I hope they don’t do it again, but curious if they can still fill the time between expansions without one.
I hate to say it but im considering doing the same if season 2 is like more of season 1. I havent logged onto the game in almost 3 weeks and im the type of player that usually pushes for the entirety of the season, with no breaks and rarely burn-out. But, this season and the queue-simulator are NOT fun.
Out of necessity, and it’s still considered one of the hardest seasons ever. Tank nerfs, healing nerfs, and the changes to stops made any number of nerfs irrelevant to the insurmountable wall they levied on players going into this season. Let’s not diminish the “they removed affixes in exchange for higher difficulty argument”. They didn’t remove affixes. They made different ones. That still didn’t play nice with certain dungeon mechanics AND were layered in with higher baseline dungeon difficulty.
Tindral was nerfed far too late into the season. Pre-nerf brood and princess could definitely compare with the snap-precision required for OG Tindral seeds. The difference was they got ahead of nerub’ar nerfs earlier. What NP is most guilty of is being the most anti-pug raid of all time on heroic, given coordination required for bosses like brood, princess, court and queen. Eggs, clone placements, webbers, and donut poppers are all key abilities that only the cheesiest of overgeared groups could successfully mitigate a missed mechanic on. They should’ve left that level of 1-shotting to mythic only. Heroic was and is still unnecessarily tilted too far to “sweaty”. Don’t agree? Go try a pug these days and see how it goes without everyone being 625+ and versed in the fights already.
S4 is the WoW equivalent of the NFL Pro Bowl.
Out of necessity, and it’s still considered one of the hardest seasons ever. Tank nerfs, healing nerfs, and the changes to stops made any number of nerfs irrelevant to the insurmountable wall they levied on players going into this season. Let’s not diminish the “they removed affixes in exchange for higher difficulty argument”. They didn’t remove affixes. They made different ones. That still didn’t play nice with certain dungeon mechanics AND were layered in with higher baseline dungeon difficulty.
To be fair a lot of changes had good goals but were simply not tuned well. Healers having to actually focus on healing rather than dps, tanks not being immortal, not being able to time a M+ where you have 20+ deaths for me are all good goals. But, dungeons have harsher execution coupled with those changes, while those changes would have been a good reason to tune down a bit dungeons.
Also affixes are totally fine to me, we didn’t see any weird spike in participation because fortified bolstering did happen, affixes changes are a pure win to me.
Tindral was nerfed far too late into the season.
Sure but it only affected around 300 guilds if we’re taking about the seed nerf. The last round of nerf wasn’t needed.
Pre-nerf brood and princess could definitely compare with the snap-precision required for OG Tindral seeds.
No, they were simply bigger dps check and princess mostly got fixed so it couldn’t be solo tanked. They nerfed Ovinax because they messed up the first 4, you can’t have a 130-150+ pull bosses after a 10 pull boss, the first 4 are maybe 20 pulls at worse together.
They should’ve left that level of 1-shotting to mythic only. Heroic was and is still unnecessarily tilted too far to “sweaty”. Don’t agree?
Heroic is still a joke to me, there have been way harder heroic raid tuning. I don’t think they should have nerfed queen or court on heroic.
Go try a pug these days
People that pug by the end of a season are generally people that have just managed to get there, the best experiences are always early. Moreover ilvl doesn’t mean much when gilded can be earned in +8s and soon next season delves.
The Heroic Court nerf was crazy. There are currently no mechanical differences between Heroic Court and Normal Court.
The thing you guys never explain is why are you compelled to do the hardest difficulty content if you don’t enjoy it?
If M+10 is too hard that you don’t enjoy it, why cant you do +6 or what ever key level you find enjoyable? Why do you need to remove harder difficulties that other people enjoy so that you can feel comfortable in the highest difficulty level?
If M+10 is too hard that you don’t enjoy it, why cant you do +6 or what ever key level you find enjoyable?
Because +6’s won’t give them Myth-track gear. And they NEED it.
They NEED Myth-track gear, you see.
People that pug by the end of a season are generally people that have just managed to get there, the best experiences are always early. Moreover ilvl doesn’t mean much when gilded can be earned in +8s and soon next season delves.
It bothers me how dismissive the community seems of people coming into seasons late. This is one of the biggest inspirations for this whole post. When you remove everyone who completes this content early (the experienced players who are familiar with baseline wow mechanics), you start to see what this game is actually like for anyone new or just managing to dip their toes into this content and it exposes just how “for the lifers” this game has become. Which is fine, until you see the gradual drop off of lifers expansion over expansion. If that’s who we’re strictly designing the game for, it’s a diminishing pool. I run regularly with all levels of players, and trying to get new players into this stuff is becoming more and more impossible. It’s so disheartening. I can run with my regular prog group for a couple of weeks, and when my less hardcore friends work up the courage to engage with higher levels, they’re so brutally slammed by the content that they just turn it down and don’t see a way forward. THATS why my sub is pulled. I’m tired of playing a game for the 1% that doesn’t care about being accessible for anyone else.
