World of Warcraft Ironman mode

Community General Discussion
1

I had a think lately regarding how Old School Runescape handles their Ironman mode. How could that be applied to WoW to make it a fun, new , and engaging way to experience the game? I thought.

Well. I came up with a few thoughts. For starters. What would be the end goal of an ironman? To reach max level? To engage in a new breed of content made for Ironmen?

To start. What would the rules of an Ironman be?

  1. Trade between ironmen and the regular playerbase is not allowed.
  2. Ironmen are not allowed to purchase gear above green rarity except from reputation vendors.
  3. Ironmen cannot use the auction house.
  4. Ironmen may not use the dungeon finder to find dungeons. They must form groups with other ironmen.
  5. Ironmen may not benefit from weekly bonus exp events from any sources. Such as timewalking or pet battle events or other exp boosting events.
  6. Ironmen get one life. If you die, your character login screen becomes a permanent ghostform with an epitaph of how you died. The character can be deleted of course.
    6.A. As an alternative to this. Perhaps some options for difficulty should be allowed upon creation. idk i’m spitballing ideas.
  7. As an Ironman you have access to all professions at once. Because there is no trading or auctioning, there is no risk of damaging an economy.
  8. Heirloom gear is forbidden.
  9. Ironmen have an innate x2 drop rate for world drop items and BoE gear.

More rules might be added as discussion brings them up, but that’s all I can think of for the time being.

Now, what is the goal of an Ironman? While largely determined by the player, the purpose of an Ironman is to experience the world with only the abilities and equipment that you have found and/or created yourself. A sense of self dependency towards your overall character growth and how you want to gear out your character using what you have.

I can think of a few end-goals for a WoW Ironman:
1: Level all profession skills to their highest possible level, and obtaining all obtainable recipes for them.
2: Using only Ironman gear: Complete all raids and dungeons.

Now for a moment lets talk about death:

As stated before, i’m bouncing between the idea of permadeath and the idea of punishing death. If not permadeath, then death should carry with it the loss of your equipment to oblivion, having to start from scratch at your hearthstone.

Lastly, I wanted to briefly talk about gearing for an Ironman.

Naturally, the rules lean towards crafting as a means of obtaining gear and consumables for your Ironman. You MAY use gear dropped from dungeon bosses. Given the penalty for death and the difficulty of completing dungeons in Ironman gear, It is a suitable risk/reward for the player to equip what they’ve earned. Gear from Reputations is also permitted, as the player earned the reputation needed to equip that piece of gear.

I hope this wasn’t too bad of a read. I’ve had this idea bouncing around my head for the past couple days and felt the need to share it. Thanks for reading if you made it this far. Please leave questions and feedback if you’d like. I know I probably forgot to mention at least 1 or 2 things.

2

The problem with making it an actual in-game feature is that it’d be a LOT of work with many of the suggested ideas causing potential issues with people who are not in ironman mode.

Also imagine you’re running a dungeon, things are going good, you don’t know the TANK is playing Ironman. He dies and doesn’t come back. You think he just jilted you. Moods get hot, people start yelling and accusing each other of makign the tank leave.

So yeah… for that aspect alone, it’s not a good idea. Because it can and will interfere with other people.

Now if its a single server, where EVERYONE is on ironman … that’d avoid the above issues. But I don’t see you’d get enough interest to fill an entire server and keep it thriving for long. It’d be a fad and it’d die out soon enough. And Blizzard would be left holding the bag of all the wasted work.

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3

You want iron man with raiding? lol, ok.

4

Oh lord, it’d be ten times worse with Raiding. One wipe, there goes potentially months of progress levelling and gearing up toons. For EVERYONE.

5

I am curious to know how many people would be interested in doing something like this. I certainly wouldn’t, but I can see how it could be a fun challenge.

I am, however, playing the IRL version of this game. All of my gear is terrible (I don’t even have anything equipped in the pants slot right now), I only get one life (AFAIK), and I have almost no gold.

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6

players already have an Ironman challange. level to max without grouping bgs, petbattles and such. Only quest and use grey/white gear. Oh and if you die you have to start all over.

7

This game fundamentally does not work with permadeath. I can’t imagine playing this game while only doing PVE content that was so easy that I had a minimal chance of death.

8

I feel like the iron man challenge in retail would be very easy. I’ve done it in classic and it’s really engaging. I feel like retail would just be kinda meh.

9

The only challenging area is WoD atm but yes. Some quest mobs are just unfair in their tuning even with good gear health wise.

10

That issue is largely mitigated by the fact that ironmen may only party with other ironmen for dungeons. And yeah. the idea of permadeath is seeming like a novelty more than a fun mechanic. Losing your equipment upon death would be a suitable punishment perhaps for the highest tier of ironman. Perhaps You shouldn’t lose anything at all upon death. What do you think?

11

Having seen actual ironmen challenges … its not something you can pull off to max level. Because death is inevitable. Especially when it comes to raiding.

And softening the blow makes it no longer “ironman” but rather a “hard mode”.

And there are plenty of modes in the game that are already ‘hard mode’. Many raids have optional things you can do to make the fight HARDER.