Well you made it sound like you didn’t want to do that- leveling is content to you. So a toggle you can turn it off. /shrug
4 Likes
Thanks for the communication!
I love all the changes the team has applied so far and I’m looking forward to the season going live. There are a couple more things I’d like to see changed but we’ll probably be able to assess things better as the beta goes on.
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I would suggest removing Battlemasters for at least Phase One. With players traveling out to the zones to queue (or at least being returned their after the game is completed if they group queue) some competitive world PvP might develop while people wait for games to start.
And I do believe queues should exist. One of the major problems of Classic is server faction balance (on PvP realms) and having Horde v Horde BGs from launch removes a major incentive to roll Alliance. Ideally it would be announced before Season of Mastery launches that BG queues would NOT be cross-realm. Help build the community by having players on the server compete exclusively against each other. Then in later phases allow cross-realm BG queues and eventually same-faction BGs if necessary.
4 Likes
Really liking the SoM server. All the changes are great. Keep up the good work.
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I could care less about the seasonal aspect. I just want to play the game again since I missed the original classic launch, but I was wondering if there will be a PVP server? I’m not much of a battlegrounds PVP’er, but I like the idea of world PVP. Non-PVP servers never appealed to me.
1 Like
How do you access them?
From the launcher. You have to sign up for a PTR account in you account settings.
Season of Mastery is an accelerated schedule:
- 12 months down from 24 months
- 2 months PER phase
- Blizzard just confirmed no increase to drop rates
Players will have run MC for a total of maybe 14-15 times out of the 16 weeks from Phase 1 to Phase 3 (BWL). Introducing world buffs to a raid where people haven’t even finished their gear sets doesn’t make sense, and goes against gear scarcity. You’ll be using world buffs to raid for your gear still, and NOT, for fun-speed-runs once you’ve completed enough of your BiS list.
We will be in Phase 4 (ZG), and still farming BiS a few items out of MC if our BiS didn’t drop from BWL. This is the nature of accelerated schedule w/o updated drop rates.
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Now if you’re talking world buffs inside MC, BWL, AQ, once we’re in Phase 6, sure. Sounds like fun because by then we should have gotten a fair amount of gear out of it and it is then for speed-runs and stress testing gear already acquired.
4 Likes
> "There have been a lot of discussions about loot, and specifically the rate at which players can get loot from raids, as we don’t currently have plans to increase that. Part of the challenge of Season of Mastery is the speedy arrival of content throughout the year, and this raises the notion that you may not approach every new challenge with the level of preparation you did in WoW Classic. We feel that loot scarcity was an important part of what made original World of Warcraft challenging and hope to recreate that feeling. Of course, we’ll be watching this closely and are open to adjustments here if we identify a need."
What loot scarcity? Loot in the old days was the same way as it was in classic? You never went into a new tier of raiding without the gear to handle it unless your guild was new, the player was new, or the guild was unable to kill the bosses it needed for the drops its players needed. There was never a issue with loot being scarce!
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If this comes out with 0 world buffs the game is DEAD ON ARRIVAL.
<3
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It is not dead, not even in the slightest.
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Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Private Servers are that way 
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Very good post. It’s all stuff we knew already tbh, but it’s good to have it all here for people to see plainly.
1 Like
Please consider helping boomkin, ele, and spriest’s mana management
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I’m deeply concerned that the changes made to SoM, have more downsides than upsides, removing world buffs or making chronoboon available from the start removes a big social aspect of the game.
Back in phase 1, my guild had to form a coalition and coordinate our entrance into BRM.
The big scale pvp fights were a lot of fun, it helped to strengthen social bonds within the server and only happened because we had something to lose going into it.
You can solve most of the negative effects of world buffs and keep the positive social interactions by just disabling buff stacking. If you die on your way to BRM, you can just port to your capital city, pop another head buff, organize a counter offensive and try again, you won’t have to spend hours setting up summoning networks to collect all of them. You won’t have to worry about logging out for hours since you can just buff before the raid start.
I can argument the same about consumables, consumables trivialize the content and farming them are not exactly fun, you can achieve the goal of having more difficult raids and remove most of the inconveniences by just reworking the buff stacking mechanics.
1 Like
Nope. World buffs and raid instances do not mix, ever, in season of mastery. it’s called challenge.
18 Likes
Such a strange approach to Classic to be so all-in on the end-game experience when the draw has always been the holistic approach to the open world and relevancy of everyone on the server. The most valuable resource was always people, whether it was wbuffs, devilsaur mafia, pvp, elemental farming, crafted BiS items, and max level BiS items that can be acquired from rares and quests starting in your 30’s (tidal charm, force of will, etc)
The meta will be near impossible to change without tinkering with class design. Any nerf to physical dps will be a nerf to the threat ceiling. Another advantage of Warrior is their dps/threat is loaded to the end of the fight so pulling threat in the last < 25% of boss is less detrimental then pulling at 90% which pretty much every warlock at classic launch did with 2 shadowbolt crits in opener.
In my opinion you give a very moderate amount of time to raid tuning, and spend time figuring out how to kill mage boosting/dungeon spamming meta and an ability to detect bots, given throwing GM’s at the issue is a solution that is off the table. I would advise against just killing exp when your with a 60, because launch will still be 80% of the community spamming dungeons to level which will be a jagged meta to swallow a second time around. Prioritize the meta to be out in the world for gold, mats, and leveling. The TBC quest exp won’t be enough, because every Draenei/Belf still dungeon spammed or mage boosted to get to 60 in 1 week. Vanilla at it’s core is a good game and even with all the warts of Classic your engagement metrics prove the gameplay loop works.
14 Likes
On the PVP honor system:
I ranked multiple times in Classic, on both sides and at different times, and got the full experience. I still have friends that I made from that. Some of these friends plan to come back for SoM PVP so my post is coming from that perspective.
Please do not completely remove ranking or make PVP gearing the same as the TBCC/Retail grind. Classic is unique in this aspect.
Also please try to keep solutions where there is a PVP community. Anything which kills the PVP community and turns it into a solo grind makes PVP unfun. For example if you want to restrict premades please look into some sort of queue matchmaking system instead of removing them completely.
Opening the number of people who can rank in a given spot so “pool boosting” is not as needed or reducing the rank decay to 10% so it’s not as punishing at the high ranks could help.
The idea that another poster mentioned of daily PVP quests is good and that should increase PVP participation which will help put more people in the brackets organically.
2 Likes
Yes, and it’s beautiful.
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Smite Priest too please!
Let’s be real, the 1st damage spell you ever cast as Priest was smite, not mindblast or SW:pain, it was Smite. Gimme that Smite love baby! 
5 Likes