Thoughts on Remix Overall, with 73 Days to Go

Community WoW Community Council
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I have played Remix almost every day since it came out and have enjoyed it a lot.

I started on a Mage to play something different, but quickly after hitting 70 realized that I would rather play a tank for dungeon queues and solo-ability of raids and I swapped to a DK. My DK is my most played character by far and hit max ilvl a few days ago. I have also leveled a Shaman and Rogue to 70.

What I love about Remix:

  1. Revisiting Mists of Pandaria was a great choice. Great story quests, good environments, and many great raids to choose from. I would love to see this type of event happen in the future and would suggest Warlords of Draenor or Legion as other settings for similar reasons.

  2. Special cosmetics from zone achievements gave a reason to do some questing instead of just dungeon/raid blasting. I think it is okay that questing eventually falls out of favor.

  3. The Cloak of Infinite potential is great, tinkers are great, cogwheel gems are amazing, and the overall power scaling from first hitting level 70 to fully geared at level 70 is what I played this mode for (more on that later).

  4. Daily rather than weekly lockouts as well as daily quests and daily queue rewards really give enough ways to play on a given day to not run out of things to do while also making sure I can make a good amount of progress even playing just a little bit every day.

  5. Bronze and Threads coming from anything and everything really makes it feel like I’m never completely wasting my time if I want to do something that is just fun. The Spool additions helped a long way in this regard.

What I would like fixed about Remix:

  1. As it stands, I will never upgrade gear on an alt. I use my alts to do daily dungeon/scenario queues and immediately log out of them. They do not feel good to play (again, more on that later) but are a cheap easy way to get some bronze. Unfortunately it just does not feel worth doing the bronze grind again for another ~2 weeks to get max geared. I would love to experience the power growth on my other characters like I did on my DK, but it needs to be cheaper to get there. Maybe an achievement for hitting max upgrades in all slots that could unlock an account wide discount? Similar to Renown catch up in Dragonflight.

  2. Heroic raids don’t give enough benefit over Normal raids for the gear required to run them. Throne of Thunder is the only one that feels substantially more rewarding on Heroic but I actually just solo Normal or carry a group of alts or low geared 70s when I run the other raids now rather than trying to make a group of well geared players for Heroic because it’s just not worth the time. TL;DR buff heroic drops.

  3. Siege of Orgrimmar is just too long with all of its slow dialogue stopping the zoom zoom, and players have been figuring out it is the worst raid to run in terms of getting bronze. Additionally, I get all of these Bones of Mannoroth and I bought everything that uses them. Maybe kill a few birds with one stone and let us turn in Bones of Mannoroth for Bronze?

  4. The extra slots are just kinda weird being stuck at 342 ilvl. Their stats are basically irrelevant, can they just scale with upgrade tracks?

Things too far gone to fix this time but could be fixed for next time:

  1. Meta gems are just bad. Most are fun but their tuning is so all over the place nobody runs anything but Lifestorm anymore. Maybe scrap the concept or focus on a few, better ideas.

  2. Power curve before 70 is insane, and maybe a structural issue with grouping players 1-70. Level 10 alts with a boosted cloak from the Infinite Potential achievement are about as strong as a level 70 on their 5th or 6th level of upgrades, and then your character gets weaker and weaker over time, hitting rock bottom at a fresh 70. Faced with the choice of spending 90k bronze on gear upgrades to get half of the way to feeling like a real human again, or just sending it all on cosmetics and throwing the alt in the trash to start over at level 10, it feels way too easy to make the latter choice. Maybe as others suggest, just make the power currency a different one than the cosmetic currency, but I also think that this wouldn’t even really be an issue if the base level 70 power level felt better, or if there was a way to slowly get better gear over time without spending bronze. This is probably the most complicated issue with Remix so I don’t expect it to get fixed this time, but i hope it is fixed for next time.

All that said, the positives outweigh the negatives by a lot. I have spent more time playing WoW in the past 3 weeks than I have in any 3 weeks in the past few years. More Remix, keep doing this, thanks.

