Why I'm Playing WoW Far Less Lately

[Elfyr-area-52]

Hey what’s up, I’ve been really burnt on WoW lately and I want to share the feedback of why, in bulletpoint format.

• WAY too many promotions. I’m a pet collector, a fairly competitive one, and having SO MANY promotions lately has really made me stop caring. It just feels gross and overwhelming. The charity event excluded from this criticism, it’s just way too much FOMO and collaboration. It’s exhausted me and I’ve stopped caring.
• Mythic-Raiding is exhausting and cringe. Our guild is on Brood, it’s a very weakaura-heavy fight to coordinate properly and just extremely punishing for all the wrong reasons. I want it to be hard, and I want it to be a wall, but not because our weakauras messed up assignments, kick assignments, or that lag prevented a kick from going out. The frames on that fight are awful and it just compounds with other stuff. Also Hunter’s mark is tiny on the boss and that’s weird.
• The actual content is okay. I really don’t want this feedback to be interpreted as we need to keep me busy with a ton of stuff in game, I love downtime, I’m excited for the next patch and upcoming content. It’s okay to take breaks. I think BFA/Shadowlands had just wayyy too many chores, and we don’t have those now - so I’m playing less! I think the main issue now because of this philosophy change is that when I do interface with WoW, in mythic raiding or in collecting, it’s some of the most frustrating sides of the game (our raiding wall, and the sheer amount of MTX to manage).
• The Game needs another Meta. We really need to focus more on developing content for non-raiding/non-dungeoning players. Making simple, fun content that we can do that is merely just there for fun would be nice. I’d love to get to the point where I don’t say “I gotta’ log on to do XYZ”, but rather “I want to log on to have fun” - because some days it still feels unfun and like a chore keeping up with all of the meta-progression systems (Glad, CE, etc.). Can I just pop in and do some jump puzzles, or learn a new dance emote from a strange talking creature? Just weird MMO stuff, we need more of the world being the main character than all of this content made for players. It’s a balance that isn’t met currently (for me!).

Hope this feedback helps, I know corporate and financial influences can trump game design but I hope those “powers that be” can get the message that a quick $30 gain, or a deadline being pushed can effect sub numbers and player retention which in a longitudinal sense loses them money - it’s just harder to display that quantitatively, but I’m telling ya’ qualitatively it’s real.

[Zoumz-zuljin (Zoumz)]

I’m playing less at this point but I’m pretty much fine with it. I’m not someone that is looking to play only wow for a full season so I like when the season slow downs and let me play other games (and classic).

I will say that the shop mount for me did help me to take that decision (to slow down and play other games at the same time as wow) as I feel it went a bit too far and ruined my vibe about the game but also it was gonna happen at some point simply accelerated the process. (I feel it would have been way better if it only got sold for gold, making it a gold sink in the process moreover when I feel selling that big of a qol for many in the shop simply feels wrong)

I’ve liked so far the raid on mythic after Rashanan as I feel the biggest problem with the raid for me was still the early easy bosses, making half the raid so easy for me is a bit of a waste, it’s like half the raid still feels like heroic bosses. As a tank the 3 first bosses don’t even make my hp bar move, it feels a bit too easy when a M+10 boss will do that much better. If we want to go that way then I think raids need to have more bosses so there can be a better curve as I wouldn’t want to nerf the more interesting bosses as I feel the curve from Ovinax to Queen feels good to me.

I still like Ovinax mythic as a tank, for me it’s like my top 2 fight in the raid for tanking, I like fights with a lot of adds but there has been performance issues and I think the fight showcase why dps dks should also be able to get mass grip, needing 2 blood dks massgrip (or vengeance dh) for me is not great. As far as weakauras go, using them to auto-mark people has been a staple in raiding. I feel the game at this point could do it, when multiple debuffs go out I would be fine with people having the game auto-assign clear markers on their head like it was used on Odyn.

As for the game balance, the amount of rework we had in .5 didn’t help and to be fair there has been frustrations with many people as their specs performance moved a bit too much around like arcane mage when from the start we saw that it could be problematic. There also has been many specs which were forgotten like brewmaster or windwalker. And it does feel like some specs overshoot a bit like prot paladins or enhance shaman with their wolves rng which probably should get capped in some way.

Raid loot is still frustrating to get. When delves are 100% droprate per player, M+ 40% and that raids are 20% with group loot it does feel like there simply ain’t enough loot to make it a good experience. Moreover with smaller raids the amount of loot you can get out of raids has gone down a lot and it feels like raids simply can’t help you gear outside of the vault much.

Another problem has been crests, many people will tell you you need 75 M+ let’s say to catch up on crests but that’s because crests from raiding are too limited. I think raids could easily give 50% to 100% more crests and it wouldn’t be much of an issue.

There also has been many cases of people disliking having to do so many Grim Batol this tier to get a specific loot, a big problem I’ve seen with grim batol is the large loot table. I feel M+ loot would be less frustrating if loot tables were more restricted, it would also make the great vault rng better as that also has been reported many times that the great vault rng doesn’t feel that great. An idea too which could help would be to be able to freeze an item like you do with the trading post, which wouldn’t make it way better but would help reduce the rng.

