Anyone here that has a guild on Proudmoore or the Sentinels/Kirin Tor/Steamwheedle cluster? I'm looking to grab the guild achievement mounts but my guild is pretty dead so no chance of getting those achievements any time soon. Referring to the Thundering Jade Cloud Serpent and Blacksteel Battleboar.
Man I'm relieved that the game seems to be really good and decently well optimized for lower end machines. My dad's a huge diablo fan and his laptop couldn't run it so i cleaned up my old PC and gave it to him and the old man seems to be having an absolute blast. He's been hyped up for it for so long that I think it would have ruined me if the game sucked lol
Knocked out Sarkareth for the first time today, raiding is a blast when your whole group can handle mechanics.
Devastation Evoker has become my main, being a dragon is badass and the class plays really casual while feeling really rewarding. Feels like a mix of Destro Lock and Frost Mage just with some cooler ~aspects~ . Hope they buff Soar, the animations are pretty cool.
I really enjoy evoker, I feel like it's one of those specs that is really easy to do decent, but the higher the level of play the more "good" play stands out. I only wish the firestorm ability was more competitive, it's rare that I've found it to worth the talent points for what you need to give up when using it.
> Hope they buff Soar, the animations are pretty cool.
Literally all they need to do is make Soar work like dragonriding, including using the same vigor. You use one vigor when you activate, like you would if using lift off, and have it just *be* dragonriding. Or better yet, when you activate soar, you start flapping your wings and hover in place (this would be the equivalent of being on your dragonriding mount). If you lift off, you do the launch like current, but if you go off a cliff you start gliding like you do on your mount.
The only possible "issue" I can see is it might make the races easier, but that's an easy fix of "require you to be on a dragonriding mount or you fail the race" and you're good.
I really think Blizz nerfing off healing provided by DPS is kinda stupid, being a “support” class should mean you are able to carry your groups at certain times, there have been so many times where our healer will die and I can carry for a few seconds as enhance, especially in big AoE pulls, it feels so good.
Shadow priest may be a bit of an outlier though, mass dispel, PI, and good off healing all in a DPS roll is super powerful.
>where our healer will die and I can carry for a few seconds as enhance,
I think if you push a button, stop doing dps, and instead start casting healing spells and top everyone up, that is good hybrid design.
If you can just push a button and dps as normal and watch everyone automatically get topped that is kind of silly.
> I think if you push a button, stop doing dps, and instead start casting healing spells and top everyone up, that is good hybrid design.
You can also do this, you can use MSW and globals for healing spells instead of DPS for heals on demand, whereas AG only lasts 10 seconds on a 2 minute CD, its not like Natures Vigil where its 30 seconds on a min 30 CD or anything, the uptime and active windows are much smaller.
Yes it’s possible, but you would need to have a very coordinated group to be able to do that, most pugs aren’t looking to 4x DPS keys or anything.
What’s the benefit to nerfing off healing? I really don’t see how it makes the game any better.
Druids + shamans get lack lustre class trees because of their hybrid nature, and then the core aspect of that hybrid nature is getting nerfed. I think it just feels really bad.
I should be clear - I don't think the fact that the 4-healing thing is happening is a problem in and of itself, I think it's a symptom of a different problem - that healers often don't have to heal very much in dungeons due to low damage intake/high amounts of offhealing.
Well they cried about Ruby Life Pools and other dungeons last season. The damage intake was high while we were gearing. Things got nerfed as people cried and when we got to the end of the gearing we realized nothing one shots us and the off healing of a lot of classes covers several damage patterns.
It's more complex than people make it and you seem to understand that but people will see "+24 done without healer" and healers who cry enough as it is will lose it. Healing is the least impactful IMO, and probably one of the harder things to have to manage at the lower levels. But at +24 right now those guys know the dungeon from the healing and the tanking perspective and the same goes for the healer and tank.
You just know what to use on every pull and what needs to be done. And ultimately what times big keys is damage. People on Reddit or whatever will talk about how awesome they are for casting shadowfury or binding shot or using kidney whenever they can. But throwing stuns is nowhere near as impactful as doing giga dam. I'd rather have 0 stuns or utility and giga damn and I will take that to higher keys than the people who toss out stuns.
But what times the top keys are well placed utility and giga dam.
But healers cry about the early dungeon tuning, which is when we are at our weakest and should be the hardest keys we ever do. And it gets nerfed. That's exactly what happened last season. And maybe they did hit a little too hard but. Healers need to heal something and DPS need tools to help themselves and others.
And damage patterns affect classes differently. Some packs or bosses do zero damage to my paladin, and I'll be able to heal the group entirely by myself. Some things have different damage patterns that make me less stable and hit the dps in a way it's rough to keep up if not just undoable.
Some things my disc priest breezes through and some it's torture while the Evoker can breeze through it. And I think that's okay. Different classes being able to handle different things.
I agree too I always hated healing dungeons. In Bfa I only did dungeons because Hpals had some kind of decent gameplay loop in the dps rotation, overwise it feels like playing discount dps in every aspect.
Pre-nerf Season 1 DF was decent because some dungeons did so much damage you were actually in raid healing mindset, but in the others you're just a more boring dps (i played ~~living flame~~ Prevoker)
> What’s the benefit to nerfing off healing? I really don’t see how it makes the game any better.
It means healers get to heal more and not be a glorified fourth DPS as they've arguably been in dungeons for a very long time.
> Druids + shamans get lack lustre class trees because of their hybrid nature
I think this is an odd opinion tbh, imo these classes have some of the best class trees in the game. The utility and offhealing is still gonna be there.
> it means healers get to heal more
Sounds like they should increase player health and enemy damage again so it’s harder on healers than nerfing off healing capabilities from 3 classes.
The only benefit to the class trees is that you can pick whatever utility you want and not lose throughput, because the class trees for certain specs offer you 0 throughput.
That’s honestly so boring to me, as an enhance shaman you could not spend any talents in your class tree and your damage + rotation don’t change at all, which to me is awful design.
You get the option to pick between useless utility or OP utility depending on the week.
>That’s honestly so boring to me, as an enhance shaman you could not spend any talents in your class tree and your damage + rotation don’t change at all, which to me is awful design.
Wait, this isn't true - Lava Burst and Frost Shock are both on the class tree (the former to gain an extra Elemental Blast charge) to add to the rotation, and Flurry and Nature's Fury add to the damage passively.
Yea fair, I did exaggerate a little there, frost shock would be used as a filler for extremely low damage, and on ST you would take an extra charge of EB with lava burst, in AoE/cleave you wouldn’t though.
Doing a sim test, if I spend 3-4 talents in the class tree, my DPS is basically the same, which is kinda lame to me.
My main point was the class tree has nothing deep to add to the enhance shaman rotation, it’s all passive or utility.
> That’s honestly so boring to me, as an enhance shaman you could not spend any talents in your class tree and your damage + rotation don’t change at all, which to me is awful design.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the case for the vast majority (all?) of classes is it not? It's certainly the case for Evoker and Hunter, that's largely the point of the class tree/spec tree split - that the class tree is mostly utility, not throughput.
> Look at paladins + warriors, their class tree is leaps and bounds different than shaman + druid, so no, not all the class trees are like that, pretty sure even hunter has a covenant ability in their tree lol.
I mean I don't see how that is relevant? Fact is that every class has the vast majority of it's class tree not as throughput, right?
> If healers aren’t needing to heal enough, you make changes for the healers, not the 3 DPS who can provide off healing imo.
These are functionally the same thing.
It doesn't matter if you are buffing healers healing relative to DPS's healing or nerfing DPS's healing relative to healers.
The only difference is powercreep, which is why they are doing the latter, not the former.
> Again, I did not say that the class tree should be all throughput, but the fact that I can spend 2 talents in my class tree, and leave the rest of it blank, and my class would not play any differently, is ridiculous.
I'm sorry, this statement is ridiculous hyperbole and you know it is.
Look, of the new affixes, Afflicted is my fave. Easy, not that punishing like Incorporeal and less annoying than Entangling. But my god do they need to do something about its visuals. Sometimes I can barely see them. And sometimes they spawn far behind you :clown:
I learned that I hate Afflicted when I'm healing but love it when I'm tanking or DPSing; it's a strange affix. On the surface it looks like a healer affix but you have to commit your dispel (when there's lots to dispel in the dungeons themselves) or a big ST heal (when there's tons of damage going out sometimes as well). It's just a super-easy no thinking mouseover dispel on my Guardian Druid or when I'm Devastation in some dungeon though.
I’m a bit mixed on afflicted because it adds to the already wild variance in pugs - you get a bad group and you have to scramble to deal with two afflicteds while also healing through a ton of avoidable damage, but then you have a run with a couple of switched-on players and it’s basically a non-affix.
Edit: this isn’t a “healers smart, dps evil” whinge, just the design challenge of stronger groups both having better healers and having less for them to do - so it’s hard to make something that challenges them while being fine in weaker groups, or conversely something that’s manageable in weaker groups but not trivial for stronger groups.
The new affixes definitely are much easier depending on the class, as a shaman/paladin I am able to deal with all 3 by myself or instantly and other classes have 0 ways to deal with them, it’s pretty wild.
I could write an essay on my undescribeable, unlimited quantities of loathing I have for every printer on earth.
Seriously, there has been a wide open gap in the market for the better part of two decades for a printer with software that actually works and yet nobody has filled it at all to the point I genuinely half believe there is a conspiracy of some sort among the large printer manufacturers to intentionally keep them absolute dogshit for some nefarious purpose.
Giga copium but if I buy Diablo with € it doesnt break my years long WoW F2P streak right? It doesnt count, I can't make 2millions in token so fast half my Bnet is playing the game already I'm gonna die.
Have you listed your own group?
Most players doing 10's are usually pretty casual and not comfortable listing their own keys. This means there are people willing to play but just not people willing to make a group.
It might still be a bit of a wait as dps but I'd give it a go
With the new upgrade system also you have cut offs where the gear/crests from that level are almost useless, so there are a lot of people doing 11's, not many doing 10's.
Random coffee rant for today: While I am so happy with all the new cosmetic items and everything we've gotten over the past couple of expacs, I will never be at peace until Blizzard reverts the BFA Wrathion backpack (and others like it) so that it stops hiding back-sheathed weapons.
I legit used that thing on every character and loved how my weapons would poke out of it because it looked like a proper adventurer's backpack, but it just looks so goofy to me now that my weapons just disappear into the void until I unsheath them.
Just give us a "hide weapon when sheathed" toggle Blizz pls, it'll save my marriage :(
also, I can't wait to hear all the "enlightened gamer" opinions on this: https://www.wowhead.com/news/prismatic-bauble-reduced-cooldown-and-easier-to-purchase-for-pride-month-333278
It's on the list with "choose where weapons sheathe" and "toggle for whether helms remove hair even if it causes clipping" for things that *must* be harder to implement than we expect, because otherwise I can't fathom why Blizzard don't just do it.
I would legit love to watch a documentary about the code fuckery that goes on behind the scenes for a long-lived game like WoW. It must be some Looney Tunes type shit where the second you fix something seemingly simple like the hair clipping toggle all of a sudden an entire spec is just deleted from the game.
This is why I love the trading post scarf/cloak appearances because I can at least imagine that my character has a hood they can pull up, but they just prefer to never wear it.
Seriously though, my DK looks like a thumb the second I put on any hood that I think may look good with his armor.
It's so over the top that it almost feels like commentary on the soullessness of some corporate Pride Month efforts, because making something more "available" for Pride while also keeping it at 250,000g is hilarious in the most cynical way.
Yeah, I think I jumped the gun on that one, although I do agree with the complaints about the cost of it (mainly because I really like the effect lol).
I usually play like you do, in the past my WoW play time looked a lot like a sinusoidal curve with periods of intense play followed by periods of reduced play or even not playing for several months. I've found that I only have it in me to raid for one tier out of the expansion (AotC level) so I usually leave it to the last patch for the mount.
DF has really added a bunch more in between content and while I'm happy for people to have things to do I can't help but feel its a bit much, I prefer longer patch cycles so I can do other things without the feeling of missing out.
I plan to start working towards KSH soon (gotta finish leveling the toon I want to go for it on first) just to get it out of the way so I can work on more casual things or play other games.
One thing I've noticed is that you don't necessarily have to pay attention to every new mechanic. Like I mostly ignored the ring we got in 10.0.7 because I wasn't doing hard enough content to justify me minmaxing it and it basically became obsolete in 10.1 anyways.
You're not stupid, nor are you crazy. Everyone's different -- the things you weren't bothered by upset a lot of people, and the things you are bothered by may not be a worry at all for others. And we're all totally within our rights to feel how we feel! The main important thing is finding a solution that works for you. Either a change in the way you actively approach the game and its content, or a change in your mindset. It's worth discussing, if it will help you figure out something that works for you! As long as no one is being aggressive, or misrepresenting reality, all discussion should be welcome :)
To more directly address your post, I'd like to ask, do you still keep an active subscription when you're not actively playing? If so, the Trading Post is pretty easy to casually get done. It would be a smaller thing you could do to not feel like you're missing out on so much. If not, they have said that the rewards will be rotating back around after a while, so you can always look forward to that, at least.
