I’m probably going to get down voted to death for this, but it’s worth the shot.
The Difficulty pacing problem in World of Warcraft is quite… interesting to say the least.
For the entire leveling experience (1-70), most of the content you can do is trivial, you can’t die, wiping in leveling dungeons is pretty much implausible. The enemies in the questing zones don’t really offer any challenge nor teach you the importance of using Crowd Control, interrupts or defensives at all, because you don’t really need them.
Mechanics for dungeon bosses are reduced considerably in Normal & Heroic modes, and all of the trash mechanics are basically irrelevant to keep track off in these difficulties because everything dies so fast. In LFR, even if the raid group fails mechanics pretty hard, every single wipe gives you a stack of ‘determination’, so, eventually, even the worst of groups will ‘brute force’ their way through the content.
Then suddenly, at M+ 10 keys, using crowd control matters, interrupting mobs and bosses is actually required to succeed, standing in the “fire” means that you die, and not using your defensives usually makes you feel like a wet noodle. Basically, how you fundamentally play and interact with the game changes drastically once you enter 10+ keys.
I think this is a problem, because the game doesn’t fundamentally let you fail up until you are 10+ key levels deep into M+. The game shouldn’t be afraid of letting you fail nor teach you through gameplay the fundamentals of wow.
Any thoughts?
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Yeah, that’s true. I mean, the game never prepares players for getting into M+ at all. Then the players that do M+ don’t want to help new players learn as Keys are timed. So, if you don’t automatically know what you’re doing then you’ll get kicked or they’ll abandon your key.
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I 100% agree. They should reverse the death strike nerfs in PvP and remove a lot of the PvP modifiers that Death Knights have in general leading to a more balanced PvP experience.
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The solution is a training room or firing range, like other games have. A space where you can test your abilities out on npcs. With selectable buffs and debuffs. The biggest problem with difficulty is that ruining keys is literally just baked into the experience. The way for a new player to “practice” is to literally just do the content, hope it isn’t so bad that you’re not entirely put off by the experience, and then do it all over again.
I kinda disagree.
This is how M+ is supposed to work. It’s an infinitely scaling system and the mechanics are always the same (barring affixes). There will logically come a point where the difficultly of the dungeon supersedes your knowledge and skills.
If you go from a fresh 70 to +10’s then, yeah, you might have a problem, but in that case you’re circumventing the natural difficulty progression.
I mean.
There’s a way to make leveling teach you these things while not particularly making it a slog to get through. It just requires effort and proper tuning, both of which Blizzard will never do for something like leveling.
They will never make Heroics require thought because they think a group of randoms are too stupid to know how interrupts work. This trickles down into players also believing themselves and others are too stupid to know how interrupts work and thus Heroics are kind of a weird worthless place where they are no better than Normal dungeons, so by the time they start doing M+ they are just going to fail upwards until the scaling reaches a point where they now have to learn how to play their class properly.
Tl;Dr: Blizzard thinks the player base is stupid and nobody (be it devs or players) really care enough to prove them wrong.
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