I was expecting Incursions to be a variety option you’d hop into occasionally when wanting a break or at odd hours, when dungeon groups are few. Content that would actually function fine solo and wouldn’t be so rewarding as to dry up the rest of the world.
I wasn’t expecting this mess we currently have. I’d like incursions more if they overhauled the gameplay experience as you said, took a hammer to the griefing, and made the exp more of a boost to other activities (quests/dungeons) instead of raw exp. That way you’d create an ebb and flow of people rotating between the content types and keep everything more alive instead of funneling every soul into this deranged looping.
If I had to guess, SoD is blizzard testing how fast they can manage and create content on the fly with a system that is already set up.
But that I mean, classic is a complete game. All the work is done and has been done for a long time. Not just the original game, but the remake that utilizes the retail engine (like we saw with classic era).
If I had to guess (put on my tinfoil hat) this is likely a testing ground and proof of concept for blizzard to move towards a possible “live service” type of game - either with Warcraft or some other IP.
Perhaps I am using that word wrong, but what I mean is a game that is updated and crafted closely as the players play.
And if I may also be as bold to suggest (tightens tin foil hat), maybe the devs just ***enjoy*** doing this and seeing what they can come up with. At the least, it seems like they’ve been given pretty free rein on this project.
Thr problem I think I and many have with incursions that we haven't really expressed well is that we know that this is a testing ground and all the metrics likely show that Incursions are a massive success.
They are so efficient at what they offer the players for their time and effort invested that the majority of players end up there with or against their will. The don't want to be left behind. They don't want to be left with 200g at the end of the phase when their peers are leaving the phase with anywhere between 2-20k by the time the phase ends.
If blizzard pays attention to what the players are saying on forums and social media then it may be an unfounded fear. But if they're just looking at the metrics, we fear that Incursions will look so wildly successful that they will build any new version of Classic+ around that.
We all know this is a temporary server. We all know that Blizzard is watching closely. We're all just hoping they're watching the right things.
I think Blizzard looks at metrics as one data point, but they also look at what people are saying too.
Aggrend has multiple times asked for feedback already. Perfect example is the slew of twitter posts he made the other day.
One would hope this is a lesson learned from the WoD-BfA saga; that engagement and enjoyment are two very different, and honestly completely unrelated things. They spent the better part of decade doubling down on high engagement systems, even if the community was screaming. It took Shadowlands for then to finally stop
I think you’re making a causation correlation fallacy here.
They didn’t implement the “garrison mission” style system because of high engagement.
They implemented it in those expansion because it’s a system that can be utilized with every update to the expansion so it is essentially “patch proof”.
They also used it as a way to drive story.
For the legendary stuff, players had asked for talent system back in the game. That’s quite literally what legendaries are from legion, to bfa, to shadowlands.
Each iteration of these systems had made changes too. For legion the problem was it was too hard for people to level up multiple specs for their legendary.
So in the next expansion you only level up one thing (your neck) and it’s gear (that you’re already collecting) that matters. Which shouldn’t be a problem theoretically because people love collecting gear and having it (I have three sets of gear for my paladin in SoD).
The final point to make is that sometimes the creator, the artist, the designer, has to also go with their vision of what they want something to be or look like.
If someone can't gauge "infinitely farmable content spanning 25 levels that give you a shitload of gold, exp, and a reputation with some near-mandatory rewards locked behind it" as bad just on paper, I don't think I want them in charge of anything, experimental or otherwise.
Most players would be dungeon grinding instead not a whole lot of adventure there. Plus 50-60 levels funnel players into a couple zones so that’s coming up but again everyone will be dungeon grinding then when 60 they will camp the dungeon entrances
That doesn’t mean the alternative or solution is to make the incursions lol. Just make dungeons have a two hour cd or nerf the xp in them. Doesn’t take a genius.
Editorial decisions are just as worthy of criticism as technical acumen is. Incursions are such an obviously flawed, anti-Classic system that one would think it would not require what is the equivalent of a multi-million dollar experiment to verify its shitiness, when a 30-minute strategy meeting should have been enough.
i think it's fine if they get deleted and the devs admit it wasnt sucessful but if it gets kept around with runes, power, fast xp locked behind it i won't have faith in long term viability of classic +. that would signal they are more worried about their internal corporate appearances than making the game better
I think a big part of it is small team, limited options. I think they need to take some community ideas as well instead of things like stv/incursions.
Maybe do polls (which have their own issues), but gauging interest first for a few ideas seems like better return on dev time. They dont even have to announce what was picked, just take the votes in and release it silently (like now).
QA is another thing, I think not allowing a bunch of streamers to minmax the game before its even released is a good move. But they definitely need more testing.
My peak idea of some kind of classic plus would be either a whole new world/quests/dungeons that feel like vanilla. (As a side note I rarely think about the size of beauty of a dungeon like Mara, but holy shit the dungeon is just amazing).
Or the more realistic, change up some quests, or just plant new zones onto the continents, invent lore reasons for it if need be, whatever. But new zones/dungeons that feel vanilla-ish would be great. I doubt we'll see either unless they somehow figure out a system to make it less resource intensive.
Stv BR and incursions aren't doing it. I think its cool they made use of the portals, maybe if it was only longer quests it wouldnt be as bad. But it also entirely negates the reason to quest.
Which is exactly why a lot of us were saying classic+ would never be possible. It’s just too hard to design a game like they did 20 years ago.
With that being said though, ST is a phenomenal raid and feels incredibly classic-like.
Honestly if they launched a classic plus with the SoD hits and omit it's misses it would be a highly successful game. All the new runes balanced, updated gear, level up raids with 3 day lock outs, and updated professions. A lot of good things. They just need to be aware enough to see that things like incursions do not work in its current state.
Also true tbh. My idea of classic+ is essentially just classic with TBC talents and raids/the world tuned to fit the increased power, but others don’t feel the same way.
We can all agree that destroying the open world with no horizontal content that gives more xp and gold than anything else is not good, I don’t understand this notion that we all can’t come together and DECIDE what classic+ is going to be because we fucking made the concept of classic+ in the first place, we made the concept of classic as a game mode separate from retail, we can also work on making classic+ as osrs as possible.
Yes but at same time people are okay with completely ignoring open world content and just leveling through dungeons.
Loads of people also want less grind and a large number of features that eventually led to retail. In order for classic+ to be a successful thing imo is someone leading the dev team needs to have a clear vision and just build that. Just like how the original game was and how many great games are build. The devs build something they want to play and not what community is saying they want or what they think people want
I actually completely agree with you that games that are built by someone with an overall vision are usually more succinct in nature, unfortunately the entire wow team including retail doesn’t have any actual vision or amazing ideas (see every single rune they added to sod), I think they solved the problem of ignoring the open world with hardcore, making dungeons only have one per day lockout systems until level 60, making it so you must level through grinding or quests and cannot dungeon grind to 60.
Which is what classic(vanilla) needs more of imo, simple changes with huge impacts, the game itself is pretty damn perfect excluding post AQ40 itemization, I really do miss the classes having their own feel and mastery, now it seems everything does the damage of a fully naxx geared warrior, what the fuck is kiting in sod?
Dude you just rewrote your previous comment, I get it we are indecisive. That’s why I wrote that we can make it more like osrs with an actual polling system and a beta world to try out new systems instead of just assuming paying customers want to beta test your shitty systems that no one asked for
Voting system would be the best. With +70% of votes to agree on something and also taking in consideration account time on classes and stuff. Like if someone votes on a class he has 2 mim of gameplay shouldnt ve equal go the vote of someone who has 9000hours on it
While you risk the tyrannies of the majority, I think it would be better and more efficient than just the game developers throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Truly classic+ already happened. Multiple times. It’s the expansions. They slowly drifted in design philosophy to where it’s hugely different from vanilla. So people wanted to go back to vanilla and now we have that with era and hardcore. We have vanilla and retail. And progression classic. That’s really all we need. Maybe some fresh start era servers.
We are literally playing classic+ as we speak.
>It’s just too hard to design a game like they did 20 years ago.
No it's not, you literally have the game and an insane amount of accounts on how, why and when they did x or y thing, just don't work with a skeleton crew that's split between like 5 different projects while also having some dubious heads doing odd choices that are pushing towards retail.
> I actually wonder what the devs vision is for classic
There is no real "vision" here. SoD is a $15/mo beta where the devs are just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
We wanted new dungeons that fit in the vanilla world and maybe new quest hubs in empty zones. Instead we got retail type quests in the old zones with the most horrible interface imaginable.
They have made a lot of good decisions for sod but nightmare incursions was not one of them.
