WoW is so confusing

Community General Discussion
1

I played World of Warcraft a long time ago (cataclysm days), however I mostly went back and forth from private servers and only lightly played the retail game as it was so confusing to get into. I recently have tried to get back into it, just renewed my sub a couple of weeks ago. My main problem with the game is how confusing it is, and how unclear everything is. I feel like the game is very inaccessible to new players and it’s hard to get into. I spend most of my time doing the same dungeons repeatedly, looting better versions of the same gear, doing fetch quests, and sitting in SW or Org. I know people will say “that’s just the leveling phase, endgame is much better”, but I’m not sure what I would even do once I got there? Every game, to me, has to have some sort of goal… something to really grind for, and I’m not too sure what that ‘something‘ is on WoW.

Another thing that bothers me: there are so many aspects of the game that are either very lightly explained, or not explained at all. I see all these terms in chat that I don’t even understand a little, and all of this information seems to spread through word of mouth rather than the game giving an explanation. I love the idea of wow and the actual gameplay is awesome, and the player base is some of the coolest people I’ve met in any other game… I just don’t get how to play the game.

3 Likes
2

You decide your own goal.

It sounds like you’re talking about something created by players. If someone for instance said they were looking for more players for 4x4 farm that’s not something a part of wow. That’s a system discovered by players for maximizing loot so it won’t be explained anywhere in game.
Players are always coming up with methods to do stuff and yeah it spreads by word of mouth + guides. It wouldn’t be possible for the game to keep track of all the things players come up with.

Your first objective should be to figure out what your goal is and learn the steps needed to reach it. Wow does take lots of research but the longer you play the more you learn and there’s less and less stuff that you don’t know.

3 Likes
3

Get to cap, gear up then grind old dungeons for mounts/mog/pets/gold. Simple game.

Pvp will be garbage until they at least do away with corruptions.

3 Likes
4

The best thing you can do is join an active guild. This is the best way to get into the action. And they will have a vested interest in you because it helps them as well.

1 Like
5

I guess that does make more sense. I guess it’s more I’m having trouble finding what goal I can even have. For example: if I said my goal is to get the best possible gear… I don’t know what gear that is, or how to obtain it

1 Like
6

Do an online search for BIS (Best In Slot) gear for a Demon Hunter? That might be a good place to start that research.

7

That’s quite true, though it isn’t anything the developers are responsible for, and it happens in every game. If you go to ESO or Final Fantasy you will have all these abbreviated terms in chat with no idea what they mean, and it takes time to figure it out. I dabbled in Classic and had to have someone tell me what many of the terms there meant, and that’s even sort of the same game.

This is also true. I very well remember how confused I was when I started playing, and were it not for a bunch of friends who were there to explain things to me, I would have been totally lost. WoW really needs a help screen similar to ESO which has a set of explanations for all the major parts of playing the game (like how to change gear sets, what professions are and how to start and use them, how to use the map, how to travel, etc). Why WoW doesn’t have something like that I do not know.

8

There already s a help screen, and it shows various buttons throughout your interactions with the game. I have mine turned off.

9

Exactly. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to bug people just to simply find the quickest route to get to a certain place. There’s a lot of things I don’t understand. Professions are also a big one for me too.

10

GEAR GRIND END GAME

The gear structure no matter how many systems they implement will always be the same

  • the highest ilvl gear you can get will come from mythic 20 man raiding

  • the next highest will be from mythic +15 (or m+10 early xpac) 5 man dungeons

  • then mythic +12/13s and heroic raiding drop 5 ilvl under that

your goal will always be, get max level
do worldquests / professions to get entry level ilvl
use that ilvl to grind dungeons for better ilvl gear
use that ilvl gear to get into raids to get better ilvl gear
then either cap out as a heroic raid pugger or look to join a scheduled guild mythic raid

