You are putting less effort and doing less than people that raid or run m+, they hey also did as much of the Maw, Torghast, Korthia and ZM as so called “solo players”, the only difference is that they engage with more and harder content so they get rewarded accordingly.
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I personally would like to be able to complete a decent looking set, INCLUDING a weapon(s). The system in the final patch of shadowlands was pretty nice, but as a warrior it really felt bad as my weapons were at least ten ilvls below the rest of my gear for months, I got bored and quit without ever getting an equivalent drop to my armor. Getting the tier set eventually, but much slower than any group player, was quite great from the last patch too.
Torghast after the revamp was phenomenal in my opinion, but was too late to catch the majority’s attention.
As a solo or duo only player, it would also be nice to have more agency over grouping as an often “undesirable” class like fury warrior for m+. That’s kind of the classic melee problem though regardless.
It probably boils down to gear. Solo players feel jilted because they aren’t able to get any appreciably strong equipment outside of what they buy on the AH. And really, that probably isn’t an unreasonable mindset.
We’ve already seen from Torghast Blizzard is capable of creating solo content that will present an adequate challenge to where one could easily make the argument high end gear obtained through something similar would be well deserved. Even if the item level of something like that never goes above what you’d get from a +5 key, at least it would be enough to satisfy most solo players.
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Currently. But! If they added challenging content for us, we’d be putting in similar effort. That’s what you’re (and Blizzard as well) )missing.
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i have a stressful job, a stressful day, a stressful week. wow, for YEARS has been that place i go to just unwind. to relax, log in, farm old content because its faceroll, sit around mop world bosses gambling lottery odds as i talk smack in lfg barrens2.0 with the other degenerates that are doing the same thing.
sometimes we hook up and do some bgs, sometimes we meet up and do some old mount farming, or mog, or whatever… but 95% of my play is me just relaxing and doing what i want at a low key, non-stressful pace.
but now most stuff is based around the endless m+ lootcycle and raiding, and competitive pvp. the scaling of old instances and raids every patch just to force people into their desired gameplay loop is tiresome, and its not for me. i have no problem functioning in a group, i just will not waste hours and hours and hours of my week chasing a stupid 2% upgrade because thats what i need to unlock another tier where i spend hours and hours and hours and hours chasing another 2% upgrade. i wont do it, i dont give the remotest of a chit about that, and blizz is actively taking away anything that isnt that path.
even in the .2 patch i was online quite a bit, but with the ah nerf and the scaling, i log in maybe 5m a day to check bmah on a few servers then thats it. theres no point anymore.,
i dont think my playstyle should reward mythic loot. thats ridiculous. but my playstyle should allow me, doing basic stuff such as heroic dungeons as i level and whatnot, a reasonable set of gear i can farm old 2+ expansion old instances in, be able to que for random bgs without being literally 75% lower health than everybody else, etc.
I also want to edit here and add in that i dont mind a grind, i earned “the insane” pre-nerf, i farmed conqueror pre-rep boosts, post medal turn in, im almost at bigger bag… i dont mind gridning, but i have no desire to deal with high failure rates and low chance of rewards. facerolling a old raid for a 1%, fine, spending 6+ hours in a raid for 0 loot when the entire time is drama, egos and bs, namecalling, and frustration? waste of my precious time. same with sitting around applying to groups forever to do anything. can not be bothered, do not care in the remotest.
im not 100% solo, but they have been ramping up their funnelling to “the big three” for a while and pushing it as the ONLY gameplay loop they want, and i will never give enough of a chit for that. eventually i will just stop playing because its more frustrating than it is entertaining, and maybe nobody will care, but theres lots of people who play like me, and think like me, and the more blizz pushes everybody out to try desparately to make wow some fomo garbage esport, the less people will be paying that sub, which just means smaller and smaller budgets, which is less and less content.
microsoft is fairly hands off, but they are also as a company very casual friendly. most of their gaming systems and designs are based around pick up and play wherever you want, however you want… because retaining customers is better than pissing them off, but we will see how that goes because microsoft is also quite famous for being fairly hands off with their studios which can be quite the fail (halo infinity).
anyways, deary diary and all that. thats my reasoning. thats why i solo and dont bother with group content. this game is entertainment for me, it was my downtime, my meditation, my brain dead, joke around with the squad game. it will never ever be a treadmill i run on as i try to prove something to someone on it. i have absolutely no desire for a video game to do that. nor do i have any desire for my down time to be a stress fest, i get more than enough of that when people are paying me to be stressed.