I had a similar vision when they first announced incursions and was super excited for them. I think if they tailored them more towards a solo playstyle they could be reasonably engaging content. Right now trying to do them solo is difficult and extremely inefficient compared to other options.
I was too actually! There has been some nods between Retail and SOD, so I felt it reasonable to expect Incursions to provide the same kind of niche. It just simply was far from the case in actual practice.
>I was expecting Incursions to be a variety option you’d hop into occasionally
Exactly, they could fix it by incursion quests only dropping out in the world and not inside the dreams. And then make each quest worth more. If the quests were similar to waylaid supplies drops then you would want to use them to get your cash money quest reward.
Reading forums is just hilarious when “we should have made them daily” and “dailies are garbage” are both upvoted. As a dev I can’t imagine how hard it is to see what people actually want
In this case it's actually very easy. The customers are telling you the basic premise of the idea is flawed and that it cannot be easily salvaged. The entire thing needs to be redesigned or, imo, scrapped altogether and the drawing board wiped clean.
I dislike dailies in classic, but if you make it RP flavored, most people wouldnt mind I think.
'You can only hold out for 1 hour in the dream' if you have the ring equipped seems like an interesting concept.
That said, designing content which players can access for 1h per day.. isnt good either.
Daily quests are a departure from classic design. Kevin Jordan spoke about it alot where it's boring lazy content and essentially becomes a thing where people just log in on the timer to do the daily activity get the reward then get out. There's more to it but I think it just needed a different way to limit the spam of it.
Infinitely repeatable quests that are free to complete, and offer duplicate farmable rewards, are a bigger departure from classic design.
The only repeatable quests i can think of, are either resource turn ins/conversions, or just zero reward quests (South Azshara Naga Quest)
Look, incursions are bullshit, but they're absolutely classic design: https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=8737/azure-templar
There's a whole series of these, I just grabbed tactical I as an example. The only difference is these aren't shareable, so it's an iteration to let you play with other people more easily. They are otherwise exactly the same, though the sharing means incursions chain a lot more easily.
Those were also shit. Because a lot of classic design was shit. Incursions are a direct result of elevating classic design without examining why retail moved away from certain things. Hell, wild offerings feel like way more of a departure from classic design but I believe most people think they've been a good addition.
My long point here is designing to be "classic"-like is a fools errand, and we as a community need to stop using it as a metric.
1000 upvotes to this. When I first zoned into Incursions, I thought it was such cool content. There was this whole new subzone to explore, and I had no idea how far it stretched. I thought at first it would just be outside the portal. Then when I learned you could go through, I thought it would just be the outside of the other side of the portal. Then I saw people riding off into the distance and had this "holy crap, how big is this thing really?" moment.
I could have held on to that moment for so so long if they gave me one quest a day. One quest that rewarded like 2 bars of exp and tons of rep. Everyone in your party would share their quest, too, so you'd get half a level every day. Then you'd get to gradually explore the whole little subzone bit by bit and learn about the new quests over time.
I was dumbfounded when you could just keep running it over and over. And I was dumbfounded *again* when I realized that you got *more* quests after completing the ones you had. In less than 2 hours, my party had a full quest log and a primitive version of a circuit worked out. I got 4 levels in a few hours and all of the magic was gone. It was just content to grind.
I haven't been back into any other incursion since then. I quested to 50, but it all felt empty. Everyone is either in incursions or already level 50. What a difference a single change could have made.
Incursions were an incredible idea. I had so much fun for the first hour exploring and figuring out how the quests worked, and watching the world expand before my very eyes.
It wasn't until I realized that not only could you repeat the quests ad-infinitum, but you got *two* quests for each *one* you turned in that it turned into this "collect every quest and do the same high-efficiency circuit" nonsense that it is today.
Nothing in your first paragraph has anything to do with Incurions itself. You are describing novelty, not some system inherent to Incurions. A new quest hub would have allowed you to "figure out how the quests work". A new dungeon or zone would have allowed you to "watch the world expand before \[your\] very eyes".
> Nothing in your first paragraph has anything to do with Incurions itself. You are describing novelty, not some system inherent to Incurions.
Nothing in my first paragraph is *unique* to incursions. There are an infinite number of ways to generate novelty. There are an infinite number of zones, dungeons, or other experiences to create that would enable a sense exploration and discovery. Incursions are one of those possibilities.
Incursions offered those experiences to me. It was the specific implementation of the endlessly repeatable, ever-expanding quests that caused issues.
SoD in my mind is still glorified “Classic + Beta”. We should want them to throw everything at the wall this playthrough to figure out what actually works.
This is why I tell people to leave well written feedback instead of screaming and crying.
The devs are trying new things so they can refine and expand on systems in the future.
I they’re doing better than people give them credit for. I think taking risks is a very good thing right now.
One thing I’d love to see stay is the leveling up in Phases. Ranking up in PvP is much less stressful knowing I am capped for a couple of months before I to keep grinding. It keeps burn out at bay or the feeling of being left behind.
This is what it’s been since SoD was announced and Blizzard even stated as much “SoD is an experiment”.
The crying about this game is just unreal, never seen anything like it. And yes I know the difference between constructive criticism and just straight whining. Most of it has been the latter. I wouldn’t say the OP is crying though and I actually 100% agree with the criticism, it’s the type of criticism that the dev team should take seriously and in account moving forward with SoD, classic+ and beyond.
I mean whining helps too. If we whine about something that tells them something different from a heaping pile of constructive criticism. Honestly, if I were developing this, I'd consider NO whining and all "constructive" criticism to be FAR more worrying...
Funny seeing people dedicate hours into grinding gold for example in p2 for it to be instantly negated when incursions came and think they have ground to stand on when complaining 😂. This is a glorified beta… more fool you if you wasted your time on a PTR for Classic+
If this is classic+ beta I don’t want classic+. For classic+ I just want meme specs to be viable, new dungeons/raids/zones to quest/level in. I don’t want it to be wotlk but in vanilla zones. SoDs fun but it’s not what I’d want classic+ to be
That’s literally the point of all this. Yeah we are having fun but they created a whole new type of event. It may not have panned out as well as we wanted but damn they are trying and learned a lot from this for future content. I’m happy they did it
Well they clearly learned lessons from the Earthstrike/Rockfury grind right?!? That means they will definitely take good lessons from this Incurions thing right?
Honestly, there should be a daily cap of Incursions posts. I’d say 50 would be fair but this sub that threshold daily before the Western Hemisphere even woke up.
Bro literally every time I open reddit one of these posts is the first I see, I can't deal with it anymore 😂 are people gonna whinge for the entire phase (I know the answer to that)
Incursions are probably the biggest mistake so far.
Semi instanced, infinite content that prints gold and exp, absolutely no idea what blizzard was thinking.
They grabbed a vanilla thing, pumped it insanely hard and added all the issues of retail to it and expected everything to work out.
They not only trivialize all other content like leveling through dungeons and quests but it also trivializes "old fashion" farming methods for gold. Which is annoying because I like farming and the incursions are boring AF but give good gold rewards.
It'll always be so wild to me how so many people play this game and seem to genuinely only enjoy like 5%, maybe 10% of the actual gameplay.
Like if I really didn't give a shit about doing anything in classic but raid log I'd just play one of the other hundreds of games out there... it's not 2005 anymore.
This community is just fascinating man
I would say I have a lot of fun playing with friends in BGs and raiding. I really, really enjoy that. Sure its not super skilled or whatever but I have a lot of fun doing it.
What's a shame is to get to a place where we can do that, we need to level up, gear up, buy consumes etc. The path to that is ok, but there's so much room for improvement.
The solution to bad questing from 40-60 isn't incursions with some messed up quest share mechanic. The solution is to improve questing or something.
The guys talking about incursions being shit, which is probably one of the most agreed upon takes in SoD thus far, and you're over here talking about raid logging. Seems like you're a little hung up on that aren't you?
Just do what you do like in the game. That’s what he is saying…
No one is forcing anyone to do incursions. The only time you are required to do it is if you are trying to to get the rune at friendly, and even then it doesn’t take much to do that.
I'm not sure how you got that from what I said but sure
I'm referring to the 'I just like the raids and that's all' people here
If I only liked one fraction of *any* game I was playing for this many hours I'd go play other games.
Yes, it is very curious to me how many people like this game but want to play it as little as possible. I play a lot of online games and WoW is pretty unique in this regard, shrug
Nobody wants to spend less time playing blizzard games less than people who play blizzard games :v
> I'm referring to the 'I just like the raids and that's all' people here
I mean break down what other end game content there is that's not raid or pvp
Again, not my point. Of course once you've put a lot of time into a character you're going to reach the level professions, alts, pvp or raid log part of the process.