[Aero-kargath]

The promotions have been a significant talking point in my guild. About 1/3 of the people in my guild got bronto, but most complained about it. The price point was bit of a shock but seems reasonable when you compare to the old bronto and game-currency wise. The biggest complaint was when this came out. I recognize that there was probably always going to be a release shortly after the patch, but having a patch that missed so incredibly hard followed up by a $90 cosmetic purchase that had great value left some serious sour taste. A punch in the gut immediately followed by a request for money (totally optional, of course).

And unfortunately, that all lined up with the “Direct” and all of the celebrations which opened up numerous options for purchase. Mount bundles, charity pet/mog, DewRito rewards, Bronto, 12mo sub reward, Grizzly packmaster (was earlier but still very recent) and I just saw about the new thrall plush with in-game pet. Individually, nothing wrong with any of these. But all of them coming out at once is overwhelming, just as Elfyr says. I want to participate in most of these but all at once is a bit much. What’s coming next month that’ll cost a few hundred bucks for cosmetics? Is Warcraft going the way of monthly cosmetic microtransactions or is this entirely based around the W30? Hopefully the latter.

I don’t play less, but that’s because of the people more so than the game. I have felt less of a desire to do things in the game though. M+ is the main are I spend time in and it just hasn’t felt fun. Compared to DF seasons, the crest rewards started off feeling out of reach for many in my guild. (My guild is an AotC, Some M guild generally with a variety of skill levels). The change to 8 for gilded made it feel more attainable, but some weeks certainly feel better than others.

I recognize that the whole M+ affix system went through multiple iterations of the drawing board. The most recent version felt like the people who designed the dungeons and the people who designed the affix pool worked on opposite days and then threw them together at the last moment. On paper, the affix setup seems reasonable. It’s only when you lay that paper over the dungeons that you start to see the significant challenge. Most of the affix work fine, but MANY bosses (and plenty of trash) have significant area denial so gathering orbs becomes a calculation of “how long can I go in the ‘do not go or you’ll die zone’ to gather orbs because if I don’t we’ll wipe?” Granted, some improvements were made to limited bosses but this affix takes a dungeon that is otherwise challenging and turns it into an absolute nightmare. As a melee, Ki’katal the Harvester is a boss that simply doesn’t exist in my brain during “gather orbs” week.

As above, I would love to have the feeling of “I want to sign on to do X” rather than “I need to fill a vault” or something like that. M+ fills that itch for me in 3/4 of the weeks so it’s not totally out there. I find the other 3 affix to be completely reasonable and generally enjoyable (wtb CDR affecting trinkets though!) I’d love to see Delves enhanced in a way that made the single-player aspect enjoyable. Maybe I’m on a short list here but I found Torghast and Horrific Visions to be a ton of fun. Awakening the Machine has potential to be something engaging and challenging rather than just a meme for rep and valorstones.

I’ve been here for just shy of 20 years and it’s hard to keep engagement for that long with such a wide variety of players. Hopefully some small tweaks (that don’t break the game entirely for weeks please ) can help us all enjoy the environment and increase our desire to log in without also increasing our immediate costs by hundreds of % in cash-grab.

[Fusur-stormrage]

@Elfyr-area-52

The Game needs another Meta. We really need to focus more on developing content for non-raiding/non-dungeoning players. Making simple, fun content that we can do that is merely just there for fun would be nice. I’d love to get to the point where I don’t say “I gotta’ log on to do XYZ”, but rather “I want to log on to have fun” - because some days it still feels unfun and like a chore keeping up with all of the meta-progression systems (Glad, CE, etc.). Can I just pop in and do some jump puzzles, or learn a new dance emote from a strange talking creature? Just weird MMO stuff, we need more of the world being the main character than all of this content made for players. It’s a balance that isn’t met currently (for me!).

I advocate for a metagame that truly embraces and highlights the game’s incredible open world.

[Elfyr-area-52]

Yeah! I want to log in every week and have to find a random talking murloc that teaches me how to do different funny dances or teaches me like a word or two of Nerglish (yes this is a real thing) a week until eventually we can roughly communicate with some of them.

Just weird, non-meta, MMO stuff. Obviously I think Midnight’s Player Owned Housing is like directly in line with this… assuming there isn’t some sort of PvP/PvE progression tied to the housing or something, which I doubt there would be. So maybe the answer is to just wait and see! I think they’re leaning this way though, with the goblin race cars, PoH, etc.

[Akariliselle-cenarion-circle]

Yeah, I would like to see more silly/fun/side stuff available. I mean there’s a lot you can do, but grinding daily quests, rep, and dungeons/delves can only go so far.

Back in the garrisons, I remember having a daily or semiweekly special pet battles for rewards. It doesn’t have to be pet battles specifically, but some short but fun daily type content that I would be interested in logging in to see what the random thing of the day is.

I think housing will be a good option if we have the ability to sink some time into it and customize it a fair amount. The racing is another possibility. Hopefully they keep expanding in this direction.