Gear progression was also really messed up this patch, gear tracks are pretty messed up.
This leads to people capping champion gear looking to do myth track content.
Gear upgrades were a mistake.
I mean this simply has happened for pretty much every seasons, this isn’t new that people coming later have a harder time. It was much worse when seasons didn’t reset gear which is why they do it.
It’s mostly because progression is really broken right now, it is normal to hit a certain level in content that feel too hard but it should take more time to get there. The same reason Ovinax had to get nerfed is people are gearing so quick at low level in very easy content then when they make the jump in harder content it’s simply impossible. Simply giving people more gear isn’t gonna make them be able to do harder content. I’d rather have someone with CE with 610 ilvl in a heroic raid than someone with 630 gear.
I can run with my regular prog group for a couple of weeks, and when my less hardcore friends work up the courage to engage with higher levels, they’re so brutally slammed by the content that they just turn it down and don’t see a way forward. THATS why my sub is pulled. I’m tired of playing a game for the 1% that doesn’t care about being accessible for anyone else.
This is why it’s so perplexing to me when people are very against more accessible gear upgrades, and incentives to try different content for the casual player-base. It’s easy for me to walk into any 12 I want and time it, but also understand that it’s not the experience of a vast majority of players. If we don’t keep a reason for the real average / casual players to keep playing, it’s not healthy for the game in general.
It’s a problem that’s been brewing for a while.
Instead of asking themselves, “What content should I be doing, now, that is appropriate to my skill and experience, and where I can work to improve?”
People instead ask, “Where are my next gear upgrades?”
And then jump to there. And are in over their heads.
This is why it’s so perplexing to me when people are very against more accessible gear upgrades
Gear upgrades are not the answer. People aren’t in over their heads because of their gear, they’re in over their heads because they’ve never learned to play well.
Gary Gygax, the man who invented role-playing games, wrote about this problem all the way back in the 1970’s:
“…the foolishness of players with astronomically high levels of strength and no real playing skill. These god-like characters boast and strut about with scores of mighty magic items, artifacts, relics adorning them as if they were Christmas trees decked out with tinsel and ornaments.”
The same reason Ovinax had to get nerfed is people are gearing so quick at low level in very easy content then when they make the jump in harder content it’s simply impossible. Simply giving people more gear isn’t gonna make them be able to do harder content. I’d rather have someone with CE with 610 ilvl in a heroic raid than someone with 630 gear.
Disagree. This was one of the slowest gearing seasons ever to ascend past a champ track. And what you’re suggesting is that, again, you’re looking for someone with built in experience rather than someone who has ground out the gear and wants to engage with content they should be doing because the skill cap exists. Heroic raid is harder than in past seasons. Full stop.
I’ve never seen a gaming company so determined to lower participation.
Start your own gaming company and you’d see it every day when you go to work.
M+ was too easy, better put up the walls and really distinguish the tops from the bottoms - disincentivization.
Easier content doesn’t drive participation numbers up, that historically has always driven numbers down. Because here’s a hint: folks who play the game, as opposed to stay on social media and chronically complain about everything, aren’t the same category of players.
Folks want challenges that are appropriate for their desired skill level of play. You make M+ too easy and you ruin that completely, just the same way as with any other PvE-activity.
Amirdrassil was too easy up until Tindral/Fyrakk? Better create some broodtwisters and princesses to really put some mid-raid walls in - disincentivization.
Different raids have different difficulties. If you aren’t keen on that, raiding is probably not for you.
Tank and healer engagement is through the roof? Better nerf them into the ground so nobody wants to play them - disincentivization.
This is frankly just made up and complete hogwash. Nothing funny or anything to debunk. A single Google search looking for people asking for Blizzard for “pls fix healers/tank shortages” going back maybe a decade or so demonstrates this is a perception issue. Not an actual issue - so Blizzard can’t “fix” something that ain’t broken.
A spec is overperforming? Should we buff others to match? Nah. Gut the overperforming class - disincentivization
Buffs are typically more disruptive than nerfs, because they affect all classes whereas nerfs affect only the offending classes. Not to mention you are getting into POKéMON TCG levels of power creep if your solution is to always just buff classes.
Also Blizz: why is retail engagment dropping and everyone is going to play the 20 year old version of the game instead???
Because hardcore is fun right now whilst waiting for the next patch since most people have cleared the raids at the level they want, done their M+ to the level that they want, and gotten their PvP ranks that they want?
Critical thinking. Try that.
Because +6’s won’t give them Myth-track gear. And they NEED it.
They NEED Myth-track gear, you see.
Wonder how many of these M+ topics would cease to exist if it didn’t reward Myth track gear…
All of them.
It’s not a real season to anybody but Blizzard keeps shoving them down our throats anyway.
Still better than having a season go on for close to a year.
Gear upgrades were a mistake.
Gear upgrades are awesome, one of the best systems they ever added.