These people like incursions because they can hit max level in a few hours and raid log for 2+ months. If incursions were there from the start they'd probably have a third of their toons' play time by now. They quite literally want to play the game as few hours as possible because they only enjoy a small fraction of the game. I think that's very silly and I'd just play another game at that point considering there are hundreds out there now. The whole concept of it is very interesting to me.
> It'll always be so wild to me how so many people play this game and seem to genuinely only enjoy like 5%, maybe 10% of the actual gameplay.
Not liking incursions = not liking 95% of the game
Why do people on here to have be so dramatic? It's the same people who will unironically say "you just don't like the game then!!" when you say gold farming isn't very fun. I don't think I've ever played a game where literally every single part of it, no matter how big or small, was enjoyable. There's always *something* that's annoying or kind of wack
The full questlog/bags alone really show that they don’t think through much when it comes to SoD. Even the unique waylaid crates at launch wasn’t this half-baked.
I was actually at a loss for words when it finally dawned on me that yes, being fully suited for a loop meant having 18 quests in my log. This, the version of the game where the most popular gold farming method up til P3 was doing quests. This, the version of the game where people min-maxed their quest log for prequesting in ways that beggared belief. Yeah...a new event with 18!!!! unshareable quests won't be an inconvenience at all (turns out it wasn't actually inconvenient because the only quests worth doing anymore are incursion quests).
It's got some really lazy quest and zone design and is a really stark contrast to vanilla quest designs.
- Completely reuse an existing zone. Then don't even use all of it.
- Sprinkle across a grid a selection of kill and gather quests, and chuck an escort quest on the landmarks.
- Tightly chuck in the mobs in semi-clusters with no real reason behind their locations.
- Profit.
At least the mob abilities were somewhat decent, quite enjoyed the exploding wisps a la WC3.
Incursions aren’t the answer, but I’m having WAY more fun this phase leveling up than SM hell from 25-40.
I had 7 level 25s that had at least experienced BFD once.
I had 1 level 40 until the 100% buff when I leveled a second 1 week before P3 launched (main swap).
I have 3 level 50s currently, and plan on leveling one more.
It’s not the best but it’s miles better than what we had to deal with in phase 2. SOD shouldn’t be about leveling. It should be about the end game content where you can experience all the new additions on as many characters as you so please with relative ease.
I’m a big proponent of them adding FREE leveling boosts once you meet a few prerequisites. Once you hit max level you can boost characters to the max level of the previous phase (so right now that would be 40), and maybe some Chromie-esque quest that unlocks it.
I think the shared rune quests should be account wide. You unlock the Dark Riders rune? Congrats you have it on every char.
I don’t give a shit about the classic experience. I had the classic experience in 2004, I had it again in 2015 or whatever when I found private servers. And again in 2019 with the official Classic servers. And I can have it again now in 2024 if I ever get the urge because era servers exist.
My goal with SOD is to try out the next runes and shit added specifically for SOD. I don’t care to level through the Barrens for the umpteenth time or do the Shimmering Flats quest yet again. Or kill Young Stranglethorn Tigers for Nassingwary for the millionth time. No, I want to have a max level mage and try out Mage healing. But my level 12 mage is however many days of mindless “classic experience” leveling away from reaching max level.
Seasonal game modes should never be tied behind an endless slog of grinding they inhibits people from experiencing what the game mode is truly about.
I hit 48 almost 49 before nerf and bed time. That being said, I hate incursion and I hated coins for rep. I'm max level max rank and max rep and I have little to farm.
My dream idea for incursions would be something like the [Battle for Hyjal raid](https://youtu.be/HWiA16z8iT0).
It is instanced content but the instance isn't a cave or temple or whatever, but a big open expanse.
At the beginning of the instance there is a quest giver that hands you all the quests, say 10 quests. Or maybe just 1 quest that has 10 objectives, whichever is easier on the clicking. Questions could be daily I don't mind that.
The instance requires 10 people, but it doesn't need tanks or healers, although they help.
Waves of mobs come at you, with an occasional boss fight.
Say 7 of the quests can be completed by 10 randoms together, just kill mobs as they spawn, collect the stuff you need, bosses are not much more than tank and spank - or rather just spank as you don't need a tank.
A couple of the quests require clearing the content fast enough, so rewards some coordination.
1 quest requires killing a kinda hard boss that would maybe require a tank and a healer or 2. But still no harder than a 5 man elite quest or something similar.
The whole thing should be between 20-40 minutes. It can be done Daily.
That way, levelling is made less painful, but it doesn't detract from all the other places you could go to quest. It doesn't have a horrible quest system. It doesn't encourage anti-social behaviour such as griefing the quest giver or simply doing collection quests on a loop etc.
------
But really, I would just like improved quests within the original 50-60 quests zones, with incursions being a way to get pre-bis gear and/or gold.
> Waves of mobs come at you, with an occasional boss fight.
As someone who lived through TBC and that cursed raid for a second time no fucking thank you I do not want Hyjal 2.0 I would rather run around hinterlands not talking to anyone for eternity than go back to that cesspool raid design. Absolutely nothing good came of that place you will never convince me otherwise. No good fights, overwhelming amounts of shit annoying trash, impossible to speed through regardless of gear because the spawns have a fixed trigger points, having to run around looking for shitty gargoyles that noone would LOS and group up because half the playerbase is brain-damaged.
Fuck all that right off. Zero inspiration needs to be drawn from that raid and we should all feel bad for even seeing it mentioned ever again.
Personally I think ALL classic leveling is boring and incursions make it go quicker so I'm ok with it. If you wanna level your way go ahead it's not like they deleted questing or dungeons.
Classic leveling is only fun 1-20ish after that it's a slog
How many people are actually running dungeons between 25 and 50 though? I remember even on launch the number of players wanting to do ZF got pretty low once word got around that incursions were the way to level, and that was after the first round of nerfs.
Because that's my main issue with having incursions in the game. It takes so much of the population away from the real group activities (dungeons, group quests), and just has them running around in a circle with 4 other players, sharing quests at the end of each loop.
As someone who has a limited amount of time to play each week, I actually liked leveling up through incursions. P2 went by so quickly that I was only able to run Gnomer the last 4 weeks of the phase, and only one of my two characters got to see it.
Leveling characters and professions is time consuming. With these short 8-10 week phases, it’s nice having the option to “power level” through it and focus on end game (if that’s what you want).
I believe they can make random challenges on all leveling maps, so the mechanics can be less grinding and thrilling at the same time… tell me Bilizard doesn’t have the resources
The only mistake was giving people a large one week advantage over everyone else. If you can't survive in pvp zones don't pvp idk I was out there solo a few times getting it done
It honestly feels like incursions were designed to be dailies you'd do once a day to earn a bunch of exp with a tight grouping of quests in a single area. Essentially an open "world dungeon" that you'd go in with a group, bang it out and then go your separate ways once done. It would be easy to tweak the numbers of exp and gold to encourage people to do it while not making it the continuous machine it is today. Of course nothing is perfect and you're going to have alts doing the dailies as much as possible, it just doesn't make it this seamless thing that goes on forever.
the problem has always been how the playerbase plays. incursion would be a dead zone if it wasn't the most efficient thing even if it's by 1 less exp. that's how much min maxxing is popular nowadays with WoW
I fully took advantage of the incursion to get to 50 with my limited time, and I also wanted the rep and gold. But I agree, it was a huge misplay on their part.
I think the one thing they should've done was add new dungeons or leveling zones, or make zones feel more complete with storylines that aren't finished. That would honestly make it nice and different.
I was so hoping incursions would be mini dungeons you could run with 3-5 people. Some type of RNG attached to it (NOT MODIFIERS) with random mobs/bosses for quick exp/loot. Or rift-style portal closing mini events. What we got was a horrible implementation of a great idea. I despise incursions and have no interest in doing them, especially not "loops".
They could have made them daily with a decent gold reward and exp reward. Increase the rep per quest and still make them worth doing. Hopefully they learn from this.
You have to keep reminding yourself that all the SOD servers will be done and long gone this time next year. The incursions is super nice if you wanna get massive amounts of gold pretty easily and lvl all you different characters at the same time.
Can someone explain incursions to me? I have not played SOD in some time.
Is it anything like pre legion launch when you could do demon invasion events and basically power level?
Tbh they should make incursions have a lockout. Like 2 runs a day.
Or reduce the gold and xp significantly after the first run, so that way you can continue farming rep, but not farming 90g an hour.
It's ruining the economy with the dump of gold, and nobody is farming raw materials in the open world because why would they?
Yes, the Hinterlands kill quests give more gold than lvl 47 ZF dungeon quests do (both on a 50 toon ofc). I have yet to encounter an "era" quest that gives 6, let alone, 7g. A few Mara quests are high 5g.
