Hello again,
I can’t stop thinking about the development of the game over all years.
Literally we’re discussing with my WoW friends for all the things that went wrong or for all the things that are simply bad or not working and more or less most of us end up to the same conclussions.
I will keep it simple about the main topics and ideas we’ve been discussing and thinking.
- LEVELING | Most of us feel that leveling and storytelling is at the lowest for the past few expansions. The story is nowhere near the stories we had in the past up to shadowlands. Also the amount of development regarding characters and significant figures is nowhere near the legendary characters we used to have in the past. To that, I believe, what contributes a lot is the way questing and leveling is happening. The way leveling works it feels like it’s just an obstacle you have to overcome to become max level and that’s it. For the majority of the players, the only interesting part is the endgame. In most of people’s opinion, at least the one’s I’m talking to, believe that we might as well have leveling removed as it is now. It doesn’t have much meaning apart from just a few hours path to max level. Leveling used to be fun, used to be a story, used to be interesting. For that to happen you need to have a certain amount of adventure with it and not just blast through within a day or less than a day. Also it used to be educational, due to the amount of time you had to spend with your spec, you were bound to learn it better.
- DUNGEONS | The amount of dungeon modes is obsolete. I believe that you will have to rethink of how many modes we have. Also you never want to revisit most of the content anymore, unless it’s through Mythic+. I’ve never heard anyone going through normal dungeons, even if it is with an alt. Only the first week of the expansion? maybe the second too? but apart from that, normal is of no use.
- RAIDS |The same I feel for the raiding modes. LFR and Normal, but especially LFR, is not needed. Do we really like LFR? Why do we keep it? Also nowdays we always have just one raid. Maybe change that approach? It was kinda fun to have to visit two different places to raid and to be honest, I miss the two separate raid sizes, 10 and 25 man. I never understood why we have to allow normals and heroics to be flexible and to accomodate 10 to 30 people and instead mythic to be fixed to 20. If people want to raid, they should join and form guilds that can support that. Why flexible 10 to 30? Why not 2 to 50? Doesn’t make any sense.
- GEARING | I posted through another thread my suggestion to remove the vault. Gearing should be harder. Diversity and hype around gear is kinda gone from the game long ago. You can bring it back. Just connect the content with gear progress. Remove the vault. If someone’s clears a boss in a certain mode, should be entitled to loot and should be rewarded with a currency that will be able to get him the loot from the bosses they cleared.
- DIFFICULTY | Content does not have to be difficult or just complicated to be fun. Having bosses that you need to figure out a gazillion amount of weakauras you have to use to be able to kill them are just not fun. Fix it. Most of us do not enjoy such things, we do not enjoy a crazy amount of puddles and we do not like to be punished. We’re here to enjoy our specs, see the new encounters and kill the bosses with our friends.
- GRAPHICS | Yes the game still looks cool. But isn’t it a time for a change?
- SEPARATE CONTENT | I’ve said that many times before, but progressing and gearing your character should be completely separate for M+ and Raiding. The same way it is separate for PvP.
- BALANCE & META | You cannot have 6-7 meta specs that can do 17s and the rest to be able to reach up to 14s. It is unfair, it has a huge impact on all key levels, even the low ones, as people will struggle more if they chose the wrong spec in the start of the patch. They will simply not get invited or even if they do, they are bound to underperform, in comparison with other classes and specs that will thrive in M+. You need to work on this. I don’t know. Maybe add M+ multipliers for DPS/HPS outputs. Maybe add M+ tier sets. There are things that you can do.
- M+ AFFIXES | Every season we have the same problems, either with dispelling, or with another stupid affix which will just happen the wrong time and you will wipe because you were… unlucky. Stop it maybe? Do we need the affixes? I mean, I know it’s harder to do 12s, but every time I enter a 12 it feels so much better to not have to deal with a random thing that will come at the wrong time. I just enjoy focusing on my character and the boss mechanics instead.
Thanks for reading and I would really love to hear your thoughts.
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Leveling is an issue because you can’t please everyone with it. As far as story go I think it’s going a bit better, the last heartlands was pretty nice as it had some factions conflict while for sure I missed it not being in-game.
