but they can be done at lower difficulties. Torghast has 12 difficulties, surely ONE of them is right for you.
Difficulty isnât the issue, the issue is that there are no less than 4 separate mind numbing grinds to do on every character just to make it raid or M+ ready.
In the good old days, all you needed to to get your character ready for raiding was to hit max level. If you were rerolling, you could get funnelled loot and be mostly caught up by the end of the first raid reset.
Now it takes dozens of hours and weeks of grinding to do that.
1 Like
1 Like
Tin foil hat time⌠Maybe that is by design? After all that would boost the engagement metrics for sure.
1 Like
Also, building completely NEW content then abandoning it instead of iterating on it.
Imagine if they actually tried to fix islands or warfronts for shadowlands instead of spending so many resources building torghast, a NEW thing players donât like.
2 Likes
M+ was an iteration on mythic dungeons, which comes at the end of a chain of iterations going all the way back to vanilla. It started from content people enjoyed and added more difficulty and progression.
By contrast, Torghast is something entirely new, invented as a new mechanic to draw people to the expansion. Fundamentally itâs a good idea, but as you said, it suffers from poor execution in its gameplay loop, which would even be fine if Blizzard decided this was content that would now be a part of WoW going forward and committed to its development.
It can stand as content all by itself, and people can choose to do it, or not. Instead, Blizzard has forced us to go for our legendary progression. So we have to go do content that is simply not ready, for no real reason other than that Blizzard feels we need to.
Even if it was just Torghast, it would be ok, but Shadowlands has thrown a handful of things at us when a lot of people want to do raids or M+. Soul Ash/Cinders, Korthite Crystals, rep⌠they could all be rewards for engaging in an activity, any activity. Instead, theyâre rewards for engaging in specific activities, regardless of whether or not anybody enjoys doing them.
So no, Iâm not opposed to new things and innovation. I think thatâs great! Blizzard just needs to calm the hell down and, instead of spreading themselves (and us) so thinly, focus on the core mechanics that make the game great. If they want to branch out, pick one thing and try that.
Yeah this happened in exactly one expansion and then was killed off forever, for the same reasons.
I mean, thatâs a hard one to speculate on. For sure, it was optional content limited to basically the latter patch/half of the expansion, so it wasnât something everyone would have cared to bother about. There was some attempt to cash in on the FOMO aspect with the limited time skins, but especially later on when people outgeared it, if they wanted to bother with a skin, they probably got it.
I canât say the tank one was a great example of being âfunâ content. It was exceptionally buggy, varied wildly per class, cheesable, and not exactly representative of what âtankingâ is actually like. So I can totally see not finding that enjoyable; the Ret one was a bit more fun. I never did any of the healing ones.
Mage Tower wasnât content you were forced into while levelling, required for Legendaries, and made into a regular grind to join on top of other grinds like AP to be done on a regular basis. If it was, perhaps you might have been a bit more disgruntled about it at the time.
I mean, that image is very disingenuous.
Much of that content is itself dungeon/raid content, on top of the fact that people werenât exactly doing every attunement at once, but as a sequential thing that flowed them from one tier to the next, on top of the fact that by the time a lot of people did the content, attunements may have been lifted, on top of the fact that the content philosophy itself was different and not seasonal content designed to make everything except the new tier/content irrelevant.
Literally the very next expansion, people hit level cap and waltzed into raids. The Realm First 25man Sartharion title on the server I was at went to a 16-man group of random Level 80âs that pooled in and pulled the boss before an actual full raid group could hit lvl 80.
M+ isnât the example youâre thinking of, itâs actually the evolution of content that was with the game at launch, aka âcontent that people have been coming back to for the last 17 yearsâ.
They did Cataclysm 5-mans with the vision that it would be an endgame mode for non-raiders. That evolved into MoP Challenge modes, then WoD Challenge modes. Legion flipped things a bit with the idea of not scaling players down, but putting infinite scaling on content, and since then weâve had small tweaks to end up where weâre currently at with Mythic+.
Itâs not in any way comparable to them trying to create different versions of content with Islands, Warfronts, Torghast, etc. If anything, most of their experiments on that space can be pinned to a singular objective - trying to come up with a system of procedural content thatâs quick to develop, but can be considered âhighly replayableâ. They just wanted to unlock some formula thatâs well-received so that they can shift content into a mode where they can bang it out super quickly and cheaply. Thatâs been one thorn in their side for a long time - execs/management who think actual raid/dungeon/whatever content is too expensive to develop.
From a more naive, less malevolent point of view, thatâs also why theyâre trying to make their experiments along that space things that people feel compelled to do. It gives them more data to work off of.
An actual example of something that might be considered an âinnovativeâ success story would be Artifacts. Remove the Artifact Power grind aspect from it, and the concept of wielding a lore-powered weapon that smoothed out a lot of weapon RNG and behind which a lot of content could be focused was actually decently well done and received.
Didnât even last that long. They were gone before the end of BC, and you could gear up your alts in the catchup dungeons and go straight into Sunwell.
challenging content.
Garrisons were okay, at the very least they pumped in millions of gold and unique transmog items so people like it for that. My garrison bought myself and many of my friends 4 to 5 years worth of tokens by itself. Toghast on the other hand is awful. It was bad before this last update and somehow now it is even worse than it was. It has completely stopped me from playing any alts and pretty much killed my main too. It is in no way fun and the new scoring system makes what was a crap chore into something even worse. I truly hope everybody that was attached to its design and art find other jobs.
1 Like
I actually think the hours + hours of campaign quests is worse than Torghast. Ok I get it, your video game writers think they are GRR Martin. But please let us do it only once, the 5th time I have played through the same incredibly boring 8 hours of questing is just torture.
1 Like
this is a themepark mmo.
sadly lately the rails have been more and more visible.