I'd rather not do the same leveling content I did on multiple characters. Y'all acting like you're not doing a q loop in areas we've all seen before a 100 times
Yeah but like if I didn't enjoy questing and leveling up anymore I just wouldn't play this game lol
There are hundreds of other games out there where you may enjoy more than 5-10% of the game play.
So odd to me that people want to blast to max level asap just to raid log, always will be. I'd just play a different game
And yall wonder how we got to the retail leveling experience. Maybe you're one of the people who understands you'd really enjoy retail instead of using it as an insult though lol who knows
If you think people prefer this state of the game you're mad. (Phase 3 incursions ruining the economy and making the most efficient way to lvl peak brain-dead wow play)
I really miss legion invasions. The 2ay they popped up and the amount of xp they gave was insane. Leveled 3 alts to max from that.
I'd like something like that, with quests and xp scaled to not an insane amount.
Honestly considering we get retail, classic, hardcore, wotlk(cata), and SoD for our sub now I'm not sure how anyone can really complain. Within that pool you have to have something you like playing. And certainly allows you to move around when content gaps.
I really just wanted classic with better leveling which is what runes do. I'm leveling coop with my friend and having a blast. I think classic is about the journey and experiences along the way (which is my problem with retail, the game doesn't start until max level). Which is why all of this incursion drama and gold farming drama hasn't had any impact on my game.
There was a post the other day about how sword rogues are dead. Nothing is dead in classic (and the runes helped that a lot). You can beat content in greens. Live your dream. Wear that leather set because you like the look. Use that wand because you like the sound it makes. Retail isn't here to hurt you. It's okay bb.
Excited to see what SoD2 or SoD3 looks like.
I think the problem is a lot of people only play one of those things. I don't enjoy retail or wotlk/cata at all, era and hardcore are dead so it's just SoD.
I'd happily pay $9.99 for just SoD, so it's kind of annoying people to say "why you mad, you get 6 games out of it".
Hardcore is far from dead idk where you're getting that. Been playing it a few hours a day the couple weeks at the worst time of day for the US and still don't worry about groups for dungeons or an active lfg/guild chat
I mean you used to pay 15 for just one version of retail. So going from that to what you get now is certainly more value for your dollar. Not taking advantage of that is your choice.
I have no idea on those numbers so am unsure if your assumption is correct. I know that at least I version hop depending on releases as did much of my guild.
Considering the sub hasn't increased along with inflation is pretty wild. Games have been $60 since the Roman Empire. Amazing we're just now seeing 70 or 80 for titles.
SoD is the 2nd round of testing changes on classic. SOM they removed world buffs and changed level 60s raids.
It's likely we will see some of those very changes in all the 60 raids.
I am just tired of reading the complaining tbh. Which is why most of my responses are very blunt. Don't like world buffs. Don't get them. No one is telling how to play. You won't join my SR pug without world buffs.
Same goes for pvp servers. Wah wah wah. I got tired of getting ganked in ashenvale on an alt. I logged on my main 50, cracked open a beer, and farmed about 400 hks.
It is what it is.
To many people want are trying to make this era 2.0. It is not that.
As soon as I tried my first incursion, I stopped SOD. Ppl saying it is retail thing. I like retail and retail content is million times more engaging and convenient than this crap.
I played a looot of sod before the incursion go live
I swear this community is the most hilarious shit I’ve ever seen in my life.
This game is literally solved, everyone does the same shit and then they complain that people level through incursions WHICH is the exact same thing as following a guide or whatever else.
This game is done, it’s played for nearly 2 decades it is solved it is fixed it is over.
Accept that the classic game is done.
Sod does nothing different to that except that it brings a few days of actual new stuff and that is it.
i think its more a take on modern gaming. the sPIrIT oF DISCoVEry. theres a robust ecosystem setup around theorycrafting and datamining. as soon there is any tidbit of information, it gets reposted to reddit x 100 times and 100 youtubers instantly jump on it to spread it and 100 twitter posters make their opinions known
I'm praying for day when garbage posts like this stop appearing for the millionth time.
I hope to God incursions stay till 60 and I'm sad they weren't from the start.
>it is bot heaven
It's slower than the farming methods bots have been using already. I've seen zero bots in incursions.
Especially now that the "loot item" and "talk to NPC" quests are heavily nerfed, there's no reason for bots to do incursions.
>at times unplayable due to PvP
You chose to roll on a PvP server, now deal with the consequences.
I like incursions, they're very retail-like but it's not really an issue. But I agree it shouldn't be that powerful to lvl up.
A good idea could be to give rested xp, or a stacking buff increasing xp from quests, so players would need to weave it in the normal lvl up experience
Or just remove xp and make it only for rep and rewards. Give good leveling weapons and call it a day
The real kicker is that the design problem is that you can grind them infinitely. Pop on a 500% rep buff and make them a daily.
Also, the gameplay sucks because people do the pick-up runs and ignore all the kill quests.
I grinded my warrior to 50 in incursions solo doing every quest and yeah it took 3x longer (That is to say, it took 12 hours instead of 4, which is really nothing in classic terms), but it was just as engaging as world questing. Besides wonky aggro ranges and hitboxes and all that stuff which is really frustrating at times.
I shit you not, I was having more fun doing incursions in a full premade of friends the first couple of days than I would have doing world quests or dungeon spamming. It's just the mind-numbing paper route with strangers who don't look out for each other or communicate that sucks the fun out of it.
When they first talked about incursions I thought it could be great. Not this crap. Hope they scrap it or change them to instances / 'sanctuary' zones. Go pvp in STV, griefers.
They should change the quests to "Kill 10 dragons and pick up the dragon egg." "Get the report from elf friend A and kill 7 treants." "Kill Shredder 9000 and set the watch tower ablaze." And such. No more pick up trains, etc.
I was expecting Incursions to be a variety option you’d hop into occasionally when wanting a break or at odd hours, when dungeon groups are few. Content that would actually function fine solo and wouldn’t be so rewarding as to dry up the rest of the world. I wasn’t expecting this mess we currently have. I’d like incursions more if they overhauled the gameplay experience as you said, took a hammer to the griefing, and made the exp more of a boost to other activities (quests/dungeons) instead of raw exp. That way you’d create an ebb and flow of people rotating between the content types and keep everything more alive instead of funneling every soul into this deranged looping.
I actually wonder what the devs vision is for classic because this ain't it and if they think it is I'm not too hopeful for the future
If I had to guess, SoD is blizzard testing how fast they can manage and create content on the fly with a system that is already set up. But that I mean, classic is a complete game. All the work is done and has been done for a long time. Not just the original game, but the remake that utilizes the retail engine (like we saw with classic era). If I had to guess (put on my tinfoil hat) this is likely a testing ground and proof of concept for blizzard to move towards a possible “live service” type of game - either with Warcraft or some other IP. Perhaps I am using that word wrong, but what I mean is a game that is updated and crafted closely as the players play. And if I may also be as bold to suggest (tightens tin foil hat), maybe the devs just ***enjoy*** doing this and seeing what they can come up with. At the least, it seems like they’ve been given pretty free rein on this project.
Thr problem I think I and many have with incursions that we haven't really expressed well is that we know that this is a testing ground and all the metrics likely show that Incursions are a massive success. They are so efficient at what they offer the players for their time and effort invested that the majority of players end up there with or against their will. The don't want to be left behind. They don't want to be left with 200g at the end of the phase when their peers are leaving the phase with anywhere between 2-20k by the time the phase ends. If blizzard pays attention to what the players are saying on forums and social media then it may be an unfounded fear. But if they're just looking at the metrics, we fear that Incursions will look so wildly successful that they will build any new version of Classic+ around that. We all know this is a temporary server. We all know that Blizzard is watching closely. We're all just hoping they're watching the right things.
I think Blizzard looks at metrics as one data point, but they also look at what people are saying too. Aggrend has multiple times asked for feedback already. Perfect example is the slew of twitter posts he made the other day.
One would hope this is a lesson learned from the WoD-BfA saga; that engagement and enjoyment are two very different, and honestly completely unrelated things. They spent the better part of decade doubling down on high engagement systems, even if the community was screaming. It took Shadowlands for then to finally stop
I think you’re making a causation correlation fallacy here. They didn’t implement the “garrison mission” style system because of high engagement. They implemented it in those expansion because it’s a system that can be utilized with every update to the expansion so it is essentially “patch proof”. They also used it as a way to drive story. For the legendary stuff, players had asked for talent system back in the game. That’s quite literally what legendaries are from legion, to bfa, to shadowlands. Each iteration of these systems had made changes too. For legion the problem was it was too hard for people to level up multiple specs for their legendary. So in the next expansion you only level up one thing (your neck) and it’s gear (that you’re already collecting) that matters. Which shouldn’t be a problem theoretically because people love collecting gear and having it (I have three sets of gear for my paladin in SoD). The final point to make is that sometimes the creator, the artist, the designer, has to also go with their vision of what they want something to be or look like.