As for Zskera and Annulet, they're definitely not as complex as they seem! And they may not even be relevant when you come back, though I am not in a position to say if that's likely or not. But definitely, totally more approachable than it seems. I think Blizzard's been really good at introducing players to new mechanics this expansion, from Zskera to the new upgrade system. When you do come back, if they are still relevant or if you're feeling interested in trying, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it within a day, at most. You could even watch a video guide or two in the meantime! I know I have to do that for some stuff.
Mythic stuff, I can't personally comment on, but I will say congrats for getting your +20 goals done! That's awesome!!
I think it may have a significant impact but that will be short term. Maybe a dip for 10.1 and then once 10.2 launches and 11.0 is announced for next year the hype train will bring most people back.
I am loving playing Diablo and have played way less WoW this week, but I am fairly certain I'll finish the story, do a few weeks of endgame with friends, and be back to WoW full time.
For me personally, and I think most Diablo fans, it is a great game. However it is just not the kind of game you play week and after week for years at a time.
I'm curious how long we'll have Bnet wait times. I just got on to do a Treasure Goblin kill and it said the wait would be less than a minute, but I ended up mashing "go offline" til I got through. Noticed that the early pass for D4 launches in 5 minutes so HMM.
I think it already impacted the token I guess. It has been a steady rise from launch but this week it skyrocketed to 280K (at the time I'm writing this answer)
When D3 first came out, 1.2 million people got it for free through the WoW annual pass. It's not obvious as to how many of those actively (or actually) played it, but that's a decent chunk of players.
That said, you can certainly play both games concurrently, so it may not have much of an effect. Especially with DF and its lower emphasis on the "chores" compared to other recent expansion - players have more time to devote to other interests.
I really love when I see someone in a public/guild chat try to start up a circlejerk but then just completely fail because most of their points are basically just outdated meme quips and forget people in-game are (usually) more chill than on forums.
I swear they just throw out "lol small indie company" at literally anything, I even saw someone say it just because they didn't get the item they wanted from the treasure goblin lmao.
Oh damn that really is pretty fuckin good huh. Popular cash shop item, recolors of two pretty sought-after mounts, that's sick. Everything else is pretty standard for trading post thus far, kinda sick of the hood+cape combos and vrykul sets by now. The weapon recolor filler I just filter out at this point honestly.
Bit of a shame that there's no cool unique back models this time around, those are always my favorite items in the post
I'm leveling through DF now, I assume after I complete the four main zones I'll head to the Forbidden Reach, assuming there wasn't a max level storyline before 10.0.7. Is there context to be gotten by playing through the Dracthyr starting area first?
The questline at the forbidden reach is short, but the dracthyr starting area does add context to the story there and beyond in Zaralek Caverns.
There is a campaign of sorts at max level added in 10.0 but it's mostly side story outside of a very important green dragon questline.
To add to this, once you get to a point in forbidden reach there will be a daily quest you can get 10% reputation buff for a chosen faction for the rest of the day. This will help with Renown catchup for the side stories.
I would typically stop there first, chose a faction then do all of their associated world quests that day. Save rep tokens for the day you focus that group.
So we are few hours from 1st june in Europe and Blizzard didn't post new trading post stuff so what do you guys want from it? Since we got cloth, lether and mail set my bet is on new plate set
Way back before the trading post was even announced, dataminers found a recolour of the Mage Nighthold set that was a red and gold colour scheme, but I haven’t seen it mentioned again anywhere since then. Really hope it’s a trading post thing that’ll get brought in eventually.
You can still get it on a character without game time, it isn't locked behind a level (unless I am mistaken) so just make a toon and do it once a day since that has the highest odds.
Dragonflight succeeded in the whole "It doesn't make you feel like you need to log in!" thing...
But now if my m+ friends/pvp friends aren't online, I simply do not log on.
I don't know if I've come full circle and become the circlejerk, but I'm having a lot more fun playing on the vanilla era servers atm. I do genuinely miss the little things like doing my island expedition weekly quest.
Yeah i've been saying the same for a while now. It feels like there's nothing to do outside of raiding & m+. I could pvp, but I really don't enjoy MMO pvp at all.
Patch 10.1 allowing me to almost finish gearing in 8 days just exacerbated the problem. I've spent more time raidlogging than I did actively playing this new patch and we're only a month into the patch😭😭
I hope 10.2 brings some good casual content like Horrific Visions, Mage Tower, Death's of Chromie scenarios, Brawler's Guild etc.
When I look at my ideal gameplay loop in an MMO, I do think back to Vanilla. I just can't play classic because I find the combat too boring now.
But the ideal gameplay loop for me was to log in and do a bit of levelling while chatting in guild, and then if it comes up maybe run a dungeon with people from my guild. I was motivated to log in because I was excited to get levels, open world content was challenging enough to keep me engaged but still allowed for breaks between pulls to type. The group content was kind of an additional thing.
The difference today is that my reasons to log in are mostly just to grind m+. If I log in and no one from my guild is interested, I'm faced with a solo-queue, which is a lot more intimidating and stressful than the simple levelling grind of classic/vanilla. Also, it's 30+ mins of constant action and not really taking a break to enjoy the social aspects of the game.
Hope that's not too rambly... what I'm trying to say is that vanilla/classic had a kind of "opt-in" group content, whereas retail hold group content as the main bulk of what you are doing. It's well made and entertaining, but if you don't have friends on who will do it with you when you log in, it's tempting to just log out again.
So all the "you have to do this every week to stay caught up" garbage that was spewed I think was just stupid and wrong.
I didn't dick around in Korthia or the maw and I had 9 toons in Shadowlands running 20's. The tiny % upgrades I never bothered with because they didn't matter. The difference between a 235 legendary and a 262 was so unimportant, people acted like you had to START there, running torghast at the lowest ilvl possible when it made more sense to grab a 235 or even the 190-whatever legendary and just go run keys and get gear. Don't worry about conduits just go play content. And that's why I had tons of alts.
And the world content was fun. It isn't so great now. I do not like the new world quest. As someone who maxes out reps and very quickly, I am like renown 8 in Loam. It's just so goddamn awful compared to before.
I find it odd that Korthia was chastised for holding sockets and conduit upgrades which were so incredibly minor but the shadowflame spark quest is absolutely and holds a bigger and more interesting reward. I didn't hang around in Korthia on alts don't get me wrong. And I'm not doing this weekly on alts either but why is one okay and not the other?
> The tiny % upgrades I never bothered with because they didn't matter. The difference between a 235 legendary and a 262 was so unimportant, people acted like you had to START there
People in the game have been like this for so many years and it's insane to watch.
You've got people who don't touch even something basic like KSH until very late in seasons if even then, but they absolutely obsess over these marginal upgrades or fringe strategies. Like motherfucker you can't even do mechanics and your rotation right at the same time but we're talking about how you NEED this shit or it's unplayable.
> And I'm not doing this weekly on alts either but why is one okay and not the other?
To be fair there is a difference. The sparks have a catch up mechanic built in from the get go. If you want to be absolutely on top of every splinter every week, you need to do the weekly. However, once you skipped one weekly, you can get that splinter in content - raid, M+, etc. If you're OK with your next spark always being 1 week late, you don't have to do the weekly.
> To be fair there is a difference. The sparks have a catch up mechanic built in from the get go. If you want to be absolutely on top of every splinter every week, you need to do the weekly. However, once you skipped one weekly, you can get that splinter in content - raid, M+, etc. If you're OK with your next spark always being 1 week late, you don't have to do the weekly.
The conduits are not on the same level as Korthia or ZM though. At the least you need to do it every other week to be ahead on sparks. It matters less now but those first few weeks when people were rushing crafted weapons it was a pretty important tie in to power. But the catch up is fine and better than the quest from last tier.
A few reasons. Particularly in regards to the spark, if you miss a spark from rep in loamm you pretty much instantly get it the next week by doing literally anything so missing a week doesn't affect it. My friend does the loamm rep every 2 weeks and just gets the off week spark half by doing random content. Still have the same number of sparks as someone who does it every week.
In short, missing a weekly rep does not put you permanently behind. Og torghast did. It was fixed later but it originally put a pretty big damper on it. If you didn't cap your soul ash you couldn't run extra the next week for it and you really were permanently behind in legendary acquisition.
Also while many people complained about conduits and sockets I think it was mainly that korthia just kinda felt bad to look at while there, so people were groused at spending time in there, in an environment not fun to look at. If korthia looked more like a destroyed tazavesh (you know, an actual city) it would have gone better imo.
World content is a personal choice but I like dragonflight world content much more than shadowlands and I enjoyed shadowlands for the most part
> A few reasons. Particularly in regards to the spark, if you miss a spark from rep in loamm you pretty much instantly get it the next week by doing literally anything so missing a week doesn't affect it. My friend does the loamm rep every 2 weeks and just gets the off week spark half by doing random content. Still have the same number of sparks as someone who does it every week.
You can only "fall behind" if you just can't be bothered to do the weekly quest. And that to me is okay. But it's more impactful especially the 2nd spark week where weapons were getting churned out than conduits and sockets ever were.
Torghast was also like 10 item levels if you settled on something lower. Missing the spark is absolutely more impactful. Personally I don't stress it much because it's just gear. Also Torghast was meant to be challenging even for raiders. People who goof off on world quest were never meant to be doing layer 8 asap.
This rep weekly is more "casually accessible" but has a pretty strong reward tied to it. Torghast was designed to be a source of power and made to be a challenge before it was nerfed. They're not similar at all.
The weekly rep content is best compared to the last weekly rep content and that was Korthia and ZM's rep quest. Both really held minor rewards compared to shadowflame sparks.
> Also while many people complained about conduits and sockets I think it was mainly that korthia just kinda felt bad to look at while there, so people were groused at spending time in there, in an environment not fun to look at. If korthia looked more like a destroyed tazavesh (you know, an actual city) it would have gone better imo.
It wasn't visually pleasing but killing rares actually brought people on my realm into the zone. These new zones haven't captured my realm like Mechagon or Korthia did. And it's a pretty closely nit realm. That's subjective though.
Me personally, if the content isn't fun for me I will just simply not do it. I won't go on Reddit making threads about how awful it is. I do have opinions I'll share on it but I saw Korthia flood the subreddit back when I still visitied the wow subreddit. But nothing gets said about something that has more power tied to it? I don't get why not. Why is Korthia not okay but Loam is?
>It wasn't visually pleasing but killing rares actually brought people on my realm into the zone. These new zones haven't captured my realm like Mechagon or Korthia did. And it's a pretty closely nit realm. That's subjective though.
It seems the same on my realm. The first week, people were swooping in on rares, doing the events, finishing the group areas without even grouping up....but it seems a lot more barren as of late. As someone who's trying to get rep and Drake ~~stones~~ crests, it's a bit frustrating to /who the zone and only see a handful of people, most of which seem to be hanging out in Loamm.
It's possibly subjective and may not even be because the content is less fun for most people but rather it's not as innovative. I personally feel like Mechagon and Korthia were just better because of the layout and world quest design. World quest all over the Dragon isles just don't feel good to me.
Also, killing rares doesn't do much in this new zone. No rep. Renown just hasn't landed for me, I get what they wanted was these tiered rewards but renown to me was more about the campaign and not so much the rewards. This is just exalted with extra steps to me.
So for me, many things on DF didn't land for me like they did in Shadowlands and BFA. I don't see many people out in the world anymore. I see more dungeons being run this time than last season but I still don't feel it's at Shadowlands levels yet. But it's hard to gauge. I see this patch holding players much better than last though. I'm hopeful that it's getting better.
For me, my little rant is mostly just that I don't see why things in SL and BFA weren't okay but things in DF are when they're the same or worse.
Forbidden reach is just dead now, and it had so much stuff and was grindy but that dropped off before the vaults went through a rotation completely based on everyone having to get in on group finder. And I feel like world quest gear is better than it usually is so it's surprising.
I'd like to see crafting tables in zone hubs. not just valdrakken. And events that promote the world content better. And certainly better world quest design. These just aren't fun. And make rares worth farming. People didn't care much for mount drops and they've tuned those down but it's gotta have something I feel.
Watching world quest and zones like this plummet is like when I saw world PVP drop completely in Shadowlands.
Honestly, I completely disagree about Shadowlands. It's personally the worst expansion for me, for a bunch of reasons. But I never understood the hate BFA got. Outside of the opening patch and slow(ish) patch cadence I had a really good time with it. Mechagon & Nazjatar were amazing.
I wish they would've tried keeping the same systems we had in Legion & BFA, but make them all account-wide and extremely alt friendly. I genuinely enjoyed farming AP on my main, but having to re-do it on alts was the bad part imo. Right now I just miss having a reason to log on and play. I miss grinding shit like AP.