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As a casual player, I am absolutely loving Remix. My main 2 gripes with it though, is that the bronze acquisition is way too low for upgrading gear. I know you guys have said that there are no plans to reduce the amount of bronze necessary to upgrade but I strongly urge you to look at that again. Increase the amount of bronze gained or reduce the amount needed to upgrade. I feel like I am way behind where others are at this point in Remix even though I have been playing every day since it came out.

I also wish the cloak had some type of added alt-friendliness to it. I would love it if our alts would scale with our main so we don’t have to work as hard as the main Remix character. As stated, I am a casual player so that is grueling for me.

I am having a lot of fun but these issues are bringing down the level of fun I wish I had.

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The fact that I can play the entire campaign/quests, do a couple dungeons/scenarios/raids every day and STILL TODAY be massively behind on bronze AND threads AND gear than somebody that just killed frogs a couple weeks ago is frustrating as hell.

That’s no longer a player problem. That’s a Blizzard problem. You’ve created a gameplay style where finding the right place to grind before it gets nerfed is massively superior to just playing the game as intended. Example: Why is questing the absolute worst way to acquire Bronze?

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My experience with remix as someone who played 20 hours on PTR, and has finished all collectibles, all achievements and has a fully max geared character + 7 max alts.

I’ll try not to spend too much time on things other people have mentioned as there has already been some fantastic feedback and I hope we see confirmation this feedback was listened to, or the philosophy of blizzards decisions (current and future) are explained so we can continue the discussion.

First of. LOVE the event. love the idea. And like everyone in this thread, this feedback is not to be taken negatively or as complaining, but as THIS is how we can make the game BETTER if you work WITH US in the production stages and actively react to early feedback.

Pre-Release

I think it was marketed poorly at the start, as it was hyped as an event around Season 4, and this got people excited for season 4 Retail, which has been a complete disaster contentwise. This is one of the many overglaring instances of blizzard being very out of touch with its playerbase, and trapped in its own bubble of internal comms and feedback. When PTR came out, quite a lot of the feedback youre seeing in this thread was fed back to the development team on these forums, but again none of it was addressed and none of it was used. This is a very consistent theme in blizzard development and something I hope we can start to change. ( see my post: Feedback: Mop Remix - #3 by Promega-moon-guard ), a lot of which is being mirrored in this thread.

On this note a lot of people who played PTR expressed that their should be a second wave of PTR testing to test end game content so blizzard can work on scaling. This could have avoided such things as having to nerf ward, etc, weeks into the release.

Bronze

-Make it account wide. There’s no reason not to, it’s what we’re moving towards with war bands, if this ever happens again I hope its automatic because of that but it was a huge oversight.
-Make a secondary currency for buying cosmetics. As said by everyone, don’t make us make unfun decisions. Let us enjoy buying things, and upgrading our gear.
-Alt armour upgrades - massive discounts on alts. Why do I have to do it all again. I’ve done it once, now let me have fun on my alts and just enjoy the limited time game mode.
-Increased aquisition from harder raids i.e. mythic SoO, bigger reward pots for “big” achievements i.e. campaign achievements, zone achievements, reps.

FROGS

First of all, did nobody on the design team play MoP? How did they not see this coming. The reaction to it was way too late, it was a better reaction than blizzard have had before to these things (actually reverting, offering rewards to others) but this all could have been avoided with a little more testing, and if not that, react FASTER, and make a public statement. It would have been very easy to come out and say “this is not how we intended this to be used, we’re disabling charm drops from frogs and will be rolling back people who have been grinding it”.

Cosmetics/pets/mounts.

-It took almost 2 weeks from me first asking within the council if World bosses and Raid bosses are capable of dropping mounts in game once I realised I hadn’t seen any drop. This is embarrassingly bad communication from Blizzard, especially considering it was previously mentioned they could - and I guarantee everyone expected that they would.
Now that we know they don’t - WHY? There is no reason they shouldn’t, let us have that little chance they’ll still drop, theres NO REASON not to. Such a pointless and frustrating decision again showing how out of touch they are.
-Pets - where are they? I mean, even just let us buy the wild ones with bronze. Why not? Let us buy the raid drop ones. Did they just forget about pets?
-PLEASE LET ME SEE WHAT ENSEMBLES I OWN ON MY ACCOUNT. I have not done anything more frustrating in this game in a long time than buying ensembles on those vendors. It would only show ones owned on that armour type, and even then half the time it was wrong. PLEASE fix this. ASAP. Literally the worst thing about this event. Also, possibly in the future a discount if parts are already owned?