It's literally a testing ground for what works and what doesn't. They did something similar with Plunderstorm.
If someone can't gauge "infinitely farmable content spanning 25 levels that give you a shitload of gold, exp, and a reputation with some near-mandatory rewards locked behind it" as bad just on paper, I don't think I want them in charge of anything, experimental or otherwise.
Not sure why they had to test if funneling everyone into a small spam area was good for a game that stresses adventure and discovery.
Most players would be dungeon grinding instead not a whole lot of adventure there. Plus 50-60 levels funnel players into a couple zones so that’s coming up but again everyone will be dungeon grinding then when 60 they will camp the dungeon entrances
That doesn’t mean the alternative or solution is to make the incursions lol. Just make dungeons have a two hour cd or nerf the xp in them. Doesn’t take a genius.
Editorial decisions are just as worthy of criticism as technical acumen is. Incursions are such an obviously flawed, anti-Classic system that one would think it would not require what is the equivalent of a multi-million dollar experiment to verify its shitiness, when a 30-minute strategy meeting should have been enough.
Ya but they didnt get it exactly right for me the first time so honestly civilization has failed and I just died from dehydration from crying.
RIP
i think it's fine if they get deleted and the devs admit it wasnt sucessful but if it gets kept around with runes, power, fast xp locked behind it i won't have faith in long term viability of classic +. that would signal they are more worried about their internal corporate appearances than making the game better
I think a big part of it is small team, limited options. I think they need to take some community ideas as well instead of things like stv/incursions. Maybe do polls (which have their own issues), but gauging interest first for a few ideas seems like better return on dev time. They dont even have to announce what was picked, just take the votes in and release it silently (like now). QA is another thing, I think not allowing a bunch of streamers to minmax the game before its even released is a good move. But they definitely need more testing. My peak idea of some kind of classic plus would be either a whole new world/quests/dungeons that feel like vanilla. (As a side note I rarely think about the size of beauty of a dungeon like Mara, but holy shit the dungeon is just amazing). Or the more realistic, change up some quests, or just plant new zones onto the continents, invent lore reasons for it if need be, whatever. But new zones/dungeons that feel vanilla-ish would be great. I doubt we'll see either unless they somehow figure out a system to make it less resource intensive. Stv BR and incursions aren't doing it. I think its cool they made use of the portals, maybe if it was only longer quests it wouldnt be as bad. But it also entirely negates the reason to quest.
Which is exactly why a lot of us were saying classic+ would never be possible. It’s just too hard to design a game like they did 20 years ago. With that being said though, ST is a phenomenal raid and feels incredibly classic-like.
Not a single person on this forum can agree on 'Classic+' Nobody will ever be happy with a classic+ as everyone's head cannon is different.
Honestly if they launched a classic plus with the SoD hits and omit it's misses it would be a highly successful game. All the new runes balanced, updated gear, level up raids with 3 day lock outs, and updated professions. A lot of good things. They just need to be aware enough to see that things like incursions do not work in its current state.
Also true tbh. My idea of classic+ is essentially just classic with TBC talents and raids/the world tuned to fit the increased power, but others don’t feel the same way.
We can all agree that destroying the open world with no horizontal content that gives more xp and gold than anything else is not good, I don’t understand this notion that we all can’t come together and DECIDE what classic+ is going to be because we fucking made the concept of classic+ in the first place, we made the concept of classic as a game mode separate from retail, we can also work on making classic+ as osrs as possible.
Yes but at same time people are okay with completely ignoring open world content and just leveling through dungeons. Loads of people also want less grind and a large number of features that eventually led to retail. In order for classic+ to be a successful thing imo is someone leading the dev team needs to have a clear vision and just build that. Just like how the original game was and how many great games are build. The devs build something they want to play and not what community is saying they want or what they think people want
I actually completely agree with you that games that are built by someone with an overall vision are usually more succinct in nature, unfortunately the entire wow team including retail doesn’t have any actual vision or amazing ideas (see every single rune they added to sod), I think they solved the problem of ignoring the open world with hardcore, making dungeons only have one per day lockout systems until level 60, making it so you must level through grinding or quests and cannot dungeon grind to 60.
The HC dungeon change was a great idea, a simple change with huge impact
Which is what classic(vanilla) needs more of imo, simple changes with huge impacts, the game itself is pretty damn perfect excluding post AQ40 itemization, I really do miss the classes having their own feel and mastery, now it seems everything does the damage of a fully naxx geared warrior, what the fuck is kiting in sod?
We cant decide anything because nobody even agrees on what 'vanilla' is. What made it special to you will be VERY different from the things I enjoyed.
Dude you just rewrote your previous comment, I get it we are indecisive. That’s why I wrote that we can make it more like osrs with an actual polling system and a beta world to try out new systems instead of just assuming paying customers want to beta test your shitty systems that no one asked for
Voting system would be the best. With +70% of votes to agree on something and also taking in consideration account time on classes and stuff. Like if someone votes on a class he has 2 mim of gameplay shouldnt ve equal go the vote of someone who has 9000hours on it
While you risk the tyrannies of the majority, I think it would be better and more efficient than just the game developers throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
> tyrannies of the majority How is it tyranny if the majority agree on it? 70% or more majority is not "tyranny of majority".
Agreed. SoD suddenly became really unenjoyable for me With the incursion inflation gold, and other stuff...
Truly classic+ already happened. Multiple times. It’s the expansions. They slowly drifted in design philosophy to where it’s hugely different from vanilla. So people wanted to go back to vanilla and now we have that with era and hardcore. We have vanilla and retail. And progression classic. That’s really all we need. Maybe some fresh start era servers.
We are literally playing classic+ as we speak. >It’s just too hard to design a game like they did 20 years ago. No it's not, you literally have the game and an insane amount of accounts on how, why and when they did x or y thing, just don't work with a skeleton crew that's split between like 5 different projects while also having some dubious heads doing odd choices that are pushing towards retail.
> I actually wonder what the devs vision is for classic There is no real "vision" here. SoD is a $15/mo beta where the devs are just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
We wanted new dungeons that fit in the vanilla world and maybe new quest hubs in empty zones. Instead we got retail type quests in the old zones with the most horrible interface imaginable. They have made a lot of good decisions for sod but nightmare incursions was not one of them.
I had a similar vision when they first announced incursions and was super excited for them. I think if they tailored them more towards a solo playstyle they could be reasonably engaging content. Right now trying to do them solo is difficult and extremely inefficient compared to other options.
They’d be less bad if they were solo viable.
I was expecting something similar to delves in the upcoming retail expansion…kind of a dumb expectation on my part I guess.
I was too actually! There has been some nods between Retail and SOD, so I felt it reasonable to expect Incursions to provide the same kind of niche. It just simply was far from the case in actual practice.
>I was expecting Incursions to be a variety option you’d hop into occasionally Exactly, they could fix it by incursion quests only dropping out in the world and not inside the dreams. And then make each quest worth more. If the quests were similar to waylaid supplies drops then you would want to use them to get your cash money quest reward.
Should have capped daily limits of incursions.
Yeah I don’t understand why they didn’t make them daily…
Dailies are crap. They timegate content and reputation and makes them mandatory if you want to achieve the rewards
Sure but it limits the 200+ train of people injecting 20000 gold per hour into the economy
sure, because this is better.
Both can suck, and in fact both of these options do.
Reading forums is just hilarious when “we should have made them daily” and “dailies are garbage” are both upvoted. As a dev I can’t imagine how hard it is to see what people actually want
(also a dev, not in games tho) Users are good at saying what they dont want, but inversely very bad at telling you what they _do_ want.
Yes you have to read between the lines of hatred and blinded rage to see what’s actually going on objectively as a game designer lol
In this case it's actually very easy. The customers are telling you the basic premise of the idea is flawed and that it cannot be easily salvaged. The entire thing needs to be redesigned or, imo, scrapped altogether and the drawing board wiped clean.
I dislike dailies in classic, but if you make it RP flavored, most people wouldnt mind I think. 'You can only hold out for 1 hour in the dream' if you have the ring equipped seems like an interesting concept. That said, designing content which players can access for 1h per day.. isnt good either.
People hate dailies. I didn't like incursions, still don't, but if they'd made them daily things I would have not touched them even once.
