IMO these things will provide a mix of player retention as well as bring in new blood.
New playable races: Ogre (Horde) and Dryad (Alliance). This will keep current players happy, and bring back old players who’ve always wanted to be these races. They’ve been demanded by the community since the inception of WoW and are historical pillars of their respective factions.
Remove faction barriers entirely. New players won’t understand why they have to choose and not be able to interact with everyone in the Sanctuary cities, and old players are just tired of the barriers between playing with other people on this dying game. It’d really help boost player integration to just mesh everything together.
(Unpopular but A MAKE OR BREAK CHANGE) Prune spells in a significant way. There’s so much button bloat that new and returning players probably can’t be bothered to learn, and will be way behind the learning curve. Current players of all skill levels could also use some reprieve as there’s just too much in the game at this point. Focus more on passive talent choices rather than forcing us to play with 100+ key binds.
Increase loot gains for RAIDERS. They shouldn’t have to run keystones to gear up. They should be rewarded for their efforts in the RAID. Loot for raid should be 2:5 ration being 2 pieces of gear per 5 players in the raid. Right now I think it’s 1:5 ratio which is unrewarding and everyone hates leaving a raid empty handed. You should reasonably expect to get 2-3 pieces of gear every time you full clear a raid. With 16 item slots that would mean you should at worst case be fully geared in 8 weeks (2 months roughly). That time table is more than reasonable, especially considering most players WILL NOT clear the full raid from week 1 and take longer than this time frame. If a raider wants to run keys as well, they should be able to gear that much faster. You shouldn’t limit one form of content because another form also offers gear…
M+ should offer max item level gear (at least through upgrades) simply by doing the content at high levels. If you’re clearing +20 to +25 keys, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to upgrade your gear to maximum item level. Having to wait until the vault to get a piece of gear that is 1-2 level brackets higher is absurd. If a Mythic raider can farm their raid for gear, a M+ player should be able to do the same with their own form of content. Again as stated with the raider gearing, don’t punish or prevent one form of content from gearing because the option is available with another as well…
PvP should be better balanced and offer higher item levels at the most elite levels in PvE gear to be at least equal to the highest level of heroic quality gear. This would help PvP players jump into PvE more easily. On the flip side, PvE gear should be viable in PvP with only slight disadvantages so that PvE players can also go into PvP more easily during the season.
For the gearing suggestions above, it’s reasonable to me to be able to easily gear to the max in about 4 (doing multiple content types to min max) to 8 (doing one content type to the max) weeks tops. Anything longer is just boring, drawn out, and makes little sense. Players want to get gear and beat content in a reasonable time. Not spend 4 months trying to get that last bit of gear to push over a boss.
Build better world content for the casual and elite players alike. Boring grinds and micro events are great as an additional option, but where’s the challenge? Where’s the in depth solo adventure and questline that other franchises have been doing lately? Why not add in some form of BG3 changeable story that the player can choose? Another cool thing would be mythic questing that can be group or solo based and offer higher item level rewards for the challenges. The challenges can be lore knowledge based, have secrets, puzzles, riddles, exploration, and of course fighting… DO BETTER.
Bring back the spec challenges from MoP, but gear them more towards a tier system that helps players learn their class as well as each spec. Have the encounters be sort of like the Mage Tower or Torghast systems where you go level by level using your abilities for specific events designed around your spec. It’d be a fun learning tool for noobies while offering a huge challenge for the pros.
Nah. Class design fell off a cliff in Legion partly due to pruning. Just master your class by practicing your abilities until they become second nature.
There better be a way to get bis without running mythics. I used to run my 8 but nowadays those last few ilvls really aren’t worth half an hour of hell.
That and less catchup rewards for current content. Please make content thats focused on the people who play instead of people who stopped playing. They aren’t coming back because you’re offering them 424 gear lol. Its partly why caverns died so fast
Regular flying at max level my only “must have”.
I have several “Should haves”.
A good casual gearing system. Bring back WF/TF, Benthic, non-capped Valor upgrades, visions, something to allow steady progress to heroic raid levels. Not mythic raid level, that should come from instanced content.
Queuable M0 dungeons.
Account wide rep rewards, if not account wide rep.
Cross realm account mail.
I have several “Should not haves”.
No DR. It was janky and micromanaging.
No Pathfinder spitegate. Flight at max level. A moderate NON-TIMEGATED quest chain would be acceptable.
No complicated DF-type professions or “crafting orders”.
Revert region wide AH to battle group or connected realms only.
No more bag space currencies.
No more reagent or gear quality levels.
Better open world content. Invasions, and wq’s like we had in Legion, and BFA. Invasions with a cool little scenario at the end after completing the objective quests. DF trash mob grind invasions are boring, and unfun. And have invasions happen randomly in EK, and Kalimdor on occasion. Put a bit of the world back into the game.
Sometimes, yes.
I spent 3 hours last night explaining to my friend how dragonflight works because he hasn’t played since MoP.
Spent 30 min alone on the upgrade system. This expansion is stupidly complicated, hell SL was less complicated to explain than this
Lets see, currencies, upgrade system, the solo shuffle system, explaining all the different quest marker meanings, all the new class designs, all the new crests, professions overhaul, dragonriding, world quests, I had to explain why gathering nets nearly no gold compared to crafting anymore, and why you have to farm a bazillion keys to upgrade 4-5 pieces of gear.
Lets not begin to mention how disgustingly toxic the community has gotten since MoP either, deny or not it is significantly worse.
Embellishments, M+ affixes, M+ routing, M+ timers, IO, explaining what the gearing system is now like, explaining all the lore that has changed.
He logged off after about 3-4 hours because he loathes questing and has to do the campaign, I’ve personally done it once, and will never do it again. Nobody should be forced to do anything they don’t want to do, story based game or not.
Edit: also the absurd amount of bugs that have been told about since Alpha, and blizzard for whatever reason refuses to fix.
We all learned those things. I feel like you’re not giving your friend enough credit. Fair enough if they didn’t like it or decided they couldn’t be bothered. But your insistence that it was beyond them is just silly.
This is all the things that they had questions about.
I did not explain a single thing they weren’t confused of.
Don’t get me started on how much he whined about dragonriding.
So on OP’s list, there are
2 Generically good ideas
1 Idea that shows they don’t actually understand how something works
1 Niche idea
1 Nothing change idea
and 1 terrible idea.