I agree that M+ is a bit too omnipresent, I wish we had a doti dungeon with its hard mode like s4 each patch, something like a 5 man raid for people that want a different experience tuned a bit higher than the normal dungeon experience with a focus more on bossing. As far as normal dungeons go those are mostly meant for leveling, heroic feels a bit too easy but when it’s the first step I guess it can’t be too hard. I think opening m0s to a queue would be great.
Normal raids have felt a bit stripped out, I guess it’s fine when content which drops comparable loot is also that easy, but I feel heroic raids could be a bit harder. I agree in some way that I like the static size and lockout even for lower difficulties as I feel static sizes are more inclusives and make it so people would want to play more with a guild but also I’m not sure there’s any going back on this and to some point I feel a change in philosophy would need to happen to go this way which would be to go toward guilds a lot more.
I feel personally that difficult content is fun, I enjoy tightly tuned encounters and feeling like I have to overcome something. As far as weakauras, there’s a problem that comes and comes again it’s mostly when multiple debuffs go out and that you need to do something with them. I think they need a better approach, the game should give you those symbols like Odyn in Trial did.
As far as gear and separating content I’ve said my part many times. Gear tracks are broken, track overlaps are bad, crafting and upgrading systems are overcomplicated. I believe it would be much easier to handle M+ and raiding if they simply scaled people down to hero track in m+. The great vault requiring 8 dungeons weekly is simply too much moreover if you also do raiding and play many alts. Loot and crests in raids need to be majorly buffed, raids should be upped to .3 loot per person with an additional .1 tier per person. It’s time to reduce grinds if you choose to raid and doing splits or your vault shouldn’t be seen as the only ways to get raid gear.
As far as affixes goes, I personally have enjoyed them this season they haven’t felt like they made one week worse than the other. Moreover, I like when the “big bad” has some interaction in M+.
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It’s a different thing though for an encounter or two in each raid to be a good challenge and a different thing to have to rely on tons of WAs and external addons. It’s plain bad design and wrong in my opinion.
Regarding gear, I forgot to mention an example which I think is totally wrong as approach too. Tier tokens. Most of people get 4set by the 2nd week of each new patch. This is not progress, not fun and not challenging. Unique items and tier sets should be more difficult to get. I know that people complained in the past that they were not getting enough loot. Yes they were not getting loot but they had something to do, something to progress and they were staying until the end of the patch trying to get ready for the new patch and optimized their gear or get their appearance sets. Now they still get everything by the 3rd-4th week, with an exception of two super rare trinkets (which might not even ever drop for their guild) and that’s it. Gearing should be connected with achieving the kills and with farming. Not with vault luck.
I don’t feel that strongly about addons, some weakauras sometime go overboard but marking people with markers has been something dbm/bigwigs have done many times before. The problem is when it’s a weakaura it’s harder to maintain on the same version and make sure everyone is using the same thing, while weakauras often have some minor advantages as you can customize them to prioritize certain classes/players to be assigned. There are famous ones completely flip around some bosses like Archimonde, but this isn’t the type of weakaura we got to use for this raid.
Like with many other designs I feel some compromise was done for other contents to be able to get tier sets, as there is more than simply raiding it didn’t make sense to lock tier sets to only raiding. Moreover, the rng of getting tier sets early or not when they are way stronger mostly seem to encourage people to do splits. I’m also not that big fan of very rare items.
There shouldn’t be any. There used to be a specific rarity connected to the actually rarity of each item. As in Poor<Common<Uncommon<Rare<Epic<Legendary<Artifact. I wish they were just focusing on this pattern rather than any other idea.
I wish simply what should be considered very rare items come from later bosses as it first doesn’t make sense to me that random items are higher ilvl from early bosses but also if we really want to push it to be rare then make some new loot tables for mythic which I think would be refreshing, simply farming the same items going up difficulty isn’t that fun.
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The solution, is to live up to the old “Blizzard Polish.”
It’s pretty clear that quality testing has continued to plummet for years. The disastrous rollout of these Cyrce’s circlet gems, to annoying bugs like the guild achievement spam that went on for ~6 weeks before being patched, really show a lack of care in Blizzard’s management.
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