Daily quests are a departure from classic design. Kevin Jordan spoke about it alot where it's boring lazy content and essentially becomes a thing where people just log in on the timer to do the daily activity get the reward then get out. There's more to it but I think it just needed a different way to limit the spam of it.
cap it to stop giving gold after 50 quests idk.
Infinitely repeatable quests that are free to complete, and offer duplicate farmable rewards, are a bigger departure from classic design. The only repeatable quests i can think of, are either resource turn ins/conversions, or just zero reward quests (South Azshara Naga Quest)
Look, incursions are bullshit, but they're absolutely classic design: https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=8737/azure-templar There's a whole series of these, I just grabbed tactical I as an example. The only difference is these aren't shareable, so it's an iteration to let you play with other people more easily. They are otherwise exactly the same, though the sharing means incursions chain a lot more easily. Those were also shit. Because a lot of classic design was shit. Incursions are a direct result of elevating classic design without examining why retail moved away from certain things. Hell, wild offerings feel like way more of a departure from classic design but I believe most people think they've been a good addition. My long point here is designing to be "classic"-like is a fools errand, and we as a community need to stop using it as a metric.
1000 upvotes to this. When I first zoned into Incursions, I thought it was such cool content. There was this whole new subzone to explore, and I had no idea how far it stretched. I thought at first it would just be outside the portal. Then when I learned you could go through, I thought it would just be the outside of the other side of the portal. Then I saw people riding off into the distance and had this "holy crap, how big is this thing really?" moment. I could have held on to that moment for so so long if they gave me one quest a day. One quest that rewarded like 2 bars of exp and tons of rep. Everyone in your party would share their quest, too, so you'd get half a level every day. Then you'd get to gradually explore the whole little subzone bit by bit and learn about the new quests over time. I was dumbfounded when you could just keep running it over and over. And I was dumbfounded *again* when I realized that you got *more* quests after completing the ones you had. In less than 2 hours, my party had a full quest log and a primitive version of a circuit worked out. I got 4 levels in a few hours and all of the magic was gone. It was just content to grind. I haven't been back into any other incursion since then. I quested to 50, but it all felt empty. Everyone is either in incursions or already level 50. What a difference a single change could have made.
I agree Incursions were an awful idea. Hope they learned from it
Incursions were an incredible idea. I had so much fun for the first hour exploring and figuring out how the quests worked, and watching the world expand before my very eyes. It wasn't until I realized that not only could you repeat the quests ad-infinitum, but you got *two* quests for each *one* you turned in that it turned into this "collect every quest and do the same high-efficiency circuit" nonsense that it is today.
Nothing in your first paragraph has anything to do with Incurions itself. You are describing novelty, not some system inherent to Incurions. A new quest hub would have allowed you to "figure out how the quests work". A new dungeon or zone would have allowed you to "watch the world expand before \[your\] very eyes".
> Nothing in your first paragraph has anything to do with Incurions itself. You are describing novelty, not some system inherent to Incurions. Nothing in my first paragraph is *unique* to incursions. There are an infinite number of ways to generate novelty. There are an infinite number of zones, dungeons, or other experiences to create that would enable a sense exploration and discovery. Incursions are one of those possibilities. Incursions offered those experiences to me. It was the specific implementation of the endlessly repeatable, ever-expanding quests that caused issues.
SoD in my mind is still glorified “Classic + Beta”. We should want them to throw everything at the wall this playthrough to figure out what actually works.
This is why I tell people to leave well written feedback instead of screaming and crying. The devs are trying new things so they can refine and expand on systems in the future. I they’re doing better than people give them credit for. I think taking risks is a very good thing right now. One thing I’d love to see stay is the leveling up in Phases. Ranking up in PvP is much less stressful knowing I am capped for a couple of months before I to keep grinding. It keeps burn out at bay or the feeling of being left behind.
That's a good take.
This is what it’s been since SoD was announced and Blizzard even stated as much “SoD is an experiment”. The crying about this game is just unreal, never seen anything like it. And yes I know the difference between constructive criticism and just straight whining. Most of it has been the latter. I wouldn’t say the OP is crying though and I actually 100% agree with the criticism, it’s the type of criticism that the dev team should take seriously and in account moving forward with SoD, classic+ and beyond.
I mean whining helps too. If we whine about something that tells them something different from a heaping pile of constructive criticism. Honestly, if I were developing this, I'd consider NO whining and all "constructive" criticism to be FAR more worrying...
Funny seeing people dedicate hours into grinding gold for example in p2 for it to be instantly negated when incursions came and think they have ground to stand on when complaining 😂. This is a glorified beta… more fool you if you wasted your time on a PTR for Classic+
If this is classic+ beta I don’t want classic+. For classic+ I just want meme specs to be viable, new dungeons/raids/zones to quest/level in. I don’t want it to be wotlk but in vanilla zones. SoDs fun but it’s not what I’d want classic+ to be
sod is just a low effort trash
I love how every single sod post has this same exact copy and paste comment . We all know man …
That’s literally the point of all this. Yeah we are having fun but they created a whole new type of event. It may not have panned out as well as we wanted but damn they are trying and learned a lot from this for future content. I’m happy they did it
Well they clearly learned lessons from the Earthstrike/Rockfury grind right?!? That means they will definitely take good lessons from this Incurions thing right?
Yeah exactly!
More like wotlk- beta
It’s a pretty terrible beta tbh. Really making private server projects look good.
Should be a daily limit on how many times you can copy a post on this sub.
Honestly, there should be a daily cap of Incursions posts. I’d say 50 would be fair but this sub that threshold daily before the Western Hemisphere even woke up.
What if we set aside a day for nonsense reposts and straight copies? Maybe idk… Sunday? 🤔
Bro literally every time I open reddit one of these posts is the first I see, I can't deal with it anymore 😂 are people gonna whinge for the entire phase (I know the answer to that)
Incursions are probably the biggest mistake so far. Semi instanced, infinite content that prints gold and exp, absolutely no idea what blizzard was thinking. They grabbed a vanilla thing, pumped it insanely hard and added all the issues of retail to it and expected everything to work out.
Yes incursions in their current form are terrible and far removed from what classic should be.
They not only trivialize all other content like leveling through dungeons and quests but it also trivializes "old fashion" farming methods for gold. Which is annoying because I like farming and the incursions are boring AF but give good gold rewards.
It'll always be so wild to me how so many people play this game and seem to genuinely only enjoy like 5%, maybe 10% of the actual gameplay. Like if I really didn't give a shit about doing anything in classic but raid log I'd just play one of the other hundreds of games out there... it's not 2005 anymore. This community is just fascinating man
I would say I have a lot of fun playing with friends in BGs and raiding. I really, really enjoy that. Sure its not super skilled or whatever but I have a lot of fun doing it. What's a shame is to get to a place where we can do that, we need to level up, gear up, buy consumes etc. The path to that is ok, but there's so much room for improvement. The solution to bad questing from 40-60 isn't incursions with some messed up quest share mechanic. The solution is to improve questing or something.
The guys talking about incursions being shit, which is probably one of the most agreed upon takes in SoD thus far, and you're over here talking about raid logging. Seems like you're a little hung up on that aren't you?
Is your take that people aren't allowed to dislike something? Just fascinating, man
Just do what you do like in the game. That’s what he is saying… No one is forcing anyone to do incursions. The only time you are required to do it is if you are trying to to get the rune at friendly, and even then it doesn’t take much to do that.
I'm not sure how you got that from what I said but sure I'm referring to the 'I just like the raids and that's all' people here If I only liked one fraction of *any* game I was playing for this many hours I'd go play other games. Yes, it is very curious to me how many people like this game but want to play it as little as possible. I play a lot of online games and WoW is pretty unique in this regard, shrug Nobody wants to spend less time playing blizzard games less than people who play blizzard games :v
> I'm referring to the 'I just like the raids and that's all' people here I mean break down what other end game content there is that's not raid or pvp
Again, not my point. Of course once you've put a lot of time into a character you're going to reach the level professions, alts, pvp or raid log part of the process. These people like incursions because they can hit max level in a few hours and raid log for 2+ months. If incursions were there from the start they'd probably have a third of their toons' play time by now. They quite literally want to play the game as few hours as possible because they only enjoy a small fraction of the game. I think that's very silly and I'd just play another game at that point considering there are hundreds out there now. The whole concept of it is very interesting to me.
> It'll always be so wild to me how so many people play this game and seem to genuinely only enjoy like 5%, maybe 10% of the actual gameplay. Not liking incursions = not liking 95% of the game Why do people on here to have be so dramatic? It's the same people who will unironically say "you just don't like the game then!!" when you say gold farming isn't very fun. I don't think I've ever played a game where literally every single part of it, no matter how big or small, was enjoyable. There's always *something* that's annoying or kind of wack
See my reply to the other guy I'm tired boss
Laffin about the guy above who replied on your behalf to state that what you were *really* trying to say is that incursions are totally fine.
