That wasn’t my point. I’m not talking about +12 keys.
Anyone* who has designs on climbing the ladder is wasting their time gearing a non-meta spec. To climb that ladder, you have to get to the key levels where points of a percent matter. You have to play the meta.
If the highest key you’ve done is a +12, I’m not talking about you.
is there ever not something wrong with M+?
FotM re-rolling is a community driven problem and has existed since Vanilla.
The funny part of FotM re-rolling in the past 5 years of the game is that the benefits of the meta don’t become apparently obvious until you’re doing content where it does well.
You can pick Sin, FDK, Enhance, Balance and Aug all you want but the performance of that class isn’t going to scale to relevance until you’re playing groups that always pull 3-5 packs at a time and using every single CD available.
Aug… so many bad augs. Almost always ends up being a detriment than bringing a full 3rd DPS player. Even in +14-15 keys.
There’s also the alright-good Augs that still ultimately negatively impact the run because sometimes people just don’t use CDs during breath of eons lol
??? You use breath after they pop cds.
Some people just never use CDs or they waste them on something else
Yes, I agree. If you’re really looking to push keys you’ll have a much more enjoyable time playing the meta.
Well, people will always want some amount of change and people make it seem like the sky is falling when it’s not on the forums. But always seeking to improve is a good thing imo.
Individuals re rolling isn’t a problem. It’s when a player feels like they need to reroll. Players who have had characters for a long time have a connection to that character. Feeling like they should abandon that character or will have negative feelings when playing their favorite character is absolutely something blizzard should take seriously.
The best way to combat this is to have very good balance. And to make frequent (read weekly) balance passes. Every week we should be seeing 1-2% adjustments through a season.
I don’t know… I got to play FDK for the first time in keys the other day and I felt like I was popping off despite being in blood gear (admittedly there is a lot of over lap but I have a ton of vers). Felt like I did as much damage as my more geared warrior. And we weren’t pulling 3-5 packs.
1 - Aug was a mistake, but they aren’t going back. Next season it will be less meta because it no longer buffs tanks and healers. Also, it’s really only meta now at 12+ key level. Below that it’s often worse to take an aug.
2 - Tanks and healers feel pretty good to me. Any tank and any healer can clear up to a +15. I’d say Brewmasters are by far the worst, having no niche. BDK needs work, but they were the meta tank for raiding for a lot of the tier so less depressing. Healers I think had a good season - closest in balance I’ve seen in a while.
3 - I think the number of trash that chain cast single target spells needs to be toned down. Other than that it’s a good challenge.
You can’t fix M+, and it is going to continue to lose participation because most MMO gamers aren’t looking for super challenging content.
Younger gamers are just playing easier to pick up games, and most of these games are free to play.
If retail WoW wants to survive, they need to abandon content like high keys and super hard mythic raid encounters. The masses aren’t looking for this type of content in online gaming.
Blizzard’s best bet is to try to simplify classes more, add a M+ queue button, ease up on how hard they make encounters, and keep adding more content like Delves and housing.
WoW is just way too stuck in the past, and I put this blame solely on the shoulders of Ion WoW’s project lead. Dude is just stuck in the past, and has been driving WoW into the ground since Legion.
The WoW IP is still very popular, WoW’s decline has nothing to do with it’s age. The decline is because the game is being steered by developers just stuck in the past.
M+ is a relic now, and the dungeon scene could see a huge boost if Blizzard tried to pivot to another system that would keep dungeons relevant instead of slapping a timer and some gimmicky affixes on them.
No.
Then they would just up the damage/output from M+ mobs. The issue isn’t the state of healers/tanks ability its that Ion has a mindset of top 1% instead of the general populous. Heck, if the target was just the top 50% things would be better. Everything is tuned for the top 1% right now.
And your “solution” to augmentation is laughable.
They do seem to be overly fixated on the more hardcore segment of players in the game.
Augmentation evoker detected
This is just blatantly untrue.
Blizzard uses mana as a balancing lever that reacts differently for different specs based on what that spec is capable of doing. Resto druid, for instance, is fairly free of cooldowns for its moment-to-moment healing. Mana ensures a resto druid can’t just jam inefficient heals the whole time. Whereas a preservation evoker is far more limited by its essence and empowerment spell cooldowns; you’re far less likely to find yourself running out of mana on a dragon.
