveling new alts to keep themselves busy when the company doesn’t bother to give them content during droughts, but doesn’t really want them to play those alts.
Data in Final Fantasy shows that people often leave the game, then come back sometime later. Making this feel like a punishment because you feel the need to keep everyone mindlessly grinding on a hamster wheel is hurting wow. You are hurting wow. Why do you want wow to fail?
true, and no burnout is probably harder to achieve because its both game design and the playerbase. No lifers will get to the carrot ona stick x10 faster than me then unsub until patch release, guilds dead, its sort of wierd how wow fluctuate like that.
The gearing system was ok took time but ok with each patch there was no problem with it just raider doing their usual,"You don’t need that gear ",or want mythics even though at the time they were just that.
Someone is actually trying to tell us that the AP grind is ‘content’ now that it’s gone.
Incredible, I hate these forums with every fiber of my being. No, the main problem with DF’s world content is that for some reason, they decided a three-day cycle on WQs was a good idea. AP would not improve the situation at all.
I don’t know that people are defending them, it’s more that some people understand why they were created in the first place.
Artifact Power was created as a direct reaction to the many complaints in Warlords of Draenor about “there’s nothing to do except raids and pvp”.
So Blizzard created AP to be a means of power progression outside of raids/pvp.
In order to fuel that system, they created world quests to add AP fuel to that engine.
This is why world quests had so many complaints, and ran out of steam, in Shadowlands. Without an AP grind (artifact or azerite power, take your pick), world quests were suddenly a mechanic without a purpose.
Now… whether people like this, or think these were good decisions on Blizzard’s part, that’s all up for discussion.
But let’s at least be honest about why AP was introduced in the first place, and where we are now:
WoD had “nothing to do”.
AP gave people something to do.
People hated AP systems.
Dragonflight is returning us back to pre-Legion expansion design.
For the people in point #1, Dragonflight will also be “there’s nothing to do”.
wait til all the crying cause nothing to do. even with systems people were whining bored. it’s gonna be another wod all over nothing to do i’m bored i just sit in the city or my garrison back in wod. blizz absolutely did not replace the systems with new content to keep people busy.
No one forces people to rush to end game playing 6+ hours a day and running out of things to do. Have you leveled every character to max level? Have you gotten all of the collectibles in the new expansion?
Content density in Legion did more favors for it than AP did in and of itself.
SL and DF WQs being very scarce are a larger part of it’s failings more than the lack of AP mattering for progression. DF, however, has much more going for it than SL that isn’t marked by a WQ.
It’s called making alts and enjoying dungeons/raids/transmog collecting/pet collecting/etc. There is a ton to do without pointless, required, boring system grinds.