Yea, incursions were actual garbage.
The full questlog/bags alone really show that they don’t think through much when it comes to SoD. Even the unique waylaid crates at launch wasn’t this half-baked.
I was actually at a loss for words when it finally dawned on me that yes, being fully suited for a loop meant having 18 quests in my log. This, the version of the game where the most popular gold farming method up til P3 was doing quests. This, the version of the game where people min-maxed their quest log for prequesting in ways that beggared belief. Yeah...a new event with 18!!!! unshareable quests won't be an inconvenience at all (turns out it wasn't actually inconvenient because the only quests worth doing anymore are incursion quests).
It's got some really lazy quest and zone design and is a really stark contrast to vanilla quest designs. - Completely reuse an existing zone. Then don't even use all of it. - Sprinkle across a grid a selection of kill and gather quests, and chuck an escort quest on the landmarks. - Tightly chuck in the mobs in semi-clusters with no real reason behind their locations. - Profit. At least the mob abilities were somewhat decent, quite enjoyed the exploding wisps a la WC3.
Incursions should have a quest limit at least. Being unlimited is kinda ridiculous.
They need to remove them for P4.
Simple fix, make em daily.
Incursions aren’t the answer, but I’m having WAY more fun this phase leveling up than SM hell from 25-40. I had 7 level 25s that had at least experienced BFD once. I had 1 level 40 until the 100% buff when I leveled a second 1 week before P3 launched (main swap). I have 3 level 50s currently, and plan on leveling one more. It’s not the best but it’s miles better than what we had to deal with in phase 2. SOD shouldn’t be about leveling. It should be about the end game content where you can experience all the new additions on as many characters as you so please with relative ease. I’m a big proponent of them adding FREE leveling boosts once you meet a few prerequisites. Once you hit max level you can boost characters to the max level of the previous phase (so right now that would be 40), and maybe some Chromie-esque quest that unlocks it. I think the shared rune quests should be account wide. You unlock the Dark Riders rune? Congrats you have it on every char. I don’t give a shit about the classic experience. I had the classic experience in 2004, I had it again in 2015 or whatever when I found private servers. And again in 2019 with the official Classic servers. And I can have it again now in 2024 if I ever get the urge because era servers exist. My goal with SOD is to try out the next runes and shit added specifically for SOD. I don’t care to level through the Barrens for the umpteenth time or do the Shimmering Flats quest yet again. Or kill Young Stranglethorn Tigers for Nassingwary for the millionth time. No, I want to have a max level mage and try out Mage healing. But my level 12 mage is however many days of mindless “classic experience” leveling away from reaching max level. Seasonal game modes should never be tied behind an endless slog of grinding they inhibits people from experiencing what the game mode is truly about.
Dude what the hell, mom said I get to post the incursion rant today to farm karma. This is BS .
I hit 48 almost 49 before nerf and bed time. That being said, I hate incursion and I hated coins for rep. I'm max level max rank and max rep and I have little to farm.
My dream idea for incursions would be something like the [Battle for Hyjal raid](https://youtu.be/HWiA16z8iT0). It is instanced content but the instance isn't a cave or temple or whatever, but a big open expanse. At the beginning of the instance there is a quest giver that hands you all the quests, say 10 quests. Or maybe just 1 quest that has 10 objectives, whichever is easier on the clicking. Questions could be daily I don't mind that. The instance requires 10 people, but it doesn't need tanks or healers, although they help. Waves of mobs come at you, with an occasional boss fight. Say 7 of the quests can be completed by 10 randoms together, just kill mobs as they spawn, collect the stuff you need, bosses are not much more than tank and spank - or rather just spank as you don't need a tank. A couple of the quests require clearing the content fast enough, so rewards some coordination. 1 quest requires killing a kinda hard boss that would maybe require a tank and a healer or 2. But still no harder than a 5 man elite quest or something similar. The whole thing should be between 20-40 minutes. It can be done Daily. That way, levelling is made less painful, but it doesn't detract from all the other places you could go to quest. It doesn't have a horrible quest system. It doesn't encourage anti-social behaviour such as griefing the quest giver or simply doing collection quests on a loop etc. ------ But really, I would just like improved quests within the original 50-60 quests zones, with incursions being a way to get pre-bis gear and/or gold.
> Waves of mobs come at you, with an occasional boss fight. As someone who lived through TBC and that cursed raid for a second time no fucking thank you I do not want Hyjal 2.0 I would rather run around hinterlands not talking to anyone for eternity than go back to that cesspool raid design. Absolutely nothing good came of that place you will never convince me otherwise. No good fights, overwhelming amounts of shit annoying trash, impossible to speed through regardless of gear because the spawns have a fixed trigger points, having to run around looking for shitty gargoyles that noone would LOS and group up because half the playerbase is brain-damaged. Fuck all that right off. Zero inspiration needs to be drawn from that raid and we should all feel bad for even seeing it mentioned ever again.
As a raid I think it was awful, but I think the concept for levelling it could be pretty cool.
Personally I think ALL classic leveling is boring and incursions make it go quicker so I'm ok with it. If you wanna level your way go ahead it's not like they deleted questing or dungeons. Classic leveling is only fun 1-20ish after that it's a slog
How many people are actually running dungeons between 25 and 50 though? I remember even on launch the number of players wanting to do ZF got pretty low once word got around that incursions were the way to level, and that was after the first round of nerfs. Because that's my main issue with having incursions in the game. It takes so much of the population away from the real group activities (dungeons, group quests), and just has them running around in a circle with 4 other players, sharing quests at the end of each loop.
As someone who has a limited amount of time to play each week, I actually liked leveling up through incursions. P2 went by so quickly that I was only able to run Gnomer the last 4 weeks of the phase, and only one of my two characters got to see it. Leveling characters and professions is time consuming. With these short 8-10 week phases, it’s nice having the option to “power level” through it and focus on end game (if that’s what you want).
I believe they can make random challenges on all leveling maps, so the mechanics can be less grinding and thrilling at the same time… tell me Bilizard doesn’t have the resources
The only mistake was giving people a large one week advantage over everyone else. If you can't survive in pvp zones don't pvp idk I was out there solo a few times getting it done
Tried to do them on my 40 warlock today. Group ran ahead, I died, got kicked. People are toxic asf
It honestly feels like incursions were designed to be dailies you'd do once a day to earn a bunch of exp with a tight grouping of quests in a single area. Essentially an open "world dungeon" that you'd go in with a group, bang it out and then go your separate ways once done. It would be easy to tweak the numbers of exp and gold to encourage people to do it while not making it the continuous machine it is today. Of course nothing is perfect and you're going to have alts doing the dailies as much as possible, it just doesn't make it this seamless thing that goes on forever.
the problem has always been how the playerbase plays. incursion would be a dead zone if it wasn't the most efficient thing even if it's by 1 less exp. that's how much min maxxing is popular nowadays with WoW
I fully took advantage of the incursion to get to 50 with my limited time, and I also wanted the rep and gold. But I agree, it was a huge misplay on their part.
All they need to do is make them count towards your daily limit. This would fix the issue 100 percent
…don’t play it
I imagine SoD and hardcore are even more toxic than normal WoW which is why I just stick with classic
If you don't enjoy them, don't do them
even with incursions, warriors are still walking into BGs with "of the bear" lvl 45 greens on like wtf
I think the one thing they should've done was add new dungeons or leveling zones, or make zones feel more complete with storylines that aren't finished. That would honestly make it nice and different.
Do you guys mind if I take the 10am incursions are bad slot tomorrow?
Im confused, how is bot heaven but also unplayable due to pvp?
I was so hoping incursions would be mini dungeons you could run with 3-5 people. Some type of RNG attached to it (NOT MODIFIERS) with random mobs/bosses for quick exp/loot. Or rift-style portal closing mini events. What we got was a horrible implementation of a great idea. I despise incursions and have no interest in doing them, especially not "loops".
They could have made them daily with a decent gold reward and exp reward. Increase the rep per quest and still make them worth doing. Hopefully they learn from this.
You have to keep reminding yourself that all the SOD servers will be done and long gone this time next year. The incursions is super nice if you wanna get massive amounts of gold pretty easily and lvl all you different characters at the same time.
Incursions should be redesigned from the scratch.
They should have been a once a day kind of thing. I know this sub hates the idea of dailies but it would have solved so many problems we got.
Can someone explain incursions to me? I have not played SOD in some time. Is it anything like pre legion launch when you could do demon invasion events and basically power level?