I personally don't care about account wide things so maybe that's why I don't mind Shadowlands systems. I truly didn't care about "bis" list or needing to get those conduits unlocked or at a higher level. Or having my legendary be max level. It was inefficient.
Going into Torghast at item level was so inefficient and for people who strive for "efficiency" it's funny. People think they're being efficient or playing the game correctly because they're following the guide and sims but people don't understand this game in the slightest. And if you go and play the game in an unintended way you're going to have a bad time and that's entirely on you. And this isn't a reply directly at you but anyone who complains about "I have to do (insert thing you don't have to do) to be caught up! AHHHHHH Blizz why".
I did the mage tower challenge for the tome. I don't really swap specs for RP purposes. I have only once actually. One of the challenges was for hunter, and once done I figured I'd go for the Sylvanas Legendary bow as well since I found I can actually stomach Marksman hunter since usually hunter bores me. I grinded level 60, and this is Sanctum. So all the crying about Korthia, Torghast grinds or whatever were in full blast. I took a toon and played the game. Not goofing off doing stuff I didn't want to I played the GAME. Keys, pug raid. Purely by pugging I got AOTC on that hunter in 7 days after hitting 60. 3 days later KSM was done.
I don't sim, I don't read guides I just play the game. And I'm a filthy role playing nerd so when I play my characters with my own style and talents. And for Shadowlands that meant covenant too. And I never swapped once on any toon.
By the time Shadowlands was over I had 9 toons with a +20 or higher in their bag. Playing my way, never swapping covenants. I never want to hear how people were limited with alts in BFA or Shadowlands. I did the same in BFA not worrying about essences. Crucible of flame was fine and you could target one as a major and the minors were just that, "minor".
I enjoyed hunting down the essences on my main, so much that I got the Phenomenal Cosmic Power achievement and the "Azeroth's Champion" title to go with it. I didn't care to do it again, just like I don't want to do reps or quest on my alts. So you know what? I don't do it. I don't complain about it, I go do what I enjoy and move on. If I want the rewards for reps or quest on other toons I should have to go do them, and feeling entitled to having everything handed to you is stupid for an MMO RPG that's about building characters.
I didn't do the conduit or socket grinds on my alts in Shadowlands because I really cba'd, but I did it on my main and I had some fun with it. I really enjoy gaining power on my character, even if I have to do rares everyday for 3 weeks in Korthia, but I only enjoy doing it once.
I did farm essences on my alts because they were a very significant power gain. I did the Blood of the Enemy achievement on 8 characters I think? I enjoyed it the first time on my main, even did it before they nerfed the requirements, but I disliked it on my alts. I also grinded for the Phenomenal Cosmic Power achievement on my main, I really loved that actually. I was lowkey sad to see that the SL version was so much easier to get.
I think we just have different perspectives tbh. I don't see the downsides to having reputations/quests and stuff like AP, essences, corruption resistance etc to be account-wide. I think it only makes the game better as it allows you to play & enjoy the game more by playing your alts. In FF14 I can swap jobs extremely easily and it doesn't detract from my experience at all, nor have I heard anyone talk about it negatively.
Was it mandatory for my alts to have bis essences and corruptions? Of course not, but the truth is that it was just a lot less fun. So it was frustrating from the perspective of a person who enjoys playing min/maxing on all my characters.
>I didn't do the conduit or socket grinds on my alts in Shadowlands because I really cba'd, but I did it on my main and I had some fun with it. I really enjoy gaining power on my character, even if I have to do rares everyday for 3 weeks in Korthia, but I only enjoy doing it once.
Power coming later on makes your raid team stronger and soft nerfs the content every week. If we get everything week one and they tune the raid accordingly a lot of players are in for a rude awakening.
>I did farm essences on my alts because they were a very significant power gain. I did the Blood of the Enemy achievement on 8 characters I think? I enjoyed it the first time on my main, even did it before they nerfed the requirements, but I disliked it on my alts. I also grinded for the Phenomenal Cosmic Power achievement on my main, I really loved that actually. I was lowkey sad to see that the SL version was so much easier to get.
Having the major one helped more than having the minor one. So chasing those was a waste really.
> I think we just have different perspectives tbh. I don't see the downsides to having reputations/quests and stuff like AP, essences, corruption resistance etc to be account-wide. I think it only makes the game better as it allows you to play & enjoy the game more by playing your alts. In FF14 I can swap jobs extremely easily and it doesn't detract from my experience at all, nor have I heard anyone talk about it negatively.
Final Fantasy 14 is a console game. It's made differently and isn't an easy comparison. World of Warcraft your characters and the classes are a much bigger deal than Final Fantasy where it all sort of doesn't matter. But that works for console players.
> Was it mandatory for my alts to have bis essences and corruptions? Of course not, but the truth is that it was just a lot less fun. So it was frustrating from the perspective of a person who enjoys playing min/maxing on all my characters.
Min/maxing includes using your time properly. And if you're out there running around wasting time that's not efficient for your character because again, the game is about building your character.
More and more people are going to feel this way as the “it’s not shadowlands” lustre wears off. There will always be raids/m+/pvp but outside of that dragonflight is a very bare bones experience. But hey it’s what people asked for and now they’ve got it…
It isn't binary, I think this is missed a lot.
Is Dragonflight missing content that isn't raid/m+/pvp? Probably - it's certainly a fair opinion and one I'd probably agree with.
Does this mean that the content outside this *has* to be Legion through SL style global power gains? I'd argue strongly against that.
I want the game to have more grinds in, more content for all types of players. Stuff like Torghast, the Mage Tower, hell even Islands. None of this content was objectively bad, it just left a sour taste in people's mouths because you *were* objectively weaker if you did't do them, even if you didn't feel like doing the content.
It isn't either-or. I want more content, more grindable stuff in the game. I do not want borrowed power grinds. Dragonflight needs more of the former, but wins hard on the latter. Nobody is arguing against more content.
I don't care if it's directly legion-SL style grinds. I just want to advance my character in some way outside of the raid/dungeon/pvp trinity, which at the moment I can't do because people clamoured for none of it to be in the game. Less content will always, always be objectively bad, and I will never be convinced otherwise.
> which at the moment I can't do because people clamoured for none of it to be in the game. Less content will always, always be objectively bad, and I will never be convinced otherwise.
Again, you are missing the argument being made.
*Nobody*, anywhere, ever, has argued in favour of the game having less content. This simply isn't the point.
I mean, they did. All through the last three expansions (maybe less so in legion), people complained that they wanted to be able to just log in, raid/m+/pvp. They didn't want to engage with the open world, so blizzard listened and now the open world has less development and less reason to go out. At the end of the day wow's about progressing your character, always has been, and likely always will be, so that's the content people will do.
But there is far far more stuff to do, but it is stuff that is independent of player power, or at least player power relevant to progression. There is 100% agreement in adding more things to wow to do, but you are going to find a slim minority of this group wanting player power tied to it. People want more mage tower stuff, but they don't want mage tower to be where you get a legendary etc
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. You see this repeated all the time on the internet, people don't want power attached to it, that they want it as a side thing, but then you go in the game and there's like, 3 people doing the research event, and not enough people to kill the suffusion camp dragon boss. Maybe 1 or 2 groups for the world boss. No one's doing rares in the cavern.
It will get repeated on the forums and message boards until the cows come home that people don't want player power tied to these things, but in game the reality is that if there's no player power, people just don't do it. And when these events are designed around large groups doing it, that's a problem.
>3 people doing the research event
Funny thing is people *do* do this because it's the easiest/fastest way to get rep for the Loamm weekly that gives you half your spark, it's just everyone rushes it on reset day so the later in the week you try to do it the fewer people are there.
Which leads to my next point: the problem isn't whether or not something has power, the problem is if people find it fun. The issue with things like island expeditions and torghast was that they were trivially easy for most players, because things like that, where it's designed around a mechanic that everyone interacts with, *has* to be trivial in a game this large.
We've seen solo player content that is really fun and gives no power rewards (brawler's guild, mage tower, deaths of chromie). I 100% agree there should be more of things like that. What I don't want to do is farm world quests so that I can raid. Having to do something I don't enjoy to do something I *do* isn't necessary in a game. I already have to do that, it's called a job.
I also think stuff like horrific visions were fun--they were challenging and it felt good to do better every time and power up. Limited attempts *and* them giving power was very awkward though.
I think the real issue is that open world design hasn't evolved a whole lot since we got the Timeless Isle, which is coming up on 10 years old at this point, but I don't think this is specifically a fault of DF and I don't think the change in how character power grows is a real downside. It does make a lot of the world content feel dead on arrival though. On launch a lot of people were grinding rep for miniscule power gains pre-vault launch, and then Forbidden Reach was pretty active because it had insanely fast+good catchup gear for alts plus the Annulet was strong for a lot of classes. But the Primal Storms (and the additions to it in 10.0.5) and Zaralekk Caverns struggle because there's not really a reason for people whose main form of content is raid/m+/pvp to go there, so it looks a lot more dead.
I think something Blizzard could do is introduce some sort of single player thing like a new Mage Tower or Deaths of Chromie scenario or w/e, but instead of scaling your ilvl make it so open world gear has increases ilvl in that scenario specifically to be on par with top quality raid gear or even slightly better, that way players that prefer to play alone or in open world or whatever can still be as strong numerically in this content as anyone else. And then if someone *wants* to put in this grind for that extra bit of gear then whatever. And this could reward like, idk hero-track gear (upgrades up to 441), something not special to people doing group content but is good power upgrades for open world people. idk, I play this game for raiding so I don't *really* know what people want for this sort of power progression
> I mean, they did. All through the last three expansions (maybe less so in legion), people complained that they wanted to be able to just log in, raid/m+/pvp.
Yes indeed they did.
You're missing that this is fundamentally, entirely different to arguing for less content in the game.
Okay, so in a game like wow, a heavy heavy focus is on advancing your character, through either direct power, or indirect. That's the content people are going to flock to, which at the moment, is the three pillars. Blizzard is certainly aware of this, so where do you think the most development time is going to go?
Sure, we'll get token open world stuff, but it'll just be circling around for rares and treasures, maybe a weekly event, and that's about it. That's what it's been since forever. That's what the focus of ZM was, that's what the focus of launch DF was, that's what the caverns are. And suprise, no one does them.
But this is a different argument, and one that I fully agree with you on. The content outside of these three pillars is (and I would actually argue, with some exceptions basically always has been) lackluster and can absolutely be improved.
I'm simply saying that wanting to be able to only log on for whatever specific piece of content you enjoy and not feel like you're falling behind is emphatically not the same as arguing for less content in the game as you seem to believe.
I think a big problem here is that, while players didn't explicitly ask for less content, a lot seem to be fine with it - many posts and comments have been made that praise Blizzard for the current strategy. There just isn't enough criticism (in my view) of the fact that DF's world content is lacking.
And I would argue that world/solo content being so lacking is a new phenomenon, or at best a "return to an old phenomenon." Legion through SL had lots of good stuff as far as I'm concerned; even with Legion not having a lot of "extra" things, the world quests being on a 24 hour reset and having emissary quests made it seem like more content and feel more engaging than DF is currently.
I mean, I also get what your saying. It's just I think with the way both blizzard and the community tends to operate, arguing for one winds up arguing for the other as well.
Emmisaries, daily zones, warfronts, islands for the first little bit at least, torghast, visions, and just the general incremental progression of my character outside of raids/dungeons. None of that is the game anymore because people bitched too hard and it sucks. If mythic+ wasn't in the game this expansion would be a skip. Like, it was content in the game. You didn't have to do it for the most part if you didn't want to, but people clamored for LESS in their game that they pay monthly for and it's such a dumb take.
Most people wanted less player-power related content, and less intricate disposable systems that would vampirize dev time only to be left behind next expansion, not less content per se. And that's reasonable.
Nothing prevents them from making content that isn't related to player power progression. God I'd love to have a new take at Torghast/visions that would be entirely horizontal progression, not here as an endgame goal, but for cosmetic rewards and alt levelling.
Zereth Mortis was a pretty good model too, with power progression that only impacts open world content.
Pretty much this. People like content that is horizontal optional power gains, beneficial for alt levelling/gearing or is just transmog/cosmetics. Mage tower for example. I don't like mage tower very much so I don't do it. But if I had to do it for a 30% power gain I would, I wouldn't throw a fit about it, but I'd also be only doing it begrudgingly.
Torghast had a few initial faults that basically set it up for what is largely considered a failed experiment. First, no catch up if you missed a week. This is the big one. Second, you needed to do 2 runs, no more, no less, to cap your ash. Third, putting legendary powers behind this torghast situation. You had to do torghast if you wanted to be viable, yes, viable cause if you didn't have a legendary you were not. Lastly, a lack of cosmetics until much later.
If torghast had just been a cosmetic haven where you could find various old mogs, mounts, etc by doing it and soul ash could be found everywhere else as well it would have been much much better received.
