It’s well known that SOM was released too soon after C19, and at a time when players were enjoying TBC for the first time in like 15 years, but setting aside the horrible timing of this product’s release, what did Season of Mastery do correctly?
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the reworked boss fights were pretty cool but no world buffs was awful
SoM did a lot of good things right including
- Updating boss mechanics and tuning them to be more difficult (though could still be tuned more imo)
- Killing boosting - made it so you get almost no xp if boosted by a 60 in a dungeon. I also think Hardcore servers took this in an ever better direction by making it so you have 1 of each instance lockout per day until lvl60, this avoids dungeon boosting AND dungeon spamming to level up (more true to original classic)
- PVP honor system - doubled the ranking points you get but also doubled the decay, far better than what era has become.
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Probably the best thing they did was go with a simpler plan, that kept all phasing to level 60 content, which they only made small and minor changes to. This is where SOM was a success where SOD has been more of a failure.
Key things
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No phased leveling, while phased leveling sounds good, the reality is it sticks people in very limited content for a long period of time, this led people leaving much sooner, before 60 where they normally would leave as harder content phased in like Naxx. At 60 there are multiple dungeons, raids and other content such as multiple BGs, at low level, there simply isn’t that much to do, it also really highlighted class imbalances to the point where it absorbed more and more dev time, pulling the devs away from content creation. This also had a relatively large impact on breaking the economy, since people could farm quests for gold even at low levels.
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Overly complex changes, SOM didn’t really change much, like or dislike the no buffs, the changes to bosses were minor, making it relatively easy to balance as well as test. There were also no real gear changes, also which is good/bad, however it didn’t really change the game balance, leading to fewer issues. SOD however jumped in with new quests, leveling options, new PvP options, and a huge amount of skills which even though most were copied, they still had a huge impact on the game. I don’t think the initial plan highlighted the heavy risk of so many major changes to the classes and the impact that would have in balance, this was also compounded by the phased leveling.
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Avoided things like Dual Spec, GDKP ban etc. Again, like/dislike the ban, it’s a distraction the devs didn’t need from the development, and where the problem was greater then on normal servers because there simply wasn’t much content to do other then extremely easy raids, which were rapidly completed by most players, unlike 40m content which typically took guilds longer to gear out and complete, which tended to push things like GDKP to more legacy raids, as example people ran GDKP MC raids where they did BWL in progression. Also things like DS just added another complication, which by itself wouldn’t have been a big deal, but as small part of all the huge changes, it was just to much.
Really the SOM scope of work was simply a much more manageable project with their small team, unlike SOD which was way more complicated, and more then was manageable by the team, especially due to how phased launches, and the relatively massive changes.
Released a game mode that players could play.
We can make a severely long list of reasons it did wrong.
Personally I can’t speak for anything it did right. We were promised a Classic+ experience from base vanilla and onwards with new stories that were previously unfinished and raids/dungeons on map that weren’t activated or completed.
We didn’t want retail-lite. Specially when archon addon exists now making it mirror to raider io.
Introduce the Soul of Iron Buff
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I didn’t get to play SoM, but the thing I was interested in was the reworked raid bosses and limits on world buffs.
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They used the classic game as a base to trick people into playing it.
You might be confused. This thread is not about Season of Discovery
Ah yes my bad… 2 days without sleep didnt do to well and I just swapped from a SoD post prior to this xD
What som did right was take a restrained approach. They added a bit on top of the vanilla experience and in doing so they didn’t break the game in two and give themselves more work than they could reasonably do
Sod could of have a much better game if there had been some restrain and only added a bit on top of the base game as opposed to trying to Frankenstein a whole new monster
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Was basically Vanilla pre-nerf in respect to raid mechanics and damage values., (criticism bosses and npc needed more HP and damage because 1.12 classes)
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Nerfed boosting