Wow is now just one big attunement

Community General Discussion
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This is going to be a long one so…………………

TLDR: I don’t like Shadowlands and so far I haven’t heard enough to make me believe that Dragonflight is going to be significantly different. At this point I am not planning to play the next xpac and there is good chance that it is finally time to say goodbye to Wow. The major issue (while I have many issues one stands out) is that the game today forces me to spend way too much time doing things I hate doing just to get in a few hours of what I really want to be doing in Wow. The entire game is now one big attunement.

Long Version: Well, I think this might be my last rodeo. I am writing this in the hopes that maybe some of it will get back to the design team or generate positive future discussion on how to improve Wow. I have been playing this game since Vanilla and have stuck with the game in good times and bad. During the bad times, I kept logging onto the game mostly for my friends and the guild that I am a part of. But now most of my friends have also hit that wall with Wow and most have bailed for FF14. The guild has been mothballed with everyone saying they probably will come back and give Dragonflight a chance but who knows if that will actually happen.

Meanwhile, I have been spending time following the Dragonflight news, info dumps, and interviews. And so far I can confidently say that the Dev team DOES NOT GET IT. They are not addressing any of the key issues that the game has IMO and instead seem hell bent on making all new problems so mid-way through the next xpac they can fix maybe 10% of them and then come out and say how “responsive” they are to the community which is the same pile of garbage we have seen for the last few xpacs. Let’s start with the biggest key issue.

End game gearing / borrowed power “systems”: So according to the dev team the biggest problem here is that you spend all this time getting borrowed power and it doesn’t feel good to give it back from one xpac to the next and starting over. Now, this is a problem, but is by far NOT the worst problem. The worst problem is the power gain involved and the TIME required. The dev team has publicly admitted on several occasions that they consider the player to have this power when they balance end game content which does make sense because if they didn’t you would faceroll every raid out there.

So now we have massive power increases that you need to do endgame content and they are mostly accessible OUTSIDE of the content that you want to do. In effect, we have attunements. Does anyone here remember the BC attunement “maps”. These are still used as memes to showcase why attunements don’t work. They don’t do anything except turn away players from doing content.

For a moment, let’s go back to the Cataclysm expansion. You got to max level. You geared up your toon in normal then heroic dungeons. Then, you were ready to raid. And there was no requirement to do anything outside of the raid to keep current. If you were having a busy week, you could just log in for the raid. But if you had more time, you were not restricted to what you could do. You could level professions or grind out a reputation or farm for a mount that you wanted. But none of that was necessary to keep raiding. From that point your gearing upgrades came from the raid which was the thing you wanted to be doing.

Now lets look at Shadowlands. You got to max level. There were several paths to gearing you could take which was good. But then you also needed to max out your Covenant to get the right Soulbind and to open up all the traits on that Soulbind. Then you needed to grind out various forms of content to get the correct conduits (these were all over the place, dungeons, open world, raids). Then you needed to farm Torgast for the legendary mats. Then you needed to farm gold to pay for the legendary piece (unless you had a friend in your guild who you could guilt into making one for you for free). And with every patch the goalposts were moved farther and farther. More Soulbind traits, more conduits, more legendaries.

The key issues here are POWER and TIME. You wouldn’t need all this stuff except for the fact that it is too powerful to ignore. It is so powerful, the endgame is balanced with it in mind. Also, this wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t so time intensive to get all this stuff and keep it up to date. If you only spent say an hour or two per week keeping your toon ready to raid it probably wouldn’t be an issue, but when keeping up to date becomes a second job, then it stops being fun. Nearly everyone in my guild ended up with a excel spreadsheet with a long list of “chores” that should be completed daily/weekly to ensure your toon was at least close to up to date.

And heavens forbid you actually got all this garbage done and wanted to spend a little time having fun doing “optional” content like farming for mounts or transmog. Not only does the Blizz team not support this, they will actually go to war with you. The war on flying, removing portals from previous content, the war on stacking speed boosts are just some examples. The last time after levels were squished folks complained that they couldn’t farm Legion raids like they used to and the Blizz response was “suck it”. They didn’t even bother making up some lie about how technical reasons prevented them from fixing it, they just came out and said “suck it”.

While all of this has been going on I have held out hope that one day the Blizz team would finally change course. But I don’t see it. On more than one occasion, the dev team has said they were perfectly happy with Shadowlands and really their only issue was that some of the players didn’t like it. The way this was communicated it pretty much felt like they were actually BLAMING the players for not liking it. So I guess I have hit my limit of all this. I am at that final point in the cycle of denial. I am past anger. I am past depression. I am now into acceptance. This game is the game we have and the game we are going to get in Dragonflight.

