Why the "roguelike" mechanic is DEEPLY MISGUIDED

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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This new “roguelike difficulty” sounds absurd, particularly for such a grueling raid with so many one-shot and soak mechanics, where 1 or 2 people can cause the deaths of just about everyone in the raid. There’s several ways in which “roguelike” doesn’t align with WoW classic, let me just point out a few:

  1. In a roguelike, the average run is 30minutes to an hour. A wow raid is several hours long, depending on gear and experience & skill levels of those involved and preparation (consumables and world buffs).
  2. In a roguelike, if I die, I can go again immediately. In a wow raid, I’m locked until the next reset.
  3. In a roguelike, there are usually smaller unlock objectives that makes death during a run hurt less (ie, I don’t mind dying before the final boss, if I can unlock some weapons/items in the meta-progression system for use in future runs). In WoW, my character (and to some extent, my guild) IS the meta progression system, and if I or my guild don’t get loot for a lockout, we are no closer to being able to overcome that challenge.

The post that announced it is also extremely light on details:

  1. Is the increased reward MORE loot or cosmetics like molten/shadowflame weapons were in MC/BWL?
  2. Will we be able to see the loot before deciding to wager it?
  3. Will we be able to wager loot on a boss-by-boss basis, or does it have to be continuous?
  4. How many deaths are too many deaths? Do deaths during trash count?

Where are there no bad luck protection to prevent too many of a specific token group from dropping and not enough of another? My guild had 4 right bindings and absolutely no left bindings to complete even a single thunderfury, and only a single eye of sulfuras.

So, I have to ask… who asked for roguelike mechanics in SoD? Literally, the only thing I hear people complain about is lack of new content that was teased in the SOD launch trailer like scarlet monastery, karazhan crypts, uldum, etc and fixing pvp because shamans, pallies and boomkin are murdering everyone.

If you guys insist on doing some kind of roguelike mode, why not put it in karazhan crypts, where you go deeper and deeper, and try to uncover more and more secrets of the town that surrounded Karazhan. Even better, it could be in a new Scarlet Stronghold raid/dungeon that could give a .5-like tier set that compliments T2.5 from AQ. Thematically, the scarlet stronghold would also dovetail into the Naxxaramas event and raid for Phase 7.

EVEN BETTER, make it a new game mode like plunderstorm or a remix game mode.

EVEN BETTER, have one of the other microsoft studios develop it as a separate game.

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they’re putting them in to test player response to different challenge mode systems likely for future development. players like roguelikes so they are giving it a whirl. nothing wrong with that.

I agree the vagueness of post is annoying. p4 fire resist “recommendations” rather stating Hard resist which ended up with a bunch of people farming 0.5 for no reason comes to mind. but at the same the answers to your questions will come when it is released so the reasonable thing would be to withhold judgement until then

The bonus loot is a mercy protection against luck. But its an mmorpg and RNG is part of that. you want bad luck i just got my shadowflame skull last week despite me running MC every week, it being a 33% drop rate, and me having priority within my group. but its fine RNG is RNG. heres the thing you aren’t supposed to get BiS everything that’s why those “not BIS for anyone” side grade drops exist. it so you can still be rewarded with an incremental power boost even if not BiS. MMORPGS especially classic are designed to be a journey.

4 Likes
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Agreed, definitely for whatever comes after SOD, I would be ok with bad RNG, given that we would be more invested in the long term health of the game and our characters.

BUT, given this is a seasonal game mode that is declining, and doesnt seem to be getting better any time soon, I think people need to get something to reinvigorate them, get them to come back, have some fun, get some loot and finish it with a bang.

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I had to google “roguelike”.

Todays education complete.

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Nobody teased SM except the goofy playerbase that assumed SM would be the raid :skull::skull: it was hilarious cause anyone with a brain knew it wasnt gonna be like that

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It’s all optional content. If you or the team cant do the hard mode then just keep it on normal ? Nobody is forcing you to up the difficulty…We think this change for AQ will be amazing for the community!! No matter what blizzard does people will complain. Don’t like it don’t do it plain and simple! Hope you have a great day Kindinos :people_hugging:

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SoD is a test bed for a lot of ideas. Theyre putting stuff out there to see what people enjoy and what people dont. What gets positive reception and what gets negative.

It gives them an - as far as WoW is concerned - unprecedented opportunity to basically go nuts. Not everything’s going to be a hit. But theyre experimenting so they can find out what IS a hit and then iterate upon those things.

Given that WoW has been locked into such a ridiculously rigid formula that barely evolves for over 15 years now, its a welcome change of pace. You arent gonna like everything and thats fine. Just calmly and logically explain where the issues are. Thats what helps them the most.

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Except Tim and his “future raid content tease slides”. Clearly just the player base and no one else lol.

2 Likes
9

I mean, we’ll see what actually happens with the new loot difficulty system. So far, most of the information floating around is all assumed based on the small snipbit of information in their AQ article. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being similar to what you’re saying though. I love SoD, its one of the best versions of WoW for me right now, but some of the decisions they make feel like “Season of Discovering how far we can push the playerbase”.

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FFS, maybe wait for more details before going full sky is falling. Once we have them, go all out requesting changes or bringing issues to their attention. This is premature.