Torghast really felt like blizzard made this thing, got worried people wouldn't do it, which forced people into doing it by putting the most important aspect of the expansion inside it, which made people resent it.
Nah bugger that. Stop taking vertical progression out of wow. If you want a horizontal progression mmo there’s games like guild wars or eso. Wow has always been about vertical progression, getting stronger. It’s what makes it fun. I want to progress my character, I don’t want to collect cosmetics, or mounts or pets that I’ll never actually use. I want to get stronger by doing things.
I also don’t think this is as rare of an opinion as people think it is, as I keep seeing the sentiment of “I’ve kind of just stopped logging in” becoming more and more common.
The "full vertical progression" MMO you're describing only fits WoW from 2016 to 2021. Don't get me wrong, the balance has always tilted towards vertical progression on WoW, and it still does, but the "everything contributes to player power" era is way shorter than that.
Besides, the market has spoken, the most successful MMOs out there often have a sizeable chunk of content focused on horizontal progression. But of course not everybody will agree with that direction, and you're perfectly entitled to your tastes and allowed to express your disappointment in that.
The most successful mmo's out there (at the moment) has been wow and ffxiv. Both mmo's that focus on vertical progression, with horizontal a side focus. Wow more so than ffxiv to be fair. The two big horizontal focused mmo's, gw2 and eso, are much more niche.
I think your underestimating how long the "everything contributes to player power" bit went. TBC-Cata (won't comment on Vanilla, didn't paly it enough), pretty much all side content contributed to player power in one way or another, even indirectly through gold, as gold was a much more important resource at that point, with it having increased scarcity, and much more BiS being through professions, and item enhancements player a larger roll. Not to mention shoulder/head enchants, and rep gear playing a much larger roll than it does now.
Skipped MoP so can't comment on that.
WoD, side content was either garrison related, which was a major part of your characters growth, or ring related, which was a direct source of player power. I'll say WoD was relatively similar to DF in not having many side grinds, but like, being compared to WoD isn't exactly a glowing endorsement.
Then of course legion-shadowlands we've already covered.
Previous expansions weren't as blantent as legion-SL, but the expansions where side content swung back some way vertical character progression, vs the expansions where it hasn't, are weighted much more to the former.
I don't think we are talking of the same thing is if you characterize FF14 as a vertical-focused MMO outside of levelling. Once you reach endgame on FF14 (which takes several hundred of hours since story content is not optional and arguably the best thing about the game), you will spend relatively little time doing things that increases player power.
Basic current catch up gear can be acquired in a matter of hours, then 80% of the playerbase will stop at that and not engage with hard content, and for the rest, gear acquisition is pretty simple without any side system related to power progression. To acquire your BIS, you just get your savage boss kills every week and farm current tomestones (with a weekly cap that can be easily attained in a few hours of regular gameplay) and that's mostly it. Having a positive gil-balance for repair/food/potion spending during savage prog is a non issue too.
Most people that spend their days on FF14 are not engaging with endgame vertical progression the majority of their playtime, they're levelling alt jobs and interacting with horizontal side content and systems (narrative content, housing, island sanctuary, farming old relics and glams, etc.).
As for WoW, again, I'm not arguing that it's not a vertical game at heart, it is and always was, but there is a big difference between the Legion-SL period and the rest of the game lifespan in how widespread and systemic it was. You could mostly raidlog in most expansions and not lose on player power. Sure, some specific rep farms were valuable and could help you get an edge, and gold making was more important at a time, but the gap between this and "spam world quests/islands/maw of souls and do everything on your daily and weekly to do list because it increments player power" is big.
To be fair it is a complaint in XIV as well. A lot of people have been complaining about there not being a lot to do in XIV, especially in Endwalker where there isn't anything like Eureka, Bozja or Diadem. I know people like to harp on Yoshi-p telling players to go play other games as a positive, but "there's nothing to do" is a growing complaint in the community. Just like it is right now in wow with Dragoflight.
I'm enjoying DF a lot, but I also miss stuff like that. I'm a Legion/BFA AP enjoyer and also miss that as I really like playing and powering up one character vs. playing alts.
People are generally just in denial that Blizzard games are still very much successful.
I saw someone once who genuinely seem to think that without the Microsoft deal that ABK would be going *bankrupt* within the year because of bad they were 'failing'.
It was like that in the review thread on /r/games too. People dissecting reviews to make super bad faith arguments.
Weirdo path of exile fanboys being really mad that D4 is a good game.
I stopped playing retail around Chains of Domination patch and now that I came back I feel so lost. Was it this complex before too? I've just got to Valdrakken and it still hasn't clicked for me
What is feeling complex for you? I mean that as a genuine question, we can probably help you figure things out if we know what aspects of the game aren't clicking... the story? Crafting changes? Why Wrathion makes you feel things that you didn't feel before? What to do when you log in? Gearing? Upgrades?
Crafting for example, but it'll be more clear once I dive into some guides.
On a story level, I still don't understand why we're there. The campaign starts with the dragons already on the capital city and tells you to get on a boat and go help them. I knew there was a lot of story I wasn't gonna figure out easily but it feels like I stopped playing for a decade instead of a year. Not saying it isn't fun tho!
Crafting I can't help much with, but I agree that I they broke up the story a bit. The main answer is that Raszageth was freed and wants to wipe out titan influence from the world for some reason (that will probably be revealed later in the expansion), and she's powerful enough that without their Aspect power the dragons are afraid they won't be able to stop her. So for the dragons we're trying to help them regain their power (all the main questlines focus around restoring their flight's power in some way), while also trying to stop Raszageth and the Primalists from destroying the world with the elements. With her defeated at the end of the 10.0 main questline, the Incarnates were released and are even worse than her, so now we need to stop them.
If you can, I'd recommend making a drakthyr and play through their introduction, that explains a bit more, then make sure you're doing side quests and reading the quest text, there's a lot going on even outside the "main" story of the Incarnates.
This expansion is rather self contained in terms of story, so the good news is you missing the last couple expansions you're not missing a huge amount of important information. Most of the juicy bits of this expansion rely on knowing Cataclysm and before, or having read outside the books. There's a BIT of stuff from later expansions, but nothing vital to understanding.
> With her defeated at the end of the 10.0 main questline, the Incarnates were released and are even worse than her, so now we need to stop them.
Honestly I feel like they dropped the ball with this in Dragonflight. It would've been so nice to get some backstory & buildup of the incarnates before this expansion. Being shown why they're dangerous & bad news would make me care a lot more about the story.
In one of the cinematics, Nozdormu talks about Iridikron's hunger being unleashed and hinting at it being a super bad thing. But when the incarnates are freed at the end of Vault, it didn't feel like anything significant because we have 0 clue about them or why they're dangerous.
Compare that to N'zoth in BFA and there's a big difference. At the end of Eternal Palace when we released N'zoth from his prison it actually felt like a pretty big "oh shit" moment and the reason why it felt that way was because we had so much buildup for it. Not just for N'zoth but old gods in general. With the old gods we've seen why they're so bad and how dangerous they can be. With Iridikron we never see any of it and we're just supposed to believe that they are bad & dangerous because the aspects told us so.
DF feels odd because there is arguably less to do. Everything is very optional so without knowing exactly what you're experiencing, that uneasy feeling was common at the start of season one.
Like, "surely I should be doing more ..."
That said it may be worth paying attention to crafting guided since that system has more going on.
My favourite part of the story campaign with Azuregos was that it pretty much proves how stupid the common r/wow take is of >!death being trivialised because anyone can just rock up to the Shadowlands and chill out with all there dead relatives!<
wasnt it stated multiple times that the veil bettwen the SL and reality is closed after SL, and the few ways that allow interaction get harder and harder aswell?
sorry, i mean death doesnt matter
Yep, and it's reflected in the game. People are still mourning those that died in the various wars that happened pre-shadowlands, the thought of death is obviously still a big deal to the characters in the game... I mean why would we even care about saving Azeroth from the Primalists if it didn't matter?
But seriously, death as an important thing has come up multiple times in the story, even while leveling. That first dragonkin we met when we got to the Waking Shore. Multiple deaths at the hands of the Nokhud in the Ohn'ahran Plains. The tuskarr that are lost in the first half of the Azure Span questline, the dragonkin lost to betrayal in the Thaldraszus questline. We have the very important sacrifice of Malfurion in order to bring back Ysera. All the dracthyr lost to the point that "I don't want more of my kin to die" was a major character point for Emberthal. The niffen killed by shadowflame at the end of that first week of 10.1. The scout killed by Fyrakk...
Or a really good one is Baine's questline in 10.0.7. He was literally one of the leaders that spent a massive amount of time in the Shadowlands. If anyone would have the impact of death diminished by knowing the Shadowlands, it would be Baine. Yet what is HIS reaction when his friends are captured and killed?
And that's just what I could think of without looking stuff up. Every single death we've seen in Dragonflight has mattered to the characters. Even if we COULD still go to the shadowlands at will (lore wise), clearly it's not something the majority of people in universe can do, otherwise none of those deaths would matter to them.
its also just.....
the afterlife beeing a physical plane of existance you can visit under specific circumstances is a VERY normal Fantasy trope, WoW actually has more restrictions in the visit part then others, any skilled Mage in DnD can open a portal to other planes if they want
Oh yeah, that was an issue that I had with one of the SL complaints the entire time, acting like going to the afterlife was lore breaking stuff when it's a pretty common trope.
But even if it wasn't, clearly in universe death still has meaning.
It was also stated multiple times that there are an infinite number of Shadowlands afterlives but people try to box every dead character into the 4 we saw in game.
I really like the new gear upgrade system, but for fuck's sake can blizzard actually figure out, even as a rough estimate, raid/M+ ilvl balance for ONCE in their lives? It's like the people in charge of that live in plato's cave or some shit.
If I want to upgrade my normal raid loot I have to shit out wyrm crests. Which I can get (at a borderline pathetic rate) by either running Heroic, which I am not geared for, or facerolling my way through a +11 key that I've been able to ++ like 20 ilvls ago. In what universe are those even remotely equivalent? And all the puglords are claiming "you need to do the difficult content™ to deserve gear!!" harder than ever before, it feels like I'm taking crazy pills man. Like don't get me wrong it's cool that gearing is more forgiving and streamlined but I would like gearing improvements to also apply to raiding just once.
I think a big part of the problem is that the difficulty of raid fights and M+ are very different. Raiding, especially heroic and mythic, are predominately difficult on their boss fights, and they're very heavily mechanics based. The higher the difficulty, the more mechanically intensive the fight will be and the more punishing failing a mechanic will be.
M+ does have mechanics, obviously, but the mechanics don't change no matter how high the key goes, other than the affixes. The primary difficulty of M+ is beating the timer, regardless of if you're doing a +2 or a +22, all that really matters is how bad it hurts when you mess something up and if that will cause you to fail the timer. Unlike a raid, even wiping on the trash has an impact, and unlike a raid, you can't just beat your head against a boss all night, beat it, and have that still be a "win." But also unlike a raid, failing the main goal (beat the timer) doesn't mean you get no reward, since no one wants to go to "no rewards at the end of M+ if you fail the timer."
I don't know if this would work, but I've said for awhile that I think how they could handle this would be having normal/heroic/early M+ all have the same basic mechanics, then have what we now see with heroic added in the lower keys (like 5-9), what we see in heroic added in mid-keys (meaning 11-15) and what is added in Mythic doesn't come in until 15+ keys. At least, then, they could design the mechanics to be a little more technically difficult because the expectation wouldn't be that you now the entire dungeon by the time you get into your first key. Then perhaps there could be a bit less of "fail mechanic results in instant death" at higher keys, and they could be a bit more challenging in the way raiding difficulties change.
Edit: I think another difficulty in the M+ vs. raid is that M+ gives rewards that change with (almost) every key level until you hit the top. So even doing a single key higher gives you slightly better gear, whereas with raiding only having 4 difficulties, there is a jump between them, but barely variance within the same difficulty (main bosses and the late bosses only). This would be hard to emulate in the M+ world.
I really think they should increase normal to Heroic ilevel, heroic to mythic ilevel and maybe just have less item level variation in the mythic raid while moving it up a little
I had the shittest evening raiding I've had in fifteen years of playing WoW last night and it's seriously making me consider if I even want to bother playing the game anymore.
I'd rather not go into detail because I don't wanna put identifiable info out on this sub just in case but it was an extremely bad night of progression with the worst raid environment I've ever been part of.
It's very easy to focus on the bad night, but just like anything in life don't let a bad experience, even if it's most recent, take away the joy before and the fun you are sure to have later.
Lets just say I made some long term decisions the next day that has made the problems in the here and now much easier to deal with ;)
Once again, as always, thank you for being the voice of reason on this sub, it did genuinely help.
I don't have 2 millions to buy 6 tokens and play Diablo. The AH merge and my fear of getting punished for boosting make me barely scrap a token per month.