Cloak

  • There is no reason the alt cloak should not be the same as the main cloak once you hit max level. THere is also no need to nerf the xp gain on alts so much at the start.
  • Same sort of theme but, let me getting threads on my alts cloak also effect my mains cloak if they’re not going to be the same.

Raids

Loving levelling through raids, I think it would have been a lot better received if we didn’t have the early exploiters able to blast through things for people, and also the weird balance of things like ward, but its fun. Nobody wants them to be particularly hard, just maybe a challenge first time through, and then easier the more upgrades to the point where theyre soloable at max gear. Again, a second round of PTR specifically for raid testing would have solved a lot of this.

Healing

I’ve had a few friends say the want to try healers and since this is such a good way to level alts they want to try it out, but its just a completely irrelevant role in remix. Definitely a balancing thing, difficult one to solve, just unfortunate.

Other Gameplay bits

Please make bronze/threads autoloot. Like the currency in torghast, etc.
Thank God for narcissus making the gem UI usable, hopefully blizz can learn from them.
Skip RP in raids? SoO is so slow compared to the other raids. A faster way to do galakras would be nice.

I’ll probably come back with more thoughts as I keep playing, but that’s it for now. Thanks for the fantastic event and I hope this feedback can help improve it for the next time it (hopefully) comes back around (legion remix when???)

Edit:: one thing I forgot to say, if blizzard are worried about peoples power scaling, I’m at the point now where I am meeting full DR on all stats, so secondary stats no longer upgrade for me at all, this is definitely a good end game point to balance around. The int/stam scaling will continue obviously but it’s definitely the point where i’ve felt “maxed”

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Taking a few points from wowhead comments to try and highlight things we haven’t talked about yet.

Bones should drop from Garrosh on LFR difficulty, and they should be scrapable for bronze.

Arsenal for weapons purchasable on vendors. (especially the remix specific drop weapons)

Some people talking about changing the XP gain % on cloak changing to bronze % acquisition increase when you hit 70.

Faster respawn timers for world bosses (and to add to this myself, give them the 1 minute spawn warning treatment you give rares so people can list groups - ALSO add a world boss section to group finder)

Add more/increase respawn rate of the orbs in the air you can fly through

Buff threads drops from raids, especially harder difficulties

Unlock raid lockouts - the changes to normal/heroic with flex raiding has been fantastic in retail, it should be like this on remix. no hard locked to an ID like mythic raids are.

Ability to send gems to alts.

Allow gear QUALITY upgradeable, not just ilvl.

https://www.wowhead.com/news/blizzard-asking-for-feedback-on-mop-remix-current-working-on-fixing-transmog-342755?page=4#p5876652 all of this comment by guardiantitan

Give people some sort of way to convert their Bronze to Timewalking Tokens for example conversion rate of 300:1.

you should add vendor with rare pets from the Timeless Isle and some other rare items related to “Going To Need A Bigger Bag”

Make heroic raids soloable (im looking at you galakras cannons)

And of course, most commonly mentioned - actually LISTEN to the feedback, don’t just ignore it.

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Another issue is Emporer Shao reputation. It is not buffed at all and with mobs giving 5 to 20 rep a go it is not fun to attempt to grind it when you have to grind so many other things.

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There’s a bug with Shado-Pan Assault rep as well. For whatever reason, it seems like there’s separate SPA reps for Horde and Alliance, and bosses give rep for the raid leader’s faction’s version of SPA (meaning if you’re Horde in a group lead by an Alliance character, you don’t get any rep). Passing leader and resetting the instance hasn’t worked for me personally to “swap” the instance’s faction, but I’ve heard that it worked for others.

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I’m worried really only about one thing.

Is this a test that will end up with you guys implementing a new leveling mode from now on?

