These drastic changes that are being hinted at in the most recent interview are scary to read.
By making big drastic changes, it’s an alienation of all the little things of what made Wrath so popular. There is a reason there is a gigantic illegal community that stole data to profit off of. Each thing mentioned is getting worse over time.
First, thank you for going back on Dual spec and deciding to keep it original. This is a good decision. We don’t need an inconvenience made for the sake of being an inconvenience.
-Changing ToC lockouts is a BAD move. The raid itself can be cleared in 30-45 minutes. People want loot from both normal and heroic, some want double trinkets from both. It hurts to remove the option to do both consistently and having to swap. Not only that, but with changeable lockouts, how will insanity be handled? This achievement run gave more tier tokens and also gave some of the best cloaks in the game. You remove the option for normal to want to be completed and will ultimately hurt more people. You effectively remove 1 extra hour of played time per week.
-Post nerf Ulduar is a joke in comparison to Pre Nerf Ulduar, Pre nerf is completely doable and it’s a ton of fun. It requires more strategy to be completable and created better raid interactions and more responsibility on a player-to-player basis. Fights like XT where you had the Light Bomb and Gravity Bomb go out during tantrum required more utility from the raid and had a more interactive fight. Or Kologarn where the raid needed to switch targets insantly to kill the hand made an easy fight a better experience where you didn’t faceroll and move on. PLEASE release pre nerf Ulduar.
-DO NOT nerf engineering. Don’t think about it, this is the expansion where Engineering had the most fun utility and was worth the sacrifice of having a profession slot taken up. Gold making isn’t as lucrative with Engineering as it is with Leatherworking, Tailoring, Enchanting, and Alchemy, but you gained a more engaging experience. Also if you decide to remove Nitro Boosts, you effectively take away one of the only movement abilities slow classes can get. It would require a rebalance with some classes(which we don’t need, 3.3.5a was in a good state) like shaman, who went engi to get movement that they don’t have from their class. Removing these in arenas wouldn’t be an issue, it got removed later for a reason and would restore some balance to arenas and allow more comps to climb. Just don’t touch it for PVE content.
-Tenacity, this is a double edged sword. By removing tenacity cap and “reaching the heavens” you will end up with a raid boss on uneven servers. A fix for this could be making Wintergrasp a server vs server situation where an Alliance Dominated Server grouped against a Horde dominated server in its own instance to battle for Wintergrasp, you wouldn’t worry about having a Raid Boss player ramping about, and the battle would be more balanced. Fighting to get it on your server.
-LFD. Beating a dead horse here, but there has been many requests on vote systems within Blizzard to get a better idea. If you are worried about flood voting by bot accounts, just set a threshold of character level minimum or require X amount of account life to vote to have a more realistic pool. This could be done within game or in your own website(you used to have GM feedback within game by survey, its definitely possible)
-Why can’t race changes be a thing? Sometimes people just want to switch. It is money to fund the game further, and allows player freedom to change decisions. It just feels like a restriction to exist to be a restriction with no real rhetoric besides “we don’t want that”
-Nerfing Boosting: GOOD. But a leveling LFD(server only) would remove this, but since you guys are so against it. Just make a better UI for grouping. Shadowlands has a really good UI for it, why not copy and change it to be more in line with the ideals of what you are looking for? This goes hand in hand with stopping bots.
You can’t set such crazy restrictions then wonder why there’s so many bots. Players are cornered against the odds and cannot keep up with what gets demanded. They end up feeling pressured to turn to RMT’s to be able to do anything. The systems that were put in place were to remove these problems and you’re effectively bringing them back.
Remember this was the most popular expansion by player numbers and one of the best memories for a lot of people. Too many changes are not good. Just reconsider some of the options you are looking at and do not rush drastic changes that will flip this Expansion on it’s head.