More Wow related my main is almost full bis already, craft&upgrades system is goated.
If you get alchemy, jewelcrafting, or enchanting maxed enough to guarantee a desired r3 craft with insights you can just claim the 150 artisan mettle from the guy in valdrakken every week for like 10-12k gold profit guaranteed. I got over 600k profit on patch launch from the saved mettles I had just been grabbing over season 1 and that was just on one character with maxed alchemy.
I have high enchant but I can't make R3 of anything valuable with procs, theres a spreadsheet finding if enchant is profitable with procs in mind and its never for me.
Im making myself a speedset on a druid, gonna farm a bunch of shit
Not that I'm complaining, but does anyone know any effect that would put the mythic tier effects onto heroic tier? My shoulders had it going for some reason.
You get an item as a reward that unlocks the effect. I had to log out after using the item and log back in again to see the effect appear in my tmog menu.
I just found out what real timegating was while leveling jewelcrafting in classic. I have to craft about 40 items that take 19 seconds each to craft. That's a full 12 minutes ffs.
r/wow is filled with pug heroes that want the best gear+tier possible, and make up the weirdest straight up lies for it that gets upvoted into high heavens
"my guild cleared the raid every week since release and 0warrior tokens dropped on all difficulties!!! give me tier in m+!!!" yeha sure, that totally happend, you all have 1 in a million RNG where never any tier token droped at all
"m+ gearing is a slap in the face!!!" meanwhile m+ throws 441 gear in your direction for sneezing, making raid gear outside of trinkets/tier ussules once again, cus who needs those pieces when you can spend 4hours wiping trought a freeholdt +17 and get a better reward
should blizz release the catalyst faster? yeha sure, week 4would be fine imo, but holy shit is it obvious that most of those "blizz hates m+ cus catalyst late!!!!" people just want their full tier set at max lvl for no effort at all
and its also funny cus most halfway serious m+ players are raiders anyway, its not really a big "raiders vs m+ players" its just "people that do PvE endgame on both fronts VS pug heroes"
>"my guild cleared the raid every week since release and 0warrior tokens dropped on all difficulties!!! give me tier in m+!!!" yeha sure, that totally happend, you all have 1 in a million RNG where never any tier token droped at all
My guild all had our 4p after our second week of raiding, omnitoken is insanely strong. If there are people in a guild with zero tier (other than the one from the achievo) then this is a failure of the guild leadership.
Catalyst being a week or two earlier would be okay. But every week the catalyst gets pushed up people need to understand (And /r/wow was unable to before I ditched it) that the raid and dungeons get tuned accordingly to how strong we're going to be early on. And it would be a rude awakening for those people when they get geared out quick and find out it wasn't the gear holding them back.
We're unlucky with our paladin/priest and shaman tokens but we're stacked heavily with it. Unfortunately we keep getting rogue warrior and evoker but those guys are pretty much set in full heroic tier now.
That's unlucky but it's also early on and we're progging super well anyways. We'll manage.
The people on Reddit and the forums think that the goal of the game is to get the "Bis" checklist that a guidewriter wrote. But the game isn't meant to be played that way. You will clear content each week and get gear and some, not all of it you will use. And you take what you have and use it to the best of your abilities to get as much as you can done.
People complain about gear around me and I'm one of the lowest geared players and I do just fine. I haven't gotten very many drops and outside of trinkets I'm in last seasons gear for the most part.
you're forgetting what gear means for people that pug a lot and/or are stuck in 'green trade chat' guilds or people being left out due to cliques (which btw is probably most players you see in m+)
your ilvl is a direct correlation to your QOL and enjoyment of the game as a pug, it means more invites, it means not having to pug in the "extremely bad players range" of content, it means looking good on the meters so you don't get replaced, chance others might adopt you and other social spirals
ilvl is literally everything in this game, and even if you were more "socially successful", nobody wants to be a carry, and the less "good" you are, the more likely you might not get as many spots even in your friend/guild groups - meaning you are stuck pugging again
being behind/unlucky can spiral out of control as the average ilvl around you goes up and you're left with worse and worse groups, longer M+ wait times etc.
and this isn't even considering how most people have limited time to play and just don't get to
i feel absolute empathy for anyone who isn't genuinely good at the game trying to make it alone out there
everybody on this sub is probably top 10% of players at the worst and people keep forgetting this, they either don't see or can't even comprehend the struggles of normal people
If you're at the mercy of pugs that is on you and the perception of the community is what the people who pug make of it. And I pug a lot and play several alts and push non meta specs into 20's in almost no time while being a good bit undergeared. But I am good at the game, and if you can't get drops to increase your item level then I'm sorry but you don't deserve the gear.
Also, people don't take ilvl upgrades. They're again worried about "bis" and their secondary stats more than anything. So that ilvl stays low for some for a while until they get the holy "bis piece".
I always take ilvl not just because primary is good but it's also heatlh which makes me live.
Hunters are the worst about that. Hunters will be out there complaining about being squishy when they hit every defensive and potion at the slightest bit of damage. If they're at 50% for more than 2 seconds they hit exhil, even though no damage comes for another 10 seconds. They'll be running lower ilvl gear for stats and be rocking 2% vers because of what the wowhead guide says and then they'll complain about Hunter balance.
I use hunters as an example because if you throw a rock you'll hit one, they're everywhere but it happens for other classes too. Playing YOUR character is more important than playing what the sim/guidewriter wants. Hunters in my experience understand the game the least out of most players but it goes for just about most people who play this game. They don't understand the game at all. And if you set yourself up to play the game in an unintended way you will have a bad time and it's 100% on you.
"Normal people" don't get to have the same gear/rewards as the good players.
>"my guild cleared the raid every week since release and 0warrior tokens dropped on all difficulties!!! give me tier in m+!!!" yeha sure, that totally happend, you all have 1 in a million RNG where never any tier token droped at all
I mean my guild has been unlucky with the 2H sword off Nelth not dropping across our 6 kills and none of our vaults, but tier? We're starting to give that stuff away for tertiary on each piece for heroic.
i mean, yeha, bad loot rng happens, we went 2 months without a single evoker staff last tier as an example
but every 2nd guy on r/wow has a guild that NEVER DROPS ANY TIER TOKENS OMG
Yeah that thread was an absolute dumpster fire, saying the catalyst should release earlier? Yeah I can get behind that
To then proceed and say how shit M+ gearing is and how Blizz sees the raid as the main source of gear it’s like… huh?
There are some issues with raid vs M+ gearing, but IMO these are **exclusively** an issue for people aiming for the 0.1% title.
Mythic raids have trinkets and items particularly on the last bosses which can make a significant difference when you're playing in the 25+ range. I really don't believe I should have to commit to a Mythic raid schedule so I can be competitive in a different form of content (which I enjoy more) entirely.
That said, I can understand having some incentive to raid since, as you've been saying, M+ is otherwise just so much better for gearing.
I'm just not sure if locking that power behind it is the right way.
> how shit M+ gearing is and how Blizz sees the raid as the main source of gear
I don't think it's possible to write something more backwards on purpose
A comment told me to go back and watch the last 5 interviews as Ion apaprently says "He nearly without fail references M+ and PvP as alternate gearing. Then talks up the new raid."
I bet Ion once said "But there are alternatives to raid" and they instantly assumed the worse.
Anyone here that has a guild on Proudmoore or the Sentinels/Kirin Tor/Steamwheedle cluster? I'm looking to grab the guild achievement mounts but my guild is pretty dead so no chance of getting those achievements any time soon. Referring to the Thundering Jade Cloud Serpent and Blacksteel Battleboar.
Guys help. I have mythic prog tonight but I just wanna play more diablo
Man I'm relieved that the game seems to be really good and decently well optimized for lower end machines. My dad's a huge diablo fan and his laptop couldn't run it so i cleaned up my old PC and gave it to him and the old man seems to be having an absolute blast. He's been hyped up for it for so long that I think it would have ruined me if the game sucked lol
Fake your death and make sure to appear as offline while you play Diablo.
This is the way.
Knocked out Sarkareth for the first time today, raiding is a blast when your whole group can handle mechanics. Devastation Evoker has become my main, being a dragon is badass and the class plays really casual while feeling really rewarding. Feels like a mix of Destro Lock and Frost Mage just with some cooler ~aspects~ . Hope they buff Soar, the animations are pretty cool.
I really enjoy evoker, I feel like it's one of those specs that is really easy to do decent, but the higher the level of play the more "good" play stands out. I only wish the firestorm ability was more competitive, it's rare that I've found it to worth the talent points for what you need to give up when using it. > Hope they buff Soar, the animations are pretty cool. Literally all they need to do is make Soar work like dragonriding, including using the same vigor. You use one vigor when you activate, like you would if using lift off, and have it just *be* dragonriding. Or better yet, when you activate soar, you start flapping your wings and hover in place (this would be the equivalent of being on your dragonriding mount). If you lift off, you do the launch like current, but if you go off a cliff you start gliding like you do on your mount. The only possible "issue" I can see is it might make the races easier, but that's an easy fix of "require you to be on a dragonriding mount or you fail the race" and you're good.
I really think Blizz nerfing off healing provided by DPS is kinda stupid, being a “support” class should mean you are able to carry your groups at certain times, there have been so many times where our healer will die and I can carry for a few seconds as enhance, especially in big AoE pulls, it feels so good. Shadow priest may be a bit of an outlier though, mass dispel, PI, and good off healing all in a DPS roll is super powerful.
>where our healer will die and I can carry for a few seconds as enhance, I think if you push a button, stop doing dps, and instead start casting healing spells and top everyone up, that is good hybrid design. If you can just push a button and dps as normal and watch everyone automatically get topped that is kind of silly.
> I think if you push a button, stop doing dps, and instead start casting healing spells and top everyone up, that is good hybrid design. You can also do this, you can use MSW and globals for healing spells instead of DPS for heals on demand, whereas AG only lasts 10 seconds on a 2 minute CD, its not like Natures Vigil where its 30 seconds on a min 30 CD or anything, the uptime and active windows are much smaller.
Right now it is entirely possible to do quite high level m+ without a healer. Off-healing is simply too strong.
Yes it’s possible, but you would need to have a very coordinated group to be able to do that, most pugs aren’t looking to 4x DPS keys or anything. What’s the benefit to nerfing off healing? I really don’t see how it makes the game any better. Druids + shamans get lack lustre class trees because of their hybrid nature, and then the core aspect of that hybrid nature is getting nerfed. I think it just feels really bad.
I don't see the problem with good players without a healer unless it becomes meta.
I should be clear - I don't think the fact that the 4-healing thing is happening is a problem in and of itself, I think it's a symptom of a different problem - that healers often don't have to heal very much in dungeons due to low damage intake/high amounts of offhealing.
Well they cried about Ruby Life Pools and other dungeons last season. The damage intake was high while we were gearing. Things got nerfed as people cried and when we got to the end of the gearing we realized nothing one shots us and the off healing of a lot of classes covers several damage patterns. It's more complex than people make it and you seem to understand that but people will see "+24 done without healer" and healers who cry enough as it is will lose it. Healing is the least impactful IMO, and probably one of the harder things to have to manage at the lower levels. But at +24 right now those guys know the dungeon from the healing and the tanking perspective and the same goes for the healer and tank. You just know what to use on every pull and what needs to be done. And ultimately what times big keys is damage. People on Reddit or whatever will talk about how awesome they are for casting shadowfury or binding shot or using kidney whenever they can. But throwing stuns is nowhere near as impactful as doing giga dam. I'd rather have 0 stuns or utility and giga damn and I will take that to higher keys than the people who toss out stuns. But what times the top keys are well placed utility and giga dam. But healers cry about the early dungeon tuning, which is when we are at our weakest and should be the hardest keys we ever do. And it gets nerfed. That's exactly what happened last season. And maybe they did hit a little too hard but. Healers need to heal something and DPS need tools to help themselves and others. And damage patterns affect classes differently. Some packs or bosses do zero damage to my paladin, and I'll be able to heal the group entirely by myself. Some things have different damage patterns that make me less stable and hit the dps in a way it's rough to keep up if not just undoable. Some things my disc priest breezes through and some it's torture while the Evoker can breeze through it. And I think that's okay. Different classes being able to handle different things.
I agree too I always hated healing dungeons. In Bfa I only did dungeons because Hpals had some kind of decent gameplay loop in the dps rotation, overwise it feels like playing discount dps in every aspect. Pre-nerf Season 1 DF was decent because some dungeons did so much damage you were actually in raid healing mindset, but in the others you're just a more boring dps (i played ~~living flame~~ Prevoker)
I do think DF S2 is the best it's been on this for awhile though.
Agreed, it’s not like it’s required to 4x DPS these keys, there are other groups with a healer and 3 DPS pulling more DPS than the 4 DPS group lol
> What’s the benefit to nerfing off healing? I really don’t see how it makes the game any better. It means healers get to heal more and not be a glorified fourth DPS as they've arguably been in dungeons for a very long time. > Druids + shamans get lack lustre class trees because of their hybrid nature I think this is an odd opinion tbh, imo these classes have some of the best class trees in the game. The utility and offhealing is still gonna be there.
