so? a lot of people quit vanilla and tbc too
the early expansions were not my favorite and they didnt have the most subs either. can you prove they had less at the end of wrath?
This is quite enlightening, says a lot about you ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Donât you think that skill/challenge should dictate the quality of gear you get, not just time?
As in doesnât it make sense to lock the best gear behind bosses/instances with challenging mechanics? Challenging to the point of needing to work on it for a few weeks, or only dong partial clears, until you get a bunch of reps in or look up guides to supplement your play. To me, having fights of that caliber and locking the best gear behind those fights is what makes the end game worth playing at all.
Theyâve managed to take away immersion (see old talent trees for example) and meaningful game play/content in exchange for spoon-feeding meaningless content and shiny objects.
The people that complain leveling takes too long these days are a) not the same people the classic version of the game appeals to and/or b) donât want to have to go through that whole process just to play current content. I get that. The game is not what it once was.
I want old world of warcraft. Vanilla was leveling. That was pretty much the game⌠most peopleâs fun and nostalgia are of that process. Sure 60 was fun running dungeons and gearing up, but most time was spent leveling and all that went with it. It was fun. The immersion, lore, zone music and ambiance hooked you without you even knowing it, and of course the friends made along the way was really what made it special.
I understand that WotLK introduced many of the community breaking things that exist today. Wotlk was still awesome. Had they not let things spin out of control after that, and maybe scaled back a bit of the phasing type stuff, weâd be in a better spot today.
For me, after WotLK, the game took a bad downward turn.
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Agree on all fronts. To me one of Blizzardâs biggest strengths is their willingness and ability to pivot or try new things.
BUT, one of their biggest weaknesses is that when they get an idea they just put the pedal to the metal and push and push until it breaks. And refuse to revert system changes despite a lot of negative feedback. The house has to literally be burning down for them to be like, âOk, we might have made a mistake, weâll fix it.â
For instance, the RNG heavy loot system has been an issue last xpac and only gotten worse with this one. Both casual and hardcore players have made it clear they do not like this system, and prefer the badge system, which took more time but was far more rewarding. The badge system brought out in WOTLK was a good idea, a nice middle ground providing a leg up for casuals to be able to somewhat keep up and provide gateway gear for alts. But then they started expanding the scope of what you could get with badges. They got this idea in their head that there shouldnât be such a big gap between casual and hardcore players, and just kept running with it. Until we got the finished product that is LFR + titan/war forging + rng loot chests.
Something similar can be said for gearing & stat systems. Where they have continually been simplifying stats on gear and the impact of professions since after BC. They just keep removing and homogenizing elements until you have what we have today. No more farming sets for different specs, no more fine tuning your gear. A lot of people really enjoyed the character building aspect of the game. Treating their well-built character and set of stats like a work of art. A tweak here, a tweak there, until they are left with a masterpiece. They got the idea that people didnât want to have to think too hard about how to outfit their character, which is totally fair. But again, just drilled it and drilled it into the ground.
Both of these issues are examples where there is a huge spectrum, and instead of landing somewhere in the middle they just repeatedly swing for the fences. I mean come on, do we really think the issue of casuals not wanting to research stats was so bad that they needed to cut down all the green stats into just 4 that are the same for every single class/spec and gem/enchant choices being made into the most boring ish ever?
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The stat pruning/hominization kinda goes hand and hand with the gear being multispec. Which this wasnât actually an omg casual, both casual and raider alike hated always having to carry 2 sets in some hybrid cases 3 sets of gear around. They have brought that concept back with azurite gear but holy god no one likes it. When making gear interchangeable with spec you cant really keep all the stats we once had it would make gear a mess so to make one concept work the other had to go hand and hand.
The RNG system is out of control at this point and the idea of forging I really donât understand why it was needed I get it as expansion come out more and more you notice the raid content is smaller I wouldnât be surprised is when BFA is all said and done we only end up with 4 actual raids so I get in that case why leaving a flat base level gear would eventually make it to where people got everything they need no need to want more, but at this point I believe it is out of control.
Iâd challenge the idea that having multiple sets of gear to farm is inherently bad. In WOTLK I played the crap out of my main. Like didnât even seriously consider leveling an alt until like right before Ulduar came out. I felt sad when I ran out of things to do on my hunter. Finding excuses to farm sets and keep playing my main was something I looked forward to. So I made sure I had my BIS set, then I made sure I had the BIS set for an armor pen build, in case I got a certain drop. Just blanket having one piece that is persistently BIS regardless of the rest of your gear set up is so boring. Itâs fun being like âOooh, I got this trinket upgrade. So Iâm going to swap out those gloves, and then use my tier head instead of my tier pants with BIS fillers instead. That way Iâll be fully optimizedâ That kind of theorycrafting is engaging and enjoyable.
Exclusivity has become a taboo word in todayâs society. Tell someone they canât have something and the gloves come off.
Thereâs nothing wrong with having content you canât do because you donât have the time or ability. Deal with it or play BFA.
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I do think that skill/challenge should be a factor in the quality of gear you get. I just disagree that a single, particular combat encounter is the only valid skill/challenge requirement, particularly to get a single, particular piece of gear.
Even though I said you could craft or purchase ascended gear in Guild Wars 2, doing so is not trivial, and many would consider such crafting as a challenge requiring particular skill. Making ascended gear in Guild Wars 2 is not trivial, and requires participating in big world events to get some of the desired recipes, materials, and currencies. The other options for purchasing involve currencies you get from running difficult instances (fractals or dungeons). But in either case, you put in your time, and yes, skill, and you can create exactly what you want. All of these avenues involve a challenge and sense of achievement for the people who like to do those things. I loved the big world events, for example, but hated dungeons and fractals.
