Like I said, there’s always room for change. Ion himself confirmed there’s a large group of players who prefer the journey over endgame.
It’s time for these 3 pillars of WoW to come to an end, and a more dynamic and living model introduced that incorporates BOTH the journey AND endgame content. That includes future patching as well that adds content to both branches of the experience.
Patching cadence also needs to change to adapt to this new model. Quarterly updates should be the minimum.
It was only missing 1 raid tier. It still had 3, and it’s boss count was only 2 lower than Cata when it came out. MoP also only had 3 tiers, but it just had a lot of bosses in the first tier.
The vibe I’m getting is people don’t want a lot of the fluff content, it just gets in the way.
Same way with having powerful items. All they do is make it feel bad when you don’t have them. It’s the same in TBC, people dread farming dragonspine trophy and other drops.
Most of these complaints seem to be based on 9.0 design. Have you seen how much Renown gets thrown at you now doing the Campaign for example?
I dusted off an rarely used DK alt on Friday night who was at 65 Renown with Venthyr and am now at 80 Venthyr and 72 Kyrian.
…and you get a free Second Lego Tuesday. No Rep required which is great for Alts. If you want to min/max you need Revered to craft the second one at max iLevel but that’s fair.
Ion says a lot of things. The “journey” you speak of isn’t forcing a massive amount of your playerbase into a leveling system they don’t want to be a part of. People, even now, have plenty of options to take their time, most don’t. Leveling is a boring slog that everyone has to get through to get to the decent parts of the game.
Of course it had cut content, Blizzard also made the mistake of being to open with the playerbase about plans way before they were concrete. They peeled back the design curtain and it backfired hard.
They learned their lesson quick though and don’t do that anymore. Nothing gets announced unless it’s 100% getting implemented.
Launch zone amount, dungeon, raid bosses, etc. were pretty normal for an expansion though.
No, that’s not what he was talking about in the context of the Q&A, nice try.
He was directly answering a question about there being mechanics to further “speed up” the ability to get to endgame content by bypassing leveling.
He specifically stated that there’s two camps of players, one of them PREFERS the journey over being in endgame content.
This whole thing of 3 core pillars of WoW is outdated. The leveling journey is equally as important as endgame. Yet it’s the most neglected.
Therefore, the model needs to change to incorporate both casual gamers who prefer leveling over endgame, and those who prefer endgame content over leveling. Not just focusing on “3 core pillars” which all revolve around endgame…
Yeah, then came Legion. Everyone always seems to talk somewhat positively about Legion but conveniently forget that it was the expansion that started all the systems they currently hate lol.
Well, you might be lucky. I have now 3 alts that the whole skip quest lines not showing up. In fact, can not even get them to work right with convents. As they locked into some weird triangle not unlocking anything. Not even table being unlocked for me.
respect your opinion
Fun is a very subjective thing because its about emotions. Pleasure, displeasure, fustration, excitement, they all play into fun in one way or another. My issue with the game atm is that I’m reminded of that old saying about the definition of insanity being repeating the same mistakes over and over and expecting a different outcome. In Blizzard’s case, its more the definition of failure.
And Im sorry, but many people here show that their expectations are fairly low. They pull up a few decent things and say look, these are good but go into denial about just how low almost everything else has sunk, including player numbers. I only have to look at my main guild roster to be able to confirm that. A guild that at its height back in Legion had 20 people on every day engaging in content now is lucky to have 2 or 3. Those are undeniable numbers.
You may stay around and play the game because you enjoy X but a great many other people have stopped playing because the things they enjoyed are no longer there.
What needs to change is the rewards we get for activities. not many will ever see a mythic raid until it gets soloed 2 expansions down the road possibly 3 that’s a 6-10 year gap in the ability of players to experience it unless they want to queue LFR for a dead raid or spam for a legacy raid group to help them. simple solutions stop exclusively making content for raiders and start focusing on everyone else get rid of this “boomer” concept you get no rewards for your time unless you bleed for it. that is not fun game design that doesn’t retain players. that just sells wow tokens and that is obvious.
Ok? None of that changes what I said lol.
It’s been neglected since day 1.
Wrath had over 12 million subs yet the leveling was still the same lol.
I think there was a paradigm shift in WoD when the idea of the answer of “what to do once level capped” was still “go raid or PvP” like it’s been since TBC was becoming less acceptable of an answer.
What’s so ironic about this entire post is that Shadowlands throws more content and gear and progression at non-raiders than almost any previous expansion.
Normal level gear for questing and world content. The entire cypher as a world progression system. The hundred of casual mounts, pets, and transmogs.
It’s like the more they try and entice the solo player and casuals with content the more it gets cried the game is only for raiders or elites.
Not me 
Legion brought world scaling, the concept of AP and endless power farming, and fake legendaries
thank you for taking the time to write your manifesto. I’m sure it’s appreciated throughout these forums and will be discussed forth width, Hazzah!
I feel Shadowlands was another casualty of 2020. I think it could have been a great expansion, but just missed the mark with me. I think it had promise, but has too many systems to keep track of as a casual player.
I don’t like the covenant system, at all, that I am forced into other than the abilities. Torghast is just a boring repetitive grind that feels forced. Soulbinds had promise but never hit the mark with me and seemed kind of silly. Conduits I think were the most fun I had as far as gear. I think that is the start of something that could be tweaked.
I think they should simplify the systems next go around, and add more optional content that is there just for fun in their place. Hopefully they don’t add content for the sake to having it, and think about what most players actually enjoy.
I’m surprised they haven’t put out a “what would you find fun” survey for current and former players. That might at least get them pointed in the right direction.
I’ll be happy if an ashran like gearing path returns 
All you had to do was go into ashran and run around finding chests (kind of like ZM 
), use the tickets/currency/whatever to buy 700 ilvl gear and do some events and get some conquest for conq gear. WoD was the xpac that removed pvp stats so all the pvp gear was just regular pve gear.
Wouldn’t 700 to 740 gear in WoD be 238 gear to mythics 278 gear in SL?
I can’t remember the item levels so I’m just going by your post.
For PVE