All of your suggestions are to return WoW to how it existed in the past. Raids in classic fall hours after they’re released; it’s clear the difficulty players faced with those raids previously were a lower base skill floor rather than the content actually being difficult. Yet that is exactly what you’re advocating for.
It is not
Hpal used to play around melee attack mana regen
Rsham used to play around LB regen or Spirit/Crit passive regen
Disco used to play around Rapture (pre rework) mana regen
Rdruid used to play around clearcasting (clearcasting lifebloom before rework)
MW Monk used to play around mana tea charges
Holy priest used to play around Maximizing EH via serendipity (later also chakras) and spirit proc mana regen with 5sec rule
Are you new to this? It’s fine, just don’t say it’s not true if it is
I typically don’t respond to you, but I’m going to point out that you fundamentally lack an understanding of what made this game popular.
Your behavior on these forums is a reflection of the broader hardcore, challenge seeking community that is driving this game into the ground.
If you enjoy stupidly challenging play sessions, fine, but you have to understand that your play style is in the minority.
At the end of the day, modern gamers are gravitating towards easier to pick up games, and if WoW continues to keep trying to shove these over designed classes and encounters into the game, WoW is going to continue to decline in player numbers.
There is a cohort of chronically online WoW forum posters that basically sit on these forums all day long trying to defend the current game and the poor decisions by the developers.
Posters like you have driven many people from just not posting here altogether, again, another example of the hardcore elitist community that has hijacked WoW.
You guys think this game can’t die, but if WoW keeps trending towards catering their game around hardcore players, the game is going to honestly just bleed out.
I’m not advocating for Classic difficulty in retail, either. Your appeal to the extreme here just shows me you don’t want to actually debate in good faith, all you want to do is push your play style and defend the status quo using bad faith arguments.
right, when only ONE specialization can step outside the role-based guard rails, that one specialization gets space to play
The PROBLEM was the game shifting from a complex RPG where every class had cross-role functionality to the game being designed to “stay in your lane!” (Classic was absolutely not built to have damage ONLY damage.)
It emerges because only ONE specialization breaks this mold. To let more classes escape their lanes is another, more dynamic way to address this issue.
An interesting point but is it true?
I myself have played less WoW and more “simple” games with partner. We’re level 80-ish in Phasmo now and about a 3rd of the way through Metroid Prime.
It’s weird really. I love doing hardcore elite stuff (IE: fighting games) but I can’t really convince my partner to feel the same. And I’m not sure I want to?
The players I run M+ with, all the randos, I’ve only added two to my friends list. The rest? I have my words but I’ll save them.
So yes to easier games. M+ is officially giving me carpal tunnel now. I had a swollen wrist joint from how active my hand was. Even fighting games don’t make me play piano the way this game does (I mean they do but they’re organized piano, not chaotic). It’s too much now.
It’s true they forgot the “easy to learn” portion, prior to overdesigning “difficult to master”.
I had a great talk from a high rank MOBA player about why they play low-design heroes. It lets them focus on the game fundamentals and master the game itself without the class design tripping over its shoelaces.
This is the real key behind easy to learn, difficult to master.
(My tin foil hat is they did this to make the job of the encounter design team easier. They transferred all the creative difficult work out of encounter design, making it a copy-and-paste job so their arbitrary norm/hero/myth difficulty slider was easier to build around.)
Look at the Steam charts, that is all you need to see. Competitive FPS games have their hardcore communities, but as a whole, these games are very easy to pick up and play. Look at the success of Marvel Rivals, that game is blowing up. They stole a ton of players from OW2 because the game isn’t fixated on e-sports like OW is.
The current devs are basically designing the game around the top 5%. The casual content in the game is so bad, I wouldn’t even classify as a video game.
Yes, WoW does have a ton of casual content, but all the real gear progression is tied to content that just isn’t fun for your average gamer.
People on these forums love to crap on Classic, but a lot of younger players are playing that version vs retail, I base this on my interactions playing Classic over the years.