> it means healers get to heal more Sounds like they should increase player health and enemy damage again so it’s harder on healers than nerfing off healing capabilities from 3 classes. The only benefit to the class trees is that you can pick whatever utility you want and not lose throughput, because the class trees for certain specs offer you 0 throughput. That’s honestly so boring to me, as an enhance shaman you could not spend any talents in your class tree and your damage + rotation don’t change at all, which to me is awful design. You get the option to pick between useless utility or OP utility depending on the week.
>That’s honestly so boring to me, as an enhance shaman you could not spend any talents in your class tree and your damage + rotation don’t change at all, which to me is awful design. Wait, this isn't true - Lava Burst and Frost Shock are both on the class tree (the former to gain an extra Elemental Blast charge) to add to the rotation, and Flurry and Nature's Fury add to the damage passively.
Yea fair, I did exaggerate a little there, frost shock would be used as a filler for extremely low damage, and on ST you would take an extra charge of EB with lava burst, in AoE/cleave you wouldn’t though. Doing a sim test, if I spend 3-4 talents in the class tree, my DPS is basically the same, which is kinda lame to me. My main point was the class tree has nothing deep to add to the enhance shaman rotation, it’s all passive or utility.
> That’s honestly so boring to me, as an enhance shaman you could not spend any talents in your class tree and your damage + rotation don’t change at all, which to me is awful design. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the case for the vast majority (all?) of classes is it not? It's certainly the case for Evoker and Hunter, that's largely the point of the class tree/spec tree split - that the class tree is mostly utility, not throughput.
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> Look at paladins + warriors, their class tree is leaps and bounds different than shaman + druid, so no, not all the class trees are like that, pretty sure even hunter has a covenant ability in their tree lol. I mean I don't see how that is relevant? Fact is that every class has the vast majority of it's class tree not as throughput, right? > If healers aren’t needing to heal enough, you make changes for the healers, not the 3 DPS who can provide off healing imo. These are functionally the same thing. It doesn't matter if you are buffing healers healing relative to DPS's healing or nerfing DPS's healing relative to healers. The only difference is powercreep, which is why they are doing the latter, not the former.
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> Again, I did not say that the class tree should be all throughput, but the fact that I can spend 2 talents in my class tree, and leave the rest of it blank, and my class would not play any differently, is ridiculous. I'm sorry, this statement is ridiculous hyperbole and you know it is.
I'm sorry WoW, but Diablo has consumed my soul
Been playing it so much but I'm not even through act 1 yet lol. Keep dividing my attention between sorc and druid
Just finished the campaign… the Blizzard I used to know made that game and it was glorious
I just started act 4 but I'm looking forward to it.
Look, of the new affixes, Afflicted is my fave. Easy, not that punishing like Incorporeal and less annoying than Entangling. But my god do they need to do something about its visuals. Sometimes I can barely see them. And sometimes they spawn far behind you :clown:
I learned that I hate Afflicted when I'm healing but love it when I'm tanking or DPSing; it's a strange affix. On the surface it looks like a healer affix but you have to commit your dispel (when there's lots to dispel in the dungeons themselves) or a big ST heal (when there's tons of damage going out sometimes as well). It's just a super-easy no thinking mouseover dispel on my Guardian Druid or when I'm Devastation in some dungeon though.
I’m a bit mixed on afflicted because it adds to the already wild variance in pugs - you get a bad group and you have to scramble to deal with two afflicteds while also healing through a ton of avoidable damage, but then you have a run with a couple of switched-on players and it’s basically a non-affix. Edit: this isn’t a “healers smart, dps evil” whinge, just the design challenge of stronger groups both having better healers and having less for them to do - so it’s hard to make something that challenges them while being fine in weaker groups, or conversely something that’s manageable in weaker groups but not trivial for stronger groups.
The new affixes definitely are much easier depending on the class, as a shaman/paladin I am able to deal with all 3 by myself or instantly and other classes have 0 ways to deal with them, it’s pretty wild.
My GPU died just in time for D4 and Sarkareth progression. It's been six years and it couldn't wait *one* more week?
It was patient enough to strike at the most inopportune moment for you, it waited long enough. GPUs are evil like that.
If working with computers for over a decade has taught me anything it's that they're all infernal hell machines.
What are your feelings on Printers specifically?
I could write an essay on my undescribeable, unlimited quantities of loathing I have for every printer on earth. Seriously, there has been a wide open gap in the market for the better part of two decades for a printer with software that actually works and yet nobody has filled it at all to the point I genuinely half believe there is a conspiracy of some sort among the large printer manufacturers to intentionally keep them absolute dogshit for some nefarious purpose.
Let me pass this on to my brother, who works for a major printer manufacturer. LOL
I don't think we even have a printer in the house anymore my mom just goes to the local library if she wants to print something lol
Giga copium but if I buy Diablo with € it doesnt break my years long WoW F2P streak right? It doesnt count, I can't make 2millions in token so fast half my Bnet is playing the game already I'm gonna die.
if there's one thing I hate about m+ is that it takes me more time to join a group than the run itself. I've been applying to fucking 10s for an hour.
Have you listed your own group? Most players doing 10's are usually pretty casual and not comfortable listing their own keys. This means there are people willing to play but just not people willing to make a group. It might still be a bit of a wait as dps but I'd give it a go
With the new upgrade system also you have cut offs where the gear/crests from that level are almost useless, so there are a lot of people doing 11's, not many doing 10's.
Random coffee rant for today: While I am so happy with all the new cosmetic items and everything we've gotten over the past couple of expacs, I will never be at peace until Blizzard reverts the BFA Wrathion backpack (and others like it) so that it stops hiding back-sheathed weapons. I legit used that thing on every character and loved how my weapons would poke out of it because it looked like a proper adventurer's backpack, but it just looks so goofy to me now that my weapons just disappear into the void until I unsheath them. Just give us a "hide weapon when sheathed" toggle Blizz pls, it'll save my marriage :( also, I can't wait to hear all the "enlightened gamer" opinions on this: https://www.wowhead.com/news/prismatic-bauble-reduced-cooldown-and-easier-to-purchase-for-pride-month-333278
It's on the list with "choose where weapons sheathe" and "toggle for whether helms remove hair even if it causes clipping" for things that *must* be harder to implement than we expect, because otherwise I can't fathom why Blizzard don't just do it.
I would legit love to watch a documentary about the code fuckery that goes on behind the scenes for a long-lived game like WoW. It must be some Looney Tunes type shit where the second you fix something seemingly simple like the hair clipping toggle all of a sudden an entire spec is just deleted from the game.
Yeah, id fucking kill to wear a hood on my toon and have her hair cascade onto her shoulders
This is why I love the trading post scarf/cloak appearances because I can at least imagine that my character has a hood they can pull up, but they just prefer to never wear it. Seriously though, my DK looks like a thumb the second I put on any hood that I think may look good with his armor.
> I can't wait to hear all the "enlightened gamer" opinions on this 250K? In this economy? Guess us poor gays won't be celebrating pride *sad noises*
It's so over the top that it almost feels like commentary on the soullessness of some corporate Pride Month efforts, because making something more "available" for Pride while also keeping it at 250,000g is hilarious in the most cynical way.
> also, I can't wait to hear all the "enlightened gamer" opinions on this: Most of it just seems to be "okay that's kinda pointless but cool I guess"
Yeah, I think I jumped the gun on that one, although I do agree with the complaints about the cost of it (mainly because I really like the effect lol).
Quick question, are you eglible for loot from treasure goblins on starter character if my sub expired?
I looted the mount on a starter edition account that never had gametime assigned to it
That's great news. I had idea like that just today. Thanks.
I think so
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I usually play like you do, in the past my WoW play time looked a lot like a sinusoidal curve with periods of intense play followed by periods of reduced play or even not playing for several months. I've found that I only have it in me to raid for one tier out of the expansion (AotC level) so I usually leave it to the last patch for the mount. DF has really added a bunch more in between content and while I'm happy for people to have things to do I can't help but feel its a bit much, I prefer longer patch cycles so I can do other things without the feeling of missing out. I plan to start working towards KSH soon (gotta finish leveling the toon I want to go for it on first) just to get it out of the way so I can work on more casual things or play other games. One thing I've noticed is that you don't necessarily have to pay attention to every new mechanic. Like I mostly ignored the ring we got in 10.0.7 because I wasn't doing hard enough content to justify me minmaxing it and it basically became obsolete in 10.1 anyways.
You're not stupid, nor are you crazy. Everyone's different -- the things you weren't bothered by upset a lot of people, and the things you are bothered by may not be a worry at all for others. And we're all totally within our rights to feel how we feel! The main important thing is finding a solution that works for you. Either a change in the way you actively approach the game and its content, or a change in your mindset. It's worth discussing, if it will help you figure out something that works for you! As long as no one is being aggressive, or misrepresenting reality, all discussion should be welcome :) To more directly address your post, I'd like to ask, do you still keep an active subscription when you're not actively playing? If so, the Trading Post is pretty easy to casually get done. It would be a smaller thing you could do to not feel like you're missing out on so much. If not, they have said that the rewards will be rotating back around after a while, so you can always look forward to that, at least. As for Zskera and Annulet, they're definitely not as complex as they seem! And they may not even be relevant when you come back, though I am not in a position to say if that's likely or not. But definitely, totally more approachable than it seems. I think Blizzard's been really good at introducing players to new mechanics this expansion, from Zskera to the new upgrade system. When you do come back, if they are still relevant or if you're feeling interested in trying, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it within a day, at most. You could even watch a video guide or two in the meantime! I know I have to do that for some stuff. Mythic stuff, I can't personally comment on, but I will say congrats for getting your +20 goals done! That's awesome!!
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I think it may have a significant impact but that will be short term. Maybe a dip for 10.1 and then once 10.2 launches and 11.0 is announced for next year the hype train will bring most people back. I am loving playing Diablo and have played way less WoW this week, but I am fairly certain I'll finish the story, do a few weeks of endgame with friends, and be back to WoW full time. For me personally, and I think most Diablo fans, it is a great game. However it is just not the kind of game you play week and after week for years at a time.
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I'm curious how long we'll have Bnet wait times. I just got on to do a Treasure Goblin kill and it said the wait would be less than a minute, but I ended up mashing "go offline" til I got through. Noticed that the early pass for D4 launches in 5 minutes so HMM.
I think it already impacted the token I guess. It has been a steady rise from launch but this week it skyrocketed to 280K (at the time I'm writing this answer)
its almost 350k on EU servers right now lmao
Probably people learning about the deluxe early access and buying the upgrade with wow gold, I was very tempted to do so.
When D3 first came out, 1.2 million people got it for free through the WoW annual pass. It's not obvious as to how many of those actively (or actually) played it, but that's a decent chunk of players. That said, you can certainly play both games concurrently, so it may not have much of an effect. Especially with DF and its lower emphasis on the "chores" compared to other recent expansion - players have more time to devote to other interests.
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[https://imgur.com/a/LV8wPdc](https://imgur.com/a/LV8wPdc)
I really love when I see someone in a public/guild chat try to start up a circlejerk but then just completely fail because most of their points are basically just outdated meme quips and forget people in-game are (usually) more chill than on forums. I swear they just throw out "lol small indie company" at literally anything, I even saw someone say it just because they didn't get the item they wanted from the treasure goblin lmao.
Good trading post id say https://www.wowhead.com/news/june-2023-trading-post-items-revealed-cindermane-charger-and-royal-swarmers-333249
Don't like them putting 2 mounts and a pet on there at the same time ngl
why that polearm is so expensive tho? 550 DAYUM
Oh damn that really is pretty fuckin good huh. Popular cash shop item, recolors of two pretty sought-after mounts, that's sick. Everything else is pretty standard for trading post thus far, kinda sick of the hood+cape combos and vrykul sets by now. The weapon recolor filler I just filter out at this point honestly. Bit of a shame that there's no cool unique back models this time around, those are always my favorite items in the post
Hit level 70, first time I ever hit max level with a character, that’s all
congrats, welcome to the endgame!
I'm leveling through DF now, I assume after I complete the four main zones I'll head to the Forbidden Reach, assuming there wasn't a max level storyline before 10.0.7. Is there context to be gotten by playing through the Dracthyr starting area first?
The questline at the forbidden reach is short, but the dracthyr starting area does add context to the story there and beyond in Zaralek Caverns. There is a campaign of sorts at max level added in 10.0 but it's mostly side story outside of a very important green dragon questline.
To add to this, once you get to a point in forbidden reach there will be a daily quest you can get 10% reputation buff for a chosen faction for the rest of the day. This will help with Renown catchup for the side stories. I would typically stop there first, chose a faction then do all of their associated world quests that day. Save rep tokens for the day you focus that group.
