Its more player driven there than developer, that is true. Players make the content more often than not.
But some dev stuff is there. they setup the wormhole content, we work in that.
How you will run a C2 magnetar is not how’d you run a C5 wolf rayat. Varying strats to the setup.
Think of it like mythic affixes, now apply it to not just a dungeon but the entire area. Imagine necrotic week (from SL)…and that crap is now all over bastion, not just the dungeon. That is what a wormhole is. System wide debuffs, harder mobs to kill. Try not to die.
You’re so jaded that you miss the forest for the trees.
Your current gear and achievements will make it much easier to start heroic week 1 immediately, as well as start farming 10s. The achievement can also be used to join guilds at the upper end of heroic/starting Mythic. A new player will have 0 of these advantages.
You also have the experience of clearing previous content fresh in your mind, while a new player will have to learn everything from the ground up.
If you don’t know how gear in that game works, gear has level and rarity. When the game came out, level 80 Exotic gear was the best available; Legendary gear existed, but did not have better stats. It was almost entirely for aesthetics/bragging rights.
In roughly 2013, they added a single new tier of gear above Exotic: Ascended.
That was the last time they added a new tier of gear. If you got a full ascended set in 2014, logged out, and logged back in today, your gear would still be at the highest level available. I could log back in on my Elementalist and jump straight into end-game content with minimal effort.
They have, since that time, released five expansion packs, not counting the mid-expansion zones, living season story updates, etc…
Which is a rather large amount of content for something “nobody wants.”
If that’s the argument that you want to make then nothing would meet the definition of seasonal games. Even if everything was literally deleted and we all started back with fresh characters you could make that same argument and claim that progress isn’t reset.
I don’t like to play an MMORPG so that I can be a better, sweatier player. I’m not trying to have the reaction time of a league level Starcraft player. I like to play an MMORPG so that my CHARACTER gets better. I’m playing the role of my character. My character should be improving. A gearing and content treadmill is an illusion of progression. It’s a seasonal game, they’re calling it a seasonal game. Just accept that some of us dislike the seasonal gaming aspect. It is what it is, I’ll make my own decision as to how much I want to play it, but to suit her and argue whether or not meaningful character progression continues between seasonal resets is dumb.
Heck, they even force playstyle changes via talent reworks and tier set changes. I got pretty good at my class in Dragonflight, then had to lean to play differently in TWW Season 1, and now I couldn’t play that way even if I wanted to because they removed four spells; I’m going to have to learn how to play this new class now.
It’s a reset of progress. That’s what a seasonal game is. And they try to make it feel fresh by changing up the class balance but it’s still just a distilled, shallow treadmill world. Some might even say it’s more of a lobby in which to queue for your next match and less of a world to immerse yourself in.
I know you’re not talking to me but that’s not my issue.
My issue is that each season I get more and more bored of gearing up again. It happens every 6 months. I have -never- considered skipping a season before since coming back to WoW 4 years ago but it has crossed my mind a few times leading up to this one because I am so sick of gearing up again and again.
I also don’t get a dopamine hit like I used to when gear drops. Most often, it is an annoyed “finally!” feeling and not true excitement. It is relief that I no longer have to grind for that item anymore.
As far as I can tell seasons have always acted as a band-aid, and it is getting soggy and greasy at this point
Blizzard has tried longer seasons and those finds their own issues.
Cata season 1 dragged on eternally. It was not just casuals ranting. it was raiders too.
It stayed long past its time, and many raiders were going RNG is truly hating us. Let’s end this. If rng hates you for 6 months, it not likely to stop hating you month 7,8 or even 9.
See it was the ML LC crews that made it stand out. that wasn’t even pug rolls against 24 other players.
They weren’t getting items to even put in the pile to get people in LC lists items.
They tried to appease us with a dungeon, but that troll dungeon didn’t work well.
FL was a shorter season, some wanted it longer. I’d wager if we got FL for 9 months, that would have overstayed its welcome too.
WoW hasn’t always had seasons and anyone claiming it has is a revisionist and a big part if the reason for Retail being the McDonalds of MMOs nowadays lol.
Seasons just don’t work well in an MMO. Resetting ALL the gear is too much.
Instead they should have baseline gear first patch. Then, add a few trinkets, weapons, rings with special text, etc as the xpac continues.
A slight ilvl bump would be ok, as long as we can level the gear we have by collecting currency.
IMO make it more about skill than gathering
You could say this about Naxx gear but that was the “last boss” of wow for a while. In reality there were many items that people held/hold on to until Naxx.
Plus in this context one is actually using the gear for the next “season”'s content. The way it is now, what would happen is you complete the raid tier, then go back to getting gear from “kill 8 lambs” quests which is where you would dispose of your previous gear, and then take those greens into the new raid to go back to epics.
Blizzard just changed the color of the items. what was a green before is now a blue
Mythic raiders are doing heroic for a few weeks and +7-10s. There is no reason to do normal unless you are desperate for completing a tier set towards the end of the week.
Sure, and then we will go and spam keys and delves to get the other 14 pieces. We won’t get all in the first week (except for a few coordinated guilds) but next week we’ll be real geared
Ah you’ve never been in a guild where your GM gives everyone homework before. It’s fun, you should try it
And you forget that there is more to raid than tier sets. Namely the other “T” – trinkets