MYTHIC PLUS “LADDER” GRIND ENDGAME

the alternatives are if you’d like to climb the timed dungeon ladder (raider.io) 90% of players use this addon/website
it scores your character based on your completed mythic + dungeons and times
some people get addicted to making their score bigger and some people dont care at all
but it’s repeatable content
for example my mains io https://raider.io/characters/us/tichondrius/trash

DPS/HPS PARSE END GAME

tons of players actually only enjoy ‘parsing’ which is the recorded dps you do in each encounter

the website ‘warcraft logs’ which is widely used by just about anyone and everyone who raids at all beyond an ultra casual level
it requires only one person in the run to be running the logging client in the backround (super easy to set up and someone else will likely be doing it) and then uploads the information recorded to the website

here you can see things like every single interaction that took place in the encounter
extremely useful for identifying problems causing you wipes ect
however it also has a ‘ranking’ and percentile feature
tons of players are just addicted to trying to 1 up all the other people logging that play their class
it’s actually pretty competitive
back in SoO i played almost exclusively for parses and got most of the r1 enhancement parses

at this point i’m more of a casual heroic raider focusing on pvp but i still like to try and keep my percentiles high

example : https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/tichondrius/trash#difficulty=4

RATED PVPstrong text

then on the other side of the game you have PvP
as someone who raided super sweaty in the past i particularly enjoy rated arena far more than anything the pve side of the game has offered in a long time
2v2 and 3v3 both have competitive ladders with unique time limited rewards that make you feel rewarded unlike raiding current content / grinding m+

the game feels so much more dynamic when pvping vs raiding/doing m+

CASUAL PVP there are a surprising amount of people that play wow to exclusively do random battle grounds
these are 10v10 solo q no mmr no points pvp brawls with objectives that’re kinda like jumping into a random call of duty lobby or league of legends game with no strings or anything

it honestly could stand alone as it’s own game and for a ton of people it does
i don’t really enjoy them much lately myself because the amount of people with literally 0 gear that q often create very one sided games
rated is alot more player controlled which is just more for me

these are all the competitive end game paths for the most part

there’s tons of other things from m+ ‘boosting’ where you get paid gold to carry players through m+ that people get addicted to doing
or auctionhouse flipping/sniping/pricefixing
or even more casual stuff like mog farming mount farming reputation grinding collectionist stuff

there’s tons to do but these are the consistent structures of end game and the goals that you’ll want to set for yourself

11

idk wow was more confusing back then imo.

nowadays it literally takes your hand and shows you were to go.
back then you had to read quest text and figure it out, or use thottbot and figure it out.

nowadays you really have to be tired or drunk to be lost/confused at all.

if by any chance something still eludes you, wowhead can take your hand through it.

12

For leveling I like to keep it simple by picking a zone and reading through the quests and stuff until I’m done with the zone. Usually I just use that as my goal while queuing for dungeons.

I end up leveled up quite a bit after that one zone too but it’s still a fun objective to achieve for me. I get excited as I level because then I can also start looking forward to going into new expansion zones too.

13

That isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a button or option that opens up a help screen that you can search for topics, and you can then close when you are finished.

It saves a new player having to either ask ingame or go outside the game and search for help on websites that they may not even know exist.

1 Like
14

Well it’s simple, all you have to do is [censored by blizzard] and there you have it.

15

How is wow confusing ? I got it all down pretty easily and I was new during legion . They have tutorial options for a reason . And there is this thing called Google it has info . I’m not trying to be rude but that’s usually where I go if I don’t understand a part of the game I use Google … 🤷

16

I feel like in recent years there are layers and layers and layers of content to “git gud” bc days we had dungeons, heroics, raids, dailies. Now we have all that plus mythics, visions, islands, war campaign stuff and probably more I’m not remembering. It IS confusing. There’s a lot I don’t do cause it’s not always worth the effort to figure out. Or I do some googling to get more guidance
. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves with the game right now.

17

The only thing I find confusing is parsing and logs and whatnot. It’s just needlessly complicated and nerdy and boring and I hate it a lot.