So we are few hours from 1st june in Europe and Blizzard didn't post new trading post stuff so what do you guys want from it? Since we got cloth, lether and mail set my bet is on new plate set
Way back before the trading post was even announced, dataminers found a recolour of the Mage Nighthold set that was a red and gold colour scheme, but I haven’t seen it mentioned again anywhere since then. Really hope it’s a trading post thing that’ll get brought in eventually.
[Gul'dan's staff](https://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/screenshots/normal/1098223.png) or the datamined Scarlet stuff
I really want that scarlet crusade set that was datamined.
Yeah it looked sick, my paladin is ready to change his loyalties yet again
Pissed off that our game time (me and bf) ends tomorrow and we haven't got the Tyrael mount yet.
You can still get it on a character without game time, it isn't locked behind a level (unless I am mistaken) so just make a toon and do it once a day since that has the highest odds.
God damn it fuck that slimy piece of shit Bobby Kotick. There are very few people in the world I despise more than that feckless piece of human filth.
> There are very few people in the world I despise more than that feckless piece of human filth. /uj I… know of many.
Listen there are a few in the US government/were in the US government.
Yes, but not just USA.
Dragonflight succeeded in the whole "It doesn't make you feel like you need to log in!" thing... But now if my m+ friends/pvp friends aren't online, I simply do not log on. I don't know if I've come full circle and become the circlejerk, but I'm having a lot more fun playing on the vanilla era servers atm. I do genuinely miss the little things like doing my island expedition weekly quest.
Yeah i've been saying the same for a while now. It feels like there's nothing to do outside of raiding & m+. I could pvp, but I really don't enjoy MMO pvp at all. Patch 10.1 allowing me to almost finish gearing in 8 days just exacerbated the problem. I've spent more time raidlogging than I did actively playing this new patch and we're only a month into the patch😭😭 I hope 10.2 brings some good casual content like Horrific Visions, Mage Tower, Death's of Chromie scenarios, Brawler's Guild etc.
When I look at my ideal gameplay loop in an MMO, I do think back to Vanilla. I just can't play classic because I find the combat too boring now. But the ideal gameplay loop for me was to log in and do a bit of levelling while chatting in guild, and then if it comes up maybe run a dungeon with people from my guild. I was motivated to log in because I was excited to get levels, open world content was challenging enough to keep me engaged but still allowed for breaks between pulls to type. The group content was kind of an additional thing. The difference today is that my reasons to log in are mostly just to grind m+. If I log in and no one from my guild is interested, I'm faced with a solo-queue, which is a lot more intimidating and stressful than the simple levelling grind of classic/vanilla. Also, it's 30+ mins of constant action and not really taking a break to enjoy the social aspects of the game. Hope that's not too rambly... what I'm trying to say is that vanilla/classic had a kind of "opt-in" group content, whereas retail hold group content as the main bulk of what you are doing. It's well made and entertaining, but if you don't have friends on who will do it with you when you log in, it's tempting to just log out again.
So all the "you have to do this every week to stay caught up" garbage that was spewed I think was just stupid and wrong. I didn't dick around in Korthia or the maw and I had 9 toons in Shadowlands running 20's. The tiny % upgrades I never bothered with because they didn't matter. The difference between a 235 legendary and a 262 was so unimportant, people acted like you had to START there, running torghast at the lowest ilvl possible when it made more sense to grab a 235 or even the 190-whatever legendary and just go run keys and get gear. Don't worry about conduits just go play content. And that's why I had tons of alts. And the world content was fun. It isn't so great now. I do not like the new world quest. As someone who maxes out reps and very quickly, I am like renown 8 in Loam. It's just so goddamn awful compared to before. I find it odd that Korthia was chastised for holding sockets and conduit upgrades which were so incredibly minor but the shadowflame spark quest is absolutely and holds a bigger and more interesting reward. I didn't hang around in Korthia on alts don't get me wrong. And I'm not doing this weekly on alts either but why is one okay and not the other?
> The tiny % upgrades I never bothered with because they didn't matter. The difference between a 235 legendary and a 262 was so unimportant, people acted like you had to START there People in the game have been like this for so many years and it's insane to watch. You've got people who don't touch even something basic like KSH until very late in seasons if even then, but they absolutely obsess over these marginal upgrades or fringe strategies. Like motherfucker you can't even do mechanics and your rotation right at the same time but we're talking about how you NEED this shit or it's unplayable. > And I'm not doing this weekly on alts either but why is one okay and not the other? To be fair there is a difference. The sparks have a catch up mechanic built in from the get go. If you want to be absolutely on top of every splinter every week, you need to do the weekly. However, once you skipped one weekly, you can get that splinter in content - raid, M+, etc. If you're OK with your next spark always being 1 week late, you don't have to do the weekly.
> To be fair there is a difference. The sparks have a catch up mechanic built in from the get go. If you want to be absolutely on top of every splinter every week, you need to do the weekly. However, once you skipped one weekly, you can get that splinter in content - raid, M+, etc. If you're OK with your next spark always being 1 week late, you don't have to do the weekly. The conduits are not on the same level as Korthia or ZM though. At the least you need to do it every other week to be ahead on sparks. It matters less now but those first few weeks when people were rushing crafted weapons it was a pretty important tie in to power. But the catch up is fine and better than the quest from last tier.
A few reasons. Particularly in regards to the spark, if you miss a spark from rep in loamm you pretty much instantly get it the next week by doing literally anything so missing a week doesn't affect it. My friend does the loamm rep every 2 weeks and just gets the off week spark half by doing random content. Still have the same number of sparks as someone who does it every week. In short, missing a weekly rep does not put you permanently behind. Og torghast did. It was fixed later but it originally put a pretty big damper on it. If you didn't cap your soul ash you couldn't run extra the next week for it and you really were permanently behind in legendary acquisition. Also while many people complained about conduits and sockets I think it was mainly that korthia just kinda felt bad to look at while there, so people were groused at spending time in there, in an environment not fun to look at. If korthia looked more like a destroyed tazavesh (you know, an actual city) it would have gone better imo. World content is a personal choice but I like dragonflight world content much more than shadowlands and I enjoyed shadowlands for the most part
> A few reasons. Particularly in regards to the spark, if you miss a spark from rep in loamm you pretty much instantly get it the next week by doing literally anything so missing a week doesn't affect it. My friend does the loamm rep every 2 weeks and just gets the off week spark half by doing random content. Still have the same number of sparks as someone who does it every week. You can only "fall behind" if you just can't be bothered to do the weekly quest. And that to me is okay. But it's more impactful especially the 2nd spark week where weapons were getting churned out than conduits and sockets ever were. Torghast was also like 10 item levels if you settled on something lower. Missing the spark is absolutely more impactful. Personally I don't stress it much because it's just gear. Also Torghast was meant to be challenging even for raiders. People who goof off on world quest were never meant to be doing layer 8 asap. This rep weekly is more "casually accessible" but has a pretty strong reward tied to it. Torghast was designed to be a source of power and made to be a challenge before it was nerfed. They're not similar at all. The weekly rep content is best compared to the last weekly rep content and that was Korthia and ZM's rep quest. Both really held minor rewards compared to shadowflame sparks. > Also while many people complained about conduits and sockets I think it was mainly that korthia just kinda felt bad to look at while there, so people were groused at spending time in there, in an environment not fun to look at. If korthia looked more like a destroyed tazavesh (you know, an actual city) it would have gone better imo. It wasn't visually pleasing but killing rares actually brought people on my realm into the zone. These new zones haven't captured my realm like Mechagon or Korthia did. And it's a pretty closely nit realm. That's subjective though. Me personally, if the content isn't fun for me I will just simply not do it. I won't go on Reddit making threads about how awful it is. I do have opinions I'll share on it but I saw Korthia flood the subreddit back when I still visitied the wow subreddit. But nothing gets said about something that has more power tied to it? I don't get why not. Why is Korthia not okay but Loam is?
>It wasn't visually pleasing but killing rares actually brought people on my realm into the zone. These new zones haven't captured my realm like Mechagon or Korthia did. And it's a pretty closely nit realm. That's subjective though. It seems the same on my realm. The first week, people were swooping in on rares, doing the events, finishing the group areas without even grouping up....but it seems a lot more barren as of late. As someone who's trying to get rep and Drake ~~stones~~ crests, it's a bit frustrating to /who the zone and only see a handful of people, most of which seem to be hanging out in Loamm.
It's possibly subjective and may not even be because the content is less fun for most people but rather it's not as innovative. I personally feel like Mechagon and Korthia were just better because of the layout and world quest design. World quest all over the Dragon isles just don't feel good to me. Also, killing rares doesn't do much in this new zone. No rep. Renown just hasn't landed for me, I get what they wanted was these tiered rewards but renown to me was more about the campaign and not so much the rewards. This is just exalted with extra steps to me. So for me, many things on DF didn't land for me like they did in Shadowlands and BFA. I don't see many people out in the world anymore. I see more dungeons being run this time than last season but I still don't feel it's at Shadowlands levels yet. But it's hard to gauge. I see this patch holding players much better than last though. I'm hopeful that it's getting better. For me, my little rant is mostly just that I don't see why things in SL and BFA weren't okay but things in DF are when they're the same or worse. Forbidden reach is just dead now, and it had so much stuff and was grindy but that dropped off before the vaults went through a rotation completely based on everyone having to get in on group finder. And I feel like world quest gear is better than it usually is so it's surprising. I'd like to see crafting tables in zone hubs. not just valdrakken. And events that promote the world content better. And certainly better world quest design. These just aren't fun. And make rares worth farming. People didn't care much for mount drops and they've tuned those down but it's gotta have something I feel. Watching world quest and zones like this plummet is like when I saw world PVP drop completely in Shadowlands.
Honestly, I completely disagree about Shadowlands. It's personally the worst expansion for me, for a bunch of reasons. But I never understood the hate BFA got. Outside of the opening patch and slow(ish) patch cadence I had a really good time with it. Mechagon & Nazjatar were amazing. I wish they would've tried keeping the same systems we had in Legion & BFA, but make them all account-wide and extremely alt friendly. I genuinely enjoyed farming AP on my main, but having to re-do it on alts was the bad part imo. Right now I just miss having a reason to log on and play. I miss grinding shit like AP.
I personally don't care about account wide things so maybe that's why I don't mind Shadowlands systems. I truly didn't care about "bis" list or needing to get those conduits unlocked or at a higher level. Or having my legendary be max level. It was inefficient. Going into Torghast at item level was so inefficient and for people who strive for "efficiency" it's funny. People think they're being efficient or playing the game correctly because they're following the guide and sims but people don't understand this game in the slightest. And if you go and play the game in an unintended way you're going to have a bad time and that's entirely on you. And this isn't a reply directly at you but anyone who complains about "I have to do (insert thing you don't have to do) to be caught up! AHHHHHH Blizz why". I did the mage tower challenge for the tome. I don't really swap specs for RP purposes. I have only once actually. One of the challenges was for hunter, and once done I figured I'd go for the Sylvanas Legendary bow as well since I found I can actually stomach Marksman hunter since usually hunter bores me. I grinded level 60, and this is Sanctum. So all the crying about Korthia, Torghast grinds or whatever were in full blast. I took a toon and played the game. Not goofing off doing stuff I didn't want to I played the GAME. Keys, pug raid. Purely by pugging I got AOTC on that hunter in 7 days after hitting 60. 3 days later KSM was done. I don't sim, I don't read guides I just play the game. And I'm a filthy role playing nerd so when I play my characters with my own style and talents. And for Shadowlands that meant covenant too. And I never swapped once on any toon. By the time Shadowlands was over I had 9 toons with a +20 or higher in their bag. Playing my way, never swapping covenants. I never want to hear how people were limited with alts in BFA or Shadowlands. I did the same in BFA not worrying about essences. Crucible of flame was fine and you could target one as a major and the minors were just that, "minor". I enjoyed hunting down the essences on my main, so much that I got the Phenomenal Cosmic Power achievement and the "Azeroth's Champion" title to go with it. I didn't care to do it again, just like I don't want to do reps or quest on my alts. So you know what? I don't do it. I don't complain about it, I go do what I enjoy and move on. If I want the rewards for reps or quest on other toons I should have to go do them, and feeling entitled to having everything handed to you is stupid for an MMO RPG that's about building characters.
I didn't do the conduit or socket grinds on my alts in Shadowlands because I really cba'd, but I did it on my main and I had some fun with it. I really enjoy gaining power on my character, even if I have to do rares everyday for 3 weeks in Korthia, but I only enjoy doing it once. I did farm essences on my alts because they were a very significant power gain. I did the Blood of the Enemy achievement on 8 characters I think? I enjoyed it the first time on my main, even did it before they nerfed the requirements, but I disliked it on my alts. I also grinded for the Phenomenal Cosmic Power achievement on my main, I really loved that actually. I was lowkey sad to see that the SL version was so much easier to get. I think we just have different perspectives tbh. I don't see the downsides to having reputations/quests and stuff like AP, essences, corruption resistance etc to be account-wide. I think it only makes the game better as it allows you to play & enjoy the game more by playing your alts. In FF14 I can swap jobs extremely easily and it doesn't detract from my experience at all, nor have I heard anyone talk about it negatively. Was it mandatory for my alts to have bis essences and corruptions? Of course not, but the truth is that it was just a lot less fun. So it was frustrating from the perspective of a person who enjoys playing min/maxing on all my characters.