As an aside and critical comparison, the ascended gear system in Guild Wars 2 allows you to tune your gear to the stats you want for your play style, which to me is much better than hoping for a singular epic drop from a singular boss, the stats of which lock you into a particular role in raiding. I said before that GW2 has plenty of problems, but in this area I think they did very well.
However, this is the Classic forum, and Classic is what we want and will get, with its own particular warts and features. Donât get me wrong; I had a ton of fun raiding in vanilla WoW and would love to do that again. Classic will require the skills, and luck, that vanilla did, and I am fine with that.
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I kind of see where you are coming from except:
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Is there really any difference between killing a boss to get a rare drop you need to craft a piece, or killing the boss and he just drops that piece? Same thing in the end no? I donât necessarily think raiding should be the only way to get gear no, but I think every tier of gear should be attached to a global challenge level. So like say you want a 385 piece right? Whether you choose to get that by raiding, world boss, crafting, etc, in the end you will have to do something that is equally challenging regardless of which avenue you choose to pursue. Until Blizz adopts that system, gear needs to be locked behind bosses.
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There is nothing wrong with farming different pieces of gear for different roles/specs. Itâs actually better that way.
Also, crafting and such is not trivial in wow. Wow is all about progression, and getting incrementally stronger. You hit max level, you craft some pieces to get you into raids, then you raid and get better gear, then you do a harder raid and get even better pieces. Itâs this desire to skip steps and not be continually building your character up OVER TIME that has called for Classic to be built and why players who want classic are so at odds with retail players.
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This is why I think the best gear in these games should be from extremely hard solo accomplishments. Everyone talks about the hard work and committment⌠Like there isnât a single person in this game that was given an amazing gear drop after not paying attention and immediately dying first thing when they fought a boss.
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Teamwork, coordination, building relationships. All important aspects of the game, and yes they may well lead to you getting carried once in a while (although I have never felt like I got carried through a progression raid), BUT it is a good design aspect when these team building elements are just as important as individual skill.
It is only over the past couple years as players have gotten more toxic across all genres, that team building aspects of the game have been looked down upon as bad requirements and features. I would say up through MOP people in general were ok with the game being pretty team focused.
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The difference is, killing exactly one particular boss to get the one particular thing you need, whether youâre crafting or not. And in vanilla WoW, that one particular thing you needed was the ONLY option. Warlocks in MC got Felheart, Paladins got bananas, and so on.
I have no idea what 385 is, but I agree that better gear should have a challenge level. And like you said, Blizzard doesnât do things that way, certainly didnât in vanilla. And Classic isnât changing how that was, so there we go.
I agree completely, but vanilla didnât have that for raiding gear (at least not within a tier), and Classic wonât either.
I donât think Iâve advocated skipping steps; Iâve said there can be multiple paths to the same goal in other gamesâin fact Iâve said there can be multiple goals, which in terms of end-game gear was decidely not something vanilla really had beyond raiding vs. pvp sets. In spite of all that, I donât expect Classic to change in that regard. Vanilla was what it was, and I really enjoyed it, and Iâve love to experience that again, warts and all.
Exclusive content is fine and people are fine with exclusive content. BFA has mythic and ranked pvp if you want exclusive content.
The issue is when a game only has exclusive content.
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How does it make you feel when I say, âYou canât do Naxxramasâ? I ainât got the time for it, and Iâm not mad and raising pitchforks over not being able to do it.
The reaction of a lot of people including blizzard, why are we wasting time developing things so few actually see.
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Unfortunately this became a dangerous precedent as it turned from âWe should make raiding more accessibleâ to âwe should make it so easy a drunken monkey could do itâ with the LFR difficulty.
It feels like it became less about making it more accessible and more about just trying to entice everybody, including those who didnât have an interest in it, to go and do it so they can see high clear percentages on raids.
Either TBC or WotLK probably struck the best balance of raiding.
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Something a lot of people seem to be forgetting when arguing about gear, is that the ILVL spreads in Vanilla and BC were far tighter than in any later expansion. Gear just didnât have the same impact on PVP (for example) that it has in the modern game.
Yes, it did have an impact⌠when a RAIDing guild in full AQ40 gear (or Nax gear before then) popped into Alterac Valley, and you were in dungeon blues, you felt it But not nearly as much as people who have only experienced the ILVL inflation of the modern game might think. Same thing when comparing BC blues against RAID gear.
Rarity was, in fact, beneficial to the health of the overall player base, and that made it possible for gear to be considered only part of the game, and not the whole game like it is in retail. And even here there were little bits and pieces of epic gear around that did not require raiding⌠you couldnât collect a full set, but you could close the ILVL gap significantly in Vanilla even if you werenât RAIDing with a combination of dungeon blues, BOEs, Crafted, and PVP gear. The tight ILVL spread was your friend.
In otherwords, in Vanilla you didnât need to have exposure to every last bit of high-level gear in the game in order to be competitive and to have fun. Seeing someone in full end-game gear meant something back then, but one thing it did NOT mean was that you would only be able to have fun if you were also wearing similar gear. That wasnât the case. For most of the player base, high-end blues were the limit, but that also meant that more often than not the people you encountered in PVP and other stuff were also wearing blues.
-Matt
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The issue with LFR is that instead of actually adding new non raid content they just made LFR so easy that everyone could do it and then used that as an excuse not to add anything besides raids.
I think wrath got the formula just about right between 10/25 man which allowed for plenty of pugging, new dungeons and continually adding badge gear kept dungeons relevant the entire expansion.
Sounds like you are talking Vanilla, more than TBC. While TBC did have level jumps they also had extra itemisation stats that started to appear the higher up you went, Ar pen and haste.
Again more relevant to vanilla than to TBC which has resilience as a stat specifically designed to give PVPers the edge in PVP while giving raiders the edge in PVE.
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