A gearing system like Korthia but with a large, diverse zone like Nazjatar or Argus would have been great. (I did in fact enjoy patch 8.2, but the pearl grind was insane.)
The debate never seems to end. Even after solo gearing options have been nerfed in subsequent patches from near-Mythic iLvls in BfA to LFR iLvls in DF, the elitists are still saying that solo and open world players don’t even need LFR iLvl.
The fact that you are using the term “deserve” in this way is a bad sign that you want to gear-gatekeep millions of solo and/or casual players to serve your own ego at the cost of the health of this game.
Hardcore group content players are getting the absolute best gear in the game, as they deserve. As long as easier content rewards inferior gear, there is no logical reason why you would benefit from arbitrarily making those inferior rewards more and more inferior.
WoW fans of all types deserve to have accessible endgame power progression options. This game deserves to survive rather than die in the name of reactionary elitism.
This is an MMO. Part of the business model needs to be devising ways to encourage millions of diverse players to feel rewarded for spending their time doing repetitive tasks on a long-term basis. Some of those tasks need to be challenging, and some of them need to be more relaxed.
Torghast Layer 8 was insanely difficult for solo players the first few days after it dropped. And you know why? Exclusively solo players were still stuck in low iLvl world quest gear because the Renown upgrades for world content weren’t even available yet.
Features like Torghast are going to be broken if they don’t provide the gear needed to comfortably complete them. WoW devs have proven that they would rather scrap solo progression entirely than risk killing off raiding.
People think gear is the end goal when it isnt. Completing content is the end goal. Gear is the means. With that said, Torghast and the Mage Tower were probably the most high end solo content ever created for WoW and I can’t fathom completing the mage tower or the highest level Torghast instances with gear which you can only obtain through soloing.
Best thing about classic being here.Whenever they try and say the game use to be easier for soloers I point them to classic and say “tell me how well you progress without grouping.” Sure it can be done, but it takes eons to progress and there will still be a large gap in gear level with players who group. And once you run out of quests there is no more progression period unless you group. Plus the game has none of the QOL features that casuals enjoy like dungeon finder or transmogs.
Probably has to do with the fact that aside from questing (leveling), which Blizzard has repeatedly nerfed and level scaled, all of the quality content and development is placed into new raids.
I don’t have an issue with group content, because I came from MMOs before WoW existed. You had to group back then for even leveling, if you cared about leveling efficiently. However, the genre has evolved since 1999 and the majority of players like to solo. Soloers pay the majority of development costs, therefore it’s just good business to give soloers a path of progression that’s just as interesting and rewarding as grouping. People who prefer grouping would continue to do so, because they have friends to group with.
I love the MMO genre, but I’m in my 40’s, have a family, and a good career that takes priority over WoW. So it’s very difficult to impossible to find a guild that raids on a rotating night shift to day shift schedule on the days I have off. So I’d love to have engaging content for solo play if/when I can’t find PUGs to do group content with.
You have to admit, the WoW PUG community places unreasonable standards for admission into raids. The meme “must have XX ilvl and link AoTC” (ilvl requested is what drops in the raid you want to join) didn’t come out of nowhere.
This is where FF14 excels. You can que for all dungeons, trials, and raids from the duty finder. Run duty finder enough to get the currency needed and buy all the gear or pay a crafter to make end game gear.
There is almost no content aimed at solo players. Visions and Torghast would be examples of solo player content, and both were incredibly underbaked despite the latter being an expansion build-around feature.
Group-oriented play shouldn’t be the end-all be-all of MMO design. There’s nothing saying it has to be. MMOs do better when they have something for everyone.
Torghast would’ve been great if it didn’t expect you to win but didn’t punish you for losing either, if it had a difficulty curve and reward system unreliant upon the metagame.
Quests are also incredibly rote and dull. It’s all just busywork that is designed for you to speed past as fast as possible to get to endgame. There are no quests where you make choices, there are no quests with multiple ways to finish it. There’s no agency, there’s no incentive to become invested. They’re just exposition dumps.
I agree on this. I came back for season 4 and ilevel entry into normal raid was higher than the ilevel that dropped. Thankfully I was able to get with guildies and knock them out. We arleady see how popular solo shuffle is with rated pvp. The quea removes barriers of entry and allows everyone to progress in pvp. LFR should be that for pve but with it always releasing long after normals it becomes nothing more than a transmog run.
Have you not read this entire thread complaining about poor solo content design? The entire point is that people who solo enjoy play want this fixed so it’s at least fun to do.
This isn’t an argument and it makes you look stupid. Then again, you completely missed the collective desire for the developers to improve the gameplay design of solo content so maybe this is more of a duck quacking like a duck.
Blizzard development team has issues making content that is not tied to power.
So when you focus your whole game on chasing powerful gear, How do you think solo players are going to feel when the content they enjoy doing does not feel rewarding enough for them.
This is a wow problem, they need to figure out how to make enjoyable content that is not tied to just power.
I don’t care about gear, I care about fun and engaging content that I can do in the world on my own. Which simply does not exist in this game anymore. Hasn’t for years. All they’ve given me is world quests, yaaay.