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Therein lies the issue. I don’t think any raider or M+ player cares if solo players are allowed to progress and if there is more endgame content. After, all, those things wouldn’t really impact raiders and M+ players .
But I think basically EVERYONE would take an issue with it if the ilvl of the gear did not correspond to the difficulty of the content you’re completing. The Korthia gear is a good example because it was something that even raiders probably farmed a couple days to round out their unlucky slots. But when we start asking for gear equivalent to heroic raid or +10 keys for doing something that has no skill floor and anyone can get with enough time… that’s where there is a problem.
To me the solution is just to spend time making solo/open world content that does scale well to end game and that gives gear accordingly. Torghast and Horrific visions could have been that, but instead they became a chore currency grind.
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I know I feel that way personally. It might not always make sense but there are plenty of us like this. I know I can probably even mythic raid if I want to put in the work but I make sure to practice a ton before I do a ton of different types of content as I fear messing up.
With dungeons I used to study up on them quite a bit before doing anything over a normal. I’ve been complimented quite often with how good I’ve been with interrupting thanks to the efforts I’ve made but it really stops me from getting into content I don’t already know.
In BFA I started raiding for real (normal and AOTC with a few bosses on mythic for extra item levels to help carry my guild.), as I finally had a PC that could handle it and I spent hours watching video’s and guides before hand every time to make sure I did not mess up and screw over other players.
I started doing arena in BFA too and it was the same there, I would do what research I could as I did not want to be “bad” in front of other players.
My guild died at the end of BFA thanks to classic and our raid lead quitting and rather than go through all of that again in SL and feeling stressed out I just gave up and became pretty casual. I plan on pushing myself again with DF along with making some changes and trying new things but it’s all pretty stressful for me.
The problem, as was already stated in this thread, is that with the exception of Korthia, all of those activities required gear that you couldn’t get from that solo content. There was no progression where you start in easy zones/phases with a reward of better gear to move to the next zone/phase, and so on. The only way to come anywhere close to the recommended gear levels for even the middle-difficulty parts of those activities was via raid, M+, or PVP. If players could get gear from the open world that allowed them the ability to move to the more challenging parts of that content where the cycle would repeat, then those content types could fit the bill for a lot of players.
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Since you don’t know how to ask a question without condescension (“put forth effort” ??), I guess we can respond in kind:
Group play is =/= “effort.” It = time. If you have the time, great. But not everyone lives with their parents. Not everyone is a college drop out or hs student. Not everyone is a sophomore in college or works at Burger King full time.
Some people are verily successful in life. To wit, a life OUTSIDE of WoW. Careers, advanced degrees, families, children.
It’s not that they don’t want to “put in effort” you dolt. It’s that not everyone logs in every day bc they lack an outside life.
So what they’re asking for is soloable content. They could go achievement hunting, sure. Or old mount farming. Battle pets. There are SOME solo things. But Blizz could do better with this.
Other MMOs have features like solo dungeons (for eg). Torghast and Mage Tower are great examples of the type of solo content people want.
So they don’t have to put it in their calendar, they don’t have to conform their family around a raid time decided by 24 other people, etc.
They can just log in and play and feel some type of progression and reward for also having a subscription.
And your mentality is why WoW continues to not have this type of content (though they’re doing SO much better thankfully). This misconception that bc someone doesn’t necessarily have the time or open schedule to raid, they’re not “putting forth effort.”
Girl, just stop. You think you look like you have a good point but anyone with a half of brain or a semblance of a life outside of WoW knows what “solo content” means. And I’m not falling for the “I genuinely wanna know 
” facade. I was on board with your question until you suggested these people just want freebies.
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So well said. More patient than I lol
I like how you point out their condescension and then proceed to do so yourself. Kind of fell right into their trap huh?
I don’t really understand peoples mentality here. You have an enormous amount of solo content available at your disposal and yet it’s strange to me that people who have such an adversity toward group interaction gravitate toward MMO’s or at least MMO’s with such obvious group dependency.
As far as not having the time to do it, that’s just silly. Arena’s take no time to start and finish, Dungeons are quick, LFR is brainless, there’s solo-shuffle in pvp now too (truthfully I don’t know what this entails) and then there’s tons of other play at your own pace activities you can take part in or minor time sinks. Could there be more? Sure, but when is that NOT the case?
Why is getting carried by your guild the only thing considered to be “putting in effort”? Never understood that.