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I’d like to see things like alt discount for Bronze gear and Emperor Shaohao rep buffs since it seems to take significantly longer than what other reputations take.

Another thing is Arsenal items for all the different types of weapon mogs since there is a lot that is exclusive to the event from many different difficulties I think it would be best to have it on a vendor as an Arsenal since this event lasts three months.

Mog list here: https://www.wowhead.com/guide/weapon-transmogs-mop-remix

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So this is a fine change in a vacuum. However, it not being announced from the very beginning really hurts my willingness to actually play future “extra game modes” on release. Why would I trust that my time investment is being valued this time when it hasn’t been for Plunderstorm and Remix? I’ve played Remix consistently all this time, based on the (naive, but based on all the information we actually have, including interviews) assumption that the acquisition rates we had until today were how it was going to stay.

Put in something like artifact knowledge from the beginning. Communicate to players that “hey, it’ll get faster over time and this is the amount it’ll get faster each week/month/whatever”. Don’t ambush us out of nowhere with “btw drops have been doubled/tripled”.

Also maybe don’t say in interviews that you’re not going to do a thing and then do it anyway (again). Yes sure you can weasel out of it by pointing at the “but we’ll rebalance if needed” part, but that’s… cheap.

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The Timerunners Mastery buff was predicted from the start. The odds of them doing another buff around or during pre-patch is also fairly high. Happens every time.

Edit – Next Timerunner event just let people have fun and not require a massive grind just to get things done. The event was pitched as fast, casual, fun. Make it that way.

Last Edit – I feel like this design pacing is also because Blizzard is conditioned to keep a few ripcords to pull to try and win players back rather than trying to keep them retained in the first place.

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Of course it was, they should still communicate it so people can make an informed decision on how to spend their time. Certainly don’t communicate the exact opposite.

Yes, it absolutely feels like farming metrics rather than designing a good catchup system in the first place.

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Thoughts:

  • Phoenix model needs more recolors, missed opportunity for the highly-beloved phoenix model
  • Challenge Mode recolor sets, missed opportunity
  • Cosmetics for days, we love this, massive thank you
  • Great place to meet others on the server, lots of new high elven RPers in the Silver Covenant now due to it!
  • Generous amount of time to collect and live out MOP in Remix, the amount of days feels just right
  • Attracts both Retail and Classic players alike, I was able to game with both of my communities at the same time for… the first time ever
  • Game feels overwhelming at this point in group content for anyone who has not farmed threads, I feel I am not pulling my weight but NBD since it is a hyper Remix with an expiration date

To expand:
We want more phoenix recolors.

While I like the one we were given, the community has wanted to reobtain this model for so long. And we all wind up with merely one color. It seems like a missed opportunity.

MOP Remix has been a great place to meet others on the server who we would not have crossed paths with otherwise, and formulate new connections for RP. So thank you for this - The Alliance’s Silver Covenant community expands onward!

8.5/10, would play again, and hopefully with more phoenixes!

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The vast majority of the discord that happens between players and Blizzard that I see comes down to simply being that players dont want to waste their time.

For every group of players ranging from those that know nothing about the mechanics, schedule or causality of why something is.
To the players that remember every cycle, patch, expansion predating the inception of their now grown children.

Clarity of will is an important aspect.

Would most players wait two to four weeks before playing content if Blizzard had predefined Bronze rate updates scheduled over a roadmap?

How would everyone reading this change your playstyle, time investment if you knew it would take half as long or a 1/4 quicker if you wait a month.

Does Blizzard predict player engagement profiles. Intentionally being radio silent for days / weeks longer then a response is expected?

While the changes that are made to improve quality of life mechanics and systems are truly appreciated. Regardless of the amount of constant negative feedback.
I wonder how the Blizzard team could improve response time in a practical and effecient manner.

Blizzard has to be careful with how they respond to players. As everyone fine tooth comb criticizes everything said.

We all wondered what Community Council would become. If we could have an unfiltered conversation of tactful discussion. We need to give specific avenues of topics more leeway so Blizzard can give us accurate updates.

Remix out.