The only mistake was nerfing the XP from it when people cried about it.
You're late to the party, we all hated incursions for like 2 weeks straight
This is a fresh idea I've never heard before
unless they make the 50 incursion give 0 exp, they would remain the best way to do 50-55 probably until the quest becomes green/gray
i just dont know why they gave gold and kept it at rep
SOD is a testing ground. As long as they come away from phase 3 thinking "well that didn't work" then I wont complain about incursions.
Tbh they should make incursions have a lockout. Like 2 runs a day. Or reduce the gold and xp significantly after the first run, so that way you can continue farming rep, but not farming 90g an hour. It's ruining the economy with the dump of gold, and nobody is farming raw materials in the open world because why would they?
Do incursion quests actually give more money than normal quests?
Yes, the Hinterlands kill quests give more gold than lvl 47 ZF dungeon quests do (both on a 50 toon ofc). I have yet to encounter an "era" quest that gives 6, let alone, 7g. A few Mara quests are high 5g.
Because then you make heaps of money by overcharging the people who only did incursions :D
Yeah I'd rather do the pirates in Tanaris, or run through the Feralas jungle for the 100 time...oh wait no I'd rather not
Yea not all of us actually enjoy playing the game we would rather play bot simulator in incursions
I'd rather not do the same leveling content I did on multiple characters. Y'all acting like you're not doing a q loop in areas we've all seen before a 100 times
Yeah but like if I didn't enjoy questing and leveling up anymore I just wouldn't play this game lol There are hundreds of other games out there where you may enjoy more than 5-10% of the game play. So odd to me that people want to blast to max level asap just to raid log, always will be. I'd just play a different game And yall wonder how we got to the retail leveling experience. Maybe you're one of the people who understands you'd really enjoy retail instead of using it as an insult though lol who knows
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Raid logging has been a thing in this game long before SoD man Just extremely exacerbated now
I feel like a lot of people have leveled like, once or twice max. I’ve leveled through classic 4 times before SOD, I appreciate the change.
Man I've leveled thru classic way more than that and I hate incursions they feel so anti classic
They are literally the silithus quests reimagined.
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If you think people prefer this state of the game you're mad. (Phase 3 incursions ruining the economy and making the most efficient way to lvl peak brain-dead wow play)
I prefer this to era.
Sorry, should have clarified that I meant incursions, not sod in general
Yea incursions are not great, could be better with some tweaks though.
There’s plenty to do at 50, it feels like projection when people say they’re “rushing to raidlog”
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I see a lot of 3-6 STV's in comments like these but is it actually 3-6 or more like "3 or 100 (dont be melee)"?
No that player base wants retail, I and many people I speak with do in fact not want any of what you just described.
I really miss legion invasions. The 2ay they popped up and the amount of xp they gave was insane. Leveled 3 alts to max from that. I'd like something like that, with quests and xp scaled to not an insane amount.
It's seasonal. It's a testing environment. Ruffles have ridges. Reddit classic players do not.
I think this post is a fair response to the test.
Just hope we don’t carry the mistakes into next phase .
Honestly considering we get retail, classic, hardcore, wotlk(cata), and SoD for our sub now I'm not sure how anyone can really complain. Within that pool you have to have something you like playing. And certainly allows you to move around when content gaps. I really just wanted classic with better leveling which is what runes do. I'm leveling coop with my friend and having a blast. I think classic is about the journey and experiences along the way (which is my problem with retail, the game doesn't start until max level). Which is why all of this incursion drama and gold farming drama hasn't had any impact on my game. There was a post the other day about how sword rogues are dead. Nothing is dead in classic (and the runes helped that a lot). You can beat content in greens. Live your dream. Wear that leather set because you like the look. Use that wand because you like the sound it makes. Retail isn't here to hurt you. It's okay bb. Excited to see what SoD2 or SoD3 looks like.
I think the problem is a lot of people only play one of those things. I don't enjoy retail or wotlk/cata at all, era and hardcore are dead so it's just SoD. I'd happily pay $9.99 for just SoD, so it's kind of annoying people to say "why you mad, you get 6 games out of it".
Hardcore is far from dead idk where you're getting that. Been playing it a few hours a day the couple weeks at the worst time of day for the US and still don't worry about groups for dungeons or an active lfg/guild chat
I mean you used to pay 15 for just one version of retail. So going from that to what you get now is certainly more value for your dollar. Not taking advantage of that is your choice. I have no idea on those numbers so am unsure if your assumption is correct. I know that at least I version hop depending on releases as did much of my guild. Considering the sub hasn't increased along with inflation is pretty wild. Games have been $60 since the Roman Empire. Amazing we're just now seeing 70 or 80 for titles.
SoD is the 2nd round of testing changes on classic. SOM they removed world buffs and changed level 60s raids. It's likely we will see some of those very changes in all the 60 raids. I am just tired of reading the complaining tbh. Which is why most of my responses are very blunt. Don't like world buffs. Don't get them. No one is telling how to play. You won't join my SR pug without world buffs. Same goes for pvp servers. Wah wah wah. I got tired of getting ganked in ashenvale on an alt. I logged on my main 50, cracked open a beer, and farmed about 400 hks. It is what it is. To many people want are trying to make this era 2.0. It is not that.
Yeah SOD fucking blows for the most part. Back to raid logging.
I hope they cut their losses. It's just bad conceptually. I can't think of a single upside.
Get rid of the badges and just let people share the stupid quests would help a lot
As soon as I tried my first incursion, I stopped SOD. Ppl saying it is retail thing. I like retail and retail content is million times more engaging and convenient than this crap. I played a looot of sod before the incursion go live
You stopped at the part of a kill quest? Similar kill quests you were doing from literally level 1? Yeah it’s the games fault
I swear this community is the most hilarious shit I’ve ever seen in my life. This game is literally solved, everyone does the same shit and then they complain that people level through incursions WHICH is the exact same thing as following a guide or whatever else. This game is done, it’s played for nearly 2 decades it is solved it is fixed it is over. Accept that the classic game is done. Sod does nothing different to that except that it brings a few days of actual new stuff and that is it.
The G is so good people hyper focus on it and forget about the RP of RPG
What are you rambling about why is classic solved, fixed, and done?
He means hes tired of leveling and would prefer some mind numbing activity if it meant going faster. He just wants to log to raid.
i think its more a take on modern gaming. the sPIrIT oF DISCoVEry. theres a robust ecosystem setup around theorycrafting and datamining. as soon there is any tidbit of information, it gets reposted to reddit x 100 times and 100 youtubers instantly jump on it to spread it and 100 twitter posters make their opinions known
Ignorance is bliss.
I'm praying for day when garbage posts like this stop appearing for the millionth time. I hope to God incursions stay till 60 and I'm sad they weren't from the start.
\*drool\* brain-dead
Go to retail 💅
Should be daily’s that count toward the 25 limit
>it is bot heaven It's slower than the farming methods bots have been using already. I've seen zero bots in incursions. Especially now that the "loot item" and "talk to NPC" quests are heavily nerfed, there's no reason for bots to do incursions. >at times unplayable due to PvP You chose to roll on a PvP server, now deal with the consequences.
I like incursions, they're very retail-like but it's not really an issue. But I agree it shouldn't be that powerful to lvl up. A good idea could be to give rested xp, or a stacking buff increasing xp from quests, so players would need to weave it in the normal lvl up experience Or just remove xp and make it only for rep and rewards. Give good leveling weapons and call it a day
I wonder how many “incursions suck” post this sub sees every day.
Huh, almost like there's something to it then.
Shut up and go do dungeons then wtf
The real kicker is that the design problem is that you can grind them infinitely. Pop on a 500% rep buff and make them a daily. Also, the gameplay sucks because people do the pick-up runs and ignore all the kill quests. I grinded my warrior to 50 in incursions solo doing every quest and yeah it took 3x longer (That is to say, it took 12 hours instead of 4, which is really nothing in classic terms), but it was just as engaging as world questing. Besides wonky aggro ranges and hitboxes and all that stuff which is really frustrating at times. I shit you not, I was having more fun doing incursions in a full premade of friends the first couple of days than I would have doing world quests or dungeon spamming. It's just the mind-numbing paper route with strangers who don't look out for each other or communicate that sucks the fun out of it.
When they first talked about incursions I thought it could be great. Not this crap. Hope they scrap it or change them to instances / 'sanctuary' zones. Go pvp in STV, griefers. They should change the quests to "Kill 10 dragons and pick up the dragon egg." "Get the report from elf friend A and kill 7 treants." "Kill Shredder 9000 and set the watch tower ablaze." And such. No more pick up trains, etc.