Regardless, a lot of my issue with it is magnitude. It probably wouldnt matter so much if there wasnt such an issue of power sprint in the game to start with. Especially for casual pvp, which a lot of solo players use for gearing. This time of an expansion is a great example. People are running around with 120k health, where a fresh 60 has 20k or less. Even if you shell out for the highest level crafted gear you can actually wear a full set of, youll have about 50k - and those people with 120k will reguarly be hitting you for over 30k in a single hit. It doesnt really make for engaging gameplay being one to two shot for weeks on end just trying to do something resembling catching up. Its excessive and absurd, and theres less than no skill involved.
Even if you give in and try to do group content instead, youre now behind. Good luck getting any groups with no IO and no ilevel. Its an incredibly vicious and unfun cycle for people that dont either have a guild to play with, or dont start doing group content from day one of the expansion and then never stop. Gods forbid you stop. Get that top end gear, take a break for a couple months and boom, you may as well be a fresh character again.
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This game is called a MMO for a reason you shouldn’t get raid or mythic+ ilvl gear from solo play this game is meant to be played with interaction between people mybe give solo content cosmetics mounts and pets but in no way should they get gear equivalent to people putting time and effort as a group into a MMO go play a single player rpg like Witcher or Skyrim if you want to solo farm your gear
I agree. I’m a solo player myself actually. In no way do I think that a quest I can do alone should award me the same level of gear I could get from joining a group and defeating some insanely powerful boss, etc. Doesn’t make sense. No offense to my solo colleagues of course. It just wouldn’t be fair in my humble opinion. I just prefer to adventure alone most of the time.
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because we put in just as much effort in to our particular play styles.
I dont care about ‘mythic raid gear’…what I’d like is to be inundated with SO much OTHER stuff to do, I would find it hard to have time to even think about a raid or dungeon.
THAT…right there ^^^^^
group content is not the ONLY play style there is, and the sooner everyone accepts this…the better the game will become in the social way
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Korthia or ZM style feels appropriate for world content.
I said this before but I think that ZM was really good ilvl for season 3 gear. I don’t think that judging solo content (zm specifically) off of season 4 is a good example of what the ilvl should be / normally is in world content.
When the max ilvl gear is 278 and ZM is 240 i mean… is it really that bad?
S4 is not a good reference point to judge world content off of, because they didn’t add anyting new, just higher ilvl to the game
There was more solo content in Shadowlands then we ever saw in the past. The problem is few people did any of it because they didn’t offer any power.
If you were honest you’d say “what I’d like is to be inundated with SO much OTHER stuff to do that offers power upgrades”
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Umm…no…what I SAID, is EXACTLY what I meant. Maybe I am in a minority in that respect, I actually do what I say, and say what I mean. I have actually been accused of being brutally honest, would rather be that way, then have someone find out I lied to them even about the tiniest thing, and think they cannot trust me.
I got bored with things like farming for motes for the mounts…I will get back to it…already have several of the mounts now…
The highest ilvl I have on came from the WB in ZM…and guess what, I don’t care, lol. I NEVER die…didn’t die b4 I got it, dont die now…I would like to maybe not spend 20 minutes trying to solo kill something, so I just don’t bother with that, killing that same rare for the hundredth time is not that important to me.
I have zero problem with the item level we got in korthia, or in ZM, none what so ever. again, I never die, so why would I have an issue with the gear I have? If I REALLY wanted better gear, I would run the raid or something, even tho I would hate every minute of it.
But…boredom? I have a problem with that. And once you have killed the same ‘rares’ a hundred times, it just gets old. I don’t want ‘super rares’…but changing them out to new ones every month or so would add some flavor.
3 WQ a day? = snooze…boredom
Dailies that give nothing but anima, or the relics you don’t need? = snooze…boredom
The new xpac coming? snooze fest fishing achievements…not just 1 or 2…but a whole LIST of them (i know a lot like that, not knockin it, just not my thing) so…we will have…‘fishing’ to do? yawn (dont throw out that dragon riding stuff either…about a week after, it will get old too…me, I am not even looking forward to it in any way)
You know what might be fun to add for folks like us?
WQ all across kalimdor, northrend, eastern kingdoms, pandaria
This would add even more to do…never the same one in the same spots, they rotate from 1 continent to the next, but all up every day, on all continents. 5-6 up in each country, every single day.
rewards are cosmetics, titles, achievements, gold…
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See I agree with this completely, I said this earlier in the thread and the solo players should be more focused about what content they’re able to recieve and enjoy rather than the ilvl of the gear from the content. I think there should be more solo content as well, the ilvl doesn’t matter but make it fun. I’m not a dev, so i don’t know what they could do to accomplish this with how wow is set up, but I would like more solo content for solo players for sure.