So to those of you who actually do have the time to put in and are enjoying this game, I have nothing but respect and hope you enjoy Dragonflight. I on the other hand am done. I won’t pay a sub for this. I can’t actually believe they raised the price for Dragonflight expecting me to pony up for that. Wow is no longer an MMO. It is a game filled with attunements and hours and hours of grindy hoops you are forced to jump through to get to that few hours of M+ or Raiding that you really want to be doing. For me, it just isn’t worth my money or my time anymore.

5 Likes
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I wish you luck on your endeavor to find a new game. You may enjoy FFXIV.

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The one thing that will ensure no one read your feedback, is not editing it down. 3 paragraph max. If it don’t fit, start shucking angles.

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I read some of this to the person at the next computer, who used to be a mythic raider but is at this moment playing vampire survivors. He quit in 8.3 after realizing that everything he did was a waste of time, came back for the Shadowlands beta with the intent of discovering how much outside grind was going to be necessary to raid. Before he reached max level, the release date was announced, and he quit, knowing that the game would be nowhere near ready.

He’s looking forward to trying the beta in Dragonflight, too, for the same reasons. We will see.

Sound bites only! No deep thoughts will be considered!

I don’t think there will be any changes in the development philosophy until sometime after Microsoft takes over, and even then only if they make sweeping management changes to this company.

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He used 11 paragraphs to say Cata systems were more fun because they let people get into the action if they don’t like rep grinds. This kind of wall of text blinds people.

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That’s what you got out of it. It’s not what I got out of it.

In any case, the game is marketed and sold through its emotional appeal, often to people who get excited by hype and are willing to take it on faith that the rest of it will be well-designed.

If someone writes how they feel and why they feel - yes, which will be long, they get responses like yours, that they should leave their feelings out and just parrot a few suggestions that have been said many times before.

If their writing is short, they are told they should write many paragraphs itemizing all issues in the game and come up with solutions to all of them.

Not everyone is analytical. Most people are not good at understanding why they feel what they are feeling. Many people are not good at writing.

In any case, by the time someone gives “feedback” based on the current expansion, it is far too late to change anything, even if it’s only in the beta.

Devs design the game they want to design, without much concern about what paying customers will want to continue paying for.

Without research into the playerbase, how and why they play, what major demographics there are, and advance planning to provide content to keep as many players playing as possible, they can’t plan in advance to retain customers.

Devs are not reading this forum for ideas on how to change 10.0 at this late date. They don’t care what players want. This forum is for players to discuss with each other and blow off steam. Period.

It’s not our job to fix the game.

2 Likes
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meme with the astronauts in space

Always has been.

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Sure, but this shouldnt surprise anyone. ATVI is expected to maximize profits. Of course they will focus on the design that generates the most revenue.

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Right? People always say this like it is some sort of grand insight. Bro, that’s how corporations have always worked.

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Didn’t read anything you wrote but bye so long take it easy.

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The insight is balance. WoW’s design is extremism. All in on one specific thing at the cost of all others. It is objectively incorrect way to do things.

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Not blinds more of an overload

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Eh I dunno, I started fresh on Horde like 6 weeks ago after not having played since 9.0 on alliance. I play pretty casually, get maybe an hour or two per day. Took a couple weeks of that to feel all caught up… nothing felt out of place or overly grindy compared to any other MMO or past iterations of WoW. Don’t get me wrong I don’t like SL at all, but its pretty easy to jump into endgame.

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i have little hope and i did like how the op threw cata in there plain and simple do dungeons go raid. the beginning of shadowlands taught me they don’t give a crap with no loot dropping again then having to revert it after everyone quit lol. just a bunch of wasted time is what keys turned into from bfa and legion and then act like well we gave you valor to upgrade lol. they freaking item levels never needed nerfed in the first place like they did. just more wasted time with farming legendaries less loot dropping in keys than bfa and no loot at all dropping in keys or raids at the start.
the games old and all i hear is people not liking the time they have to put in anymore to get crap done or the pointless gating that zereth was instead of just letting people grind the rep out and be done with zereth when they wanted. all i know if my friends don’t wanna dragonflight i ain’t either i’m tired of having to find new friends over and over or guilds cause they just die. have fun op doing whatever.

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Know your audience