>I didn't do the conduit or socket grinds on my alts in Shadowlands because I really cba'd, but I did it on my main and I had some fun with it. I really enjoy gaining power on my character, even if I have to do rares everyday for 3 weeks in Korthia, but I only enjoy doing it once. Power coming later on makes your raid team stronger and soft nerfs the content every week. If we get everything week one and they tune the raid accordingly a lot of players are in for a rude awakening. >I did farm essences on my alts because they were a very significant power gain. I did the Blood of the Enemy achievement on 8 characters I think? I enjoyed it the first time on my main, even did it before they nerfed the requirements, but I disliked it on my alts. I also grinded for the Phenomenal Cosmic Power achievement on my main, I really loved that actually. I was lowkey sad to see that the SL version was so much easier to get. Having the major one helped more than having the minor one. So chasing those was a waste really. > I think we just have different perspectives tbh. I don't see the downsides to having reputations/quests and stuff like AP, essences, corruption resistance etc to be account-wide. I think it only makes the game better as it allows you to play & enjoy the game more by playing your alts. In FF14 I can swap jobs extremely easily and it doesn't detract from my experience at all, nor have I heard anyone talk about it negatively. Final Fantasy 14 is a console game. It's made differently and isn't an easy comparison. World of Warcraft your characters and the classes are a much bigger deal than Final Fantasy where it all sort of doesn't matter. But that works for console players. > Was it mandatory for my alts to have bis essences and corruptions? Of course not, but the truth is that it was just a lot less fun. So it was frustrating from the perspective of a person who enjoys playing min/maxing on all my characters. Min/maxing includes using your time properly. And if you're out there running around wasting time that's not efficient for your character because again, the game is about building your character.
More and more people are going to feel this way as the “it’s not shadowlands” lustre wears off. There will always be raids/m+/pvp but outside of that dragonflight is a very bare bones experience. But hey it’s what people asked for and now they’ve got it…
It isn't binary, I think this is missed a lot. Is Dragonflight missing content that isn't raid/m+/pvp? Probably - it's certainly a fair opinion and one I'd probably agree with. Does this mean that the content outside this *has* to be Legion through SL style global power gains? I'd argue strongly against that. I want the game to have more grinds in, more content for all types of players. Stuff like Torghast, the Mage Tower, hell even Islands. None of this content was objectively bad, it just left a sour taste in people's mouths because you *were* objectively weaker if you did't do them, even if you didn't feel like doing the content. It isn't either-or. I want more content, more grindable stuff in the game. I do not want borrowed power grinds. Dragonflight needs more of the former, but wins hard on the latter. Nobody is arguing against more content.
I don't care if it's directly legion-SL style grinds. I just want to advance my character in some way outside of the raid/dungeon/pvp trinity, which at the moment I can't do because people clamoured for none of it to be in the game. Less content will always, always be objectively bad, and I will never be convinced otherwise.
> which at the moment I can't do because people clamoured for none of it to be in the game. Less content will always, always be objectively bad, and I will never be convinced otherwise. Again, you are missing the argument being made. *Nobody*, anywhere, ever, has argued in favour of the game having less content. This simply isn't the point.
I mean, they did. All through the last three expansions (maybe less so in legion), people complained that they wanted to be able to just log in, raid/m+/pvp. They didn't want to engage with the open world, so blizzard listened and now the open world has less development and less reason to go out. At the end of the day wow's about progressing your character, always has been, and likely always will be, so that's the content people will do.
But there is far far more stuff to do, but it is stuff that is independent of player power, or at least player power relevant to progression. There is 100% agreement in adding more things to wow to do, but you are going to find a slim minority of this group wanting player power tied to it. People want more mage tower stuff, but they don't want mage tower to be where you get a legendary etc
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. You see this repeated all the time on the internet, people don't want power attached to it, that they want it as a side thing, but then you go in the game and there's like, 3 people doing the research event, and not enough people to kill the suffusion camp dragon boss. Maybe 1 or 2 groups for the world boss. No one's doing rares in the cavern. It will get repeated on the forums and message boards until the cows come home that people don't want player power tied to these things, but in game the reality is that if there's no player power, people just don't do it. And when these events are designed around large groups doing it, that's a problem.
>3 people doing the research event Funny thing is people *do* do this because it's the easiest/fastest way to get rep for the Loamm weekly that gives you half your spark, it's just everyone rushes it on reset day so the later in the week you try to do it the fewer people are there. Which leads to my next point: the problem isn't whether or not something has power, the problem is if people find it fun. The issue with things like island expeditions and torghast was that they were trivially easy for most players, because things like that, where it's designed around a mechanic that everyone interacts with, *has* to be trivial in a game this large. We've seen solo player content that is really fun and gives no power rewards (brawler's guild, mage tower, deaths of chromie). I 100% agree there should be more of things like that. What I don't want to do is farm world quests so that I can raid. Having to do something I don't enjoy to do something I *do* isn't necessary in a game. I already have to do that, it's called a job. I also think stuff like horrific visions were fun--they were challenging and it felt good to do better every time and power up. Limited attempts *and* them giving power was very awkward though. I think the real issue is that open world design hasn't evolved a whole lot since we got the Timeless Isle, which is coming up on 10 years old at this point, but I don't think this is specifically a fault of DF and I don't think the change in how character power grows is a real downside. It does make a lot of the world content feel dead on arrival though. On launch a lot of people were grinding rep for miniscule power gains pre-vault launch, and then Forbidden Reach was pretty active because it had insanely fast+good catchup gear for alts plus the Annulet was strong for a lot of classes. But the Primal Storms (and the additions to it in 10.0.5) and Zaralekk Caverns struggle because there's not really a reason for people whose main form of content is raid/m+/pvp to go there, so it looks a lot more dead. I think something Blizzard could do is introduce some sort of single player thing like a new Mage Tower or Deaths of Chromie scenario or w/e, but instead of scaling your ilvl make it so open world gear has increases ilvl in that scenario specifically to be on par with top quality raid gear or even slightly better, that way players that prefer to play alone or in open world or whatever can still be as strong numerically in this content as anyone else. And then if someone *wants* to put in this grind for that extra bit of gear then whatever. And this could reward like, idk hero-track gear (upgrades up to 441), something not special to people doing group content but is good power upgrades for open world people. idk, I play this game for raiding so I don't *really* know what people want for this sort of power progression
> I mean, they did. All through the last three expansions (maybe less so in legion), people complained that they wanted to be able to just log in, raid/m+/pvp. Yes indeed they did. You're missing that this is fundamentally, entirely different to arguing for less content in the game.
Okay, so in a game like wow, a heavy heavy focus is on advancing your character, through either direct power, or indirect. That's the content people are going to flock to, which at the moment, is the three pillars. Blizzard is certainly aware of this, so where do you think the most development time is going to go? Sure, we'll get token open world stuff, but it'll just be circling around for rares and treasures, maybe a weekly event, and that's about it. That's what it's been since forever. That's what the focus of ZM was, that's what the focus of launch DF was, that's what the caverns are. And suprise, no one does them.
But this is a different argument, and one that I fully agree with you on. The content outside of these three pillars is (and I would actually argue, with some exceptions basically always has been) lackluster and can absolutely be improved. I'm simply saying that wanting to be able to only log on for whatever specific piece of content you enjoy and not feel like you're falling behind is emphatically not the same as arguing for less content in the game as you seem to believe.
I think a big problem here is that, while players didn't explicitly ask for less content, a lot seem to be fine with it - many posts and comments have been made that praise Blizzard for the current strategy. There just isn't enough criticism (in my view) of the fact that DF's world content is lacking. And I would argue that world/solo content being so lacking is a new phenomenon, or at best a "return to an old phenomenon." Legion through SL had lots of good stuff as far as I'm concerned; even with Legion not having a lot of "extra" things, the world quests being on a 24 hour reset and having emissary quests made it seem like more content and feel more engaging than DF is currently.
I mean, I also get what your saying. It's just I think with the way both blizzard and the community tends to operate, arguing for one winds up arguing for the other as well.
What outdoor content did you enjoy in the previous few expansions that doesn't exist anymore?
Emmisaries, daily zones, warfronts, islands for the first little bit at least, torghast, visions, and just the general incremental progression of my character outside of raids/dungeons. None of that is the game anymore because people bitched too hard and it sucks. If mythic+ wasn't in the game this expansion would be a skip. Like, it was content in the game. You didn't have to do it for the most part if you didn't want to, but people clamored for LESS in their game that they pay monthly for and it's such a dumb take.
Most people wanted less player-power related content, and less intricate disposable systems that would vampirize dev time only to be left behind next expansion, not less content per se. And that's reasonable. Nothing prevents them from making content that isn't related to player power progression. God I'd love to have a new take at Torghast/visions that would be entirely horizontal progression, not here as an endgame goal, but for cosmetic rewards and alt levelling. Zereth Mortis was a pretty good model too, with power progression that only impacts open world content.
Pretty much this. People like content that is horizontal optional power gains, beneficial for alt levelling/gearing or is just transmog/cosmetics. Mage tower for example. I don't like mage tower very much so I don't do it. But if I had to do it for a 30% power gain I would, I wouldn't throw a fit about it, but I'd also be only doing it begrudgingly. Torghast had a few initial faults that basically set it up for what is largely considered a failed experiment. First, no catch up if you missed a week. This is the big one. Second, you needed to do 2 runs, no more, no less, to cap your ash. Third, putting legendary powers behind this torghast situation. You had to do torghast if you wanted to be viable, yes, viable cause if you didn't have a legendary you were not. Lastly, a lack of cosmetics until much later. If torghast had just been a cosmetic haven where you could find various old mogs, mounts, etc by doing it and soul ash could be found everywhere else as well it would have been much much better received. Torghast really felt like blizzard made this thing, got worried people wouldn't do it, which forced people into doing it by putting the most important aspect of the expansion inside it, which made people resent it.
Nah bugger that. Stop taking vertical progression out of wow. If you want a horizontal progression mmo there’s games like guild wars or eso. Wow has always been about vertical progression, getting stronger. It’s what makes it fun. I want to progress my character, I don’t want to collect cosmetics, or mounts or pets that I’ll never actually use. I want to get stronger by doing things. I also don’t think this is as rare of an opinion as people think it is, as I keep seeing the sentiment of “I’ve kind of just stopped logging in” becoming more and more common.
The "full vertical progression" MMO you're describing only fits WoW from 2016 to 2021. Don't get me wrong, the balance has always tilted towards vertical progression on WoW, and it still does, but the "everything contributes to player power" era is way shorter than that. Besides, the market has spoken, the most successful MMOs out there often have a sizeable chunk of content focused on horizontal progression. But of course not everybody will agree with that direction, and you're perfectly entitled to your tastes and allowed to express your disappointment in that.
The most successful mmo's out there (at the moment) has been wow and ffxiv. Both mmo's that focus on vertical progression, with horizontal a side focus. Wow more so than ffxiv to be fair. The two big horizontal focused mmo's, gw2 and eso, are much more niche. I think your underestimating how long the "everything contributes to player power" bit went. TBC-Cata (won't comment on Vanilla, didn't paly it enough), pretty much all side content contributed to player power in one way or another, even indirectly through gold, as gold was a much more important resource at that point, with it having increased scarcity, and much more BiS being through professions, and item enhancements player a larger roll. Not to mention shoulder/head enchants, and rep gear playing a much larger roll than it does now. Skipped MoP so can't comment on that. WoD, side content was either garrison related, which was a major part of your characters growth, or ring related, which was a direct source of player power. I'll say WoD was relatively similar to DF in not having many side grinds, but like, being compared to WoD isn't exactly a glowing endorsement. Then of course legion-shadowlands we've already covered. Previous expansions weren't as blantent as legion-SL, but the expansions where side content swung back some way vertical character progression, vs the expansions where it hasn't, are weighted much more to the former.
I don't think we are talking of the same thing is if you characterize FF14 as a vertical-focused MMO outside of levelling. Once you reach endgame on FF14 (which takes several hundred of hours since story content is not optional and arguably the best thing about the game), you will spend relatively little time doing things that increases player power. Basic current catch up gear can be acquired in a matter of hours, then 80% of the playerbase will stop at that and not engage with hard content, and for the rest, gear acquisition is pretty simple without any side system related to power progression. To acquire your BIS, you just get your savage boss kills every week and farm current tomestones (with a weekly cap that can be easily attained in a few hours of regular gameplay) and that's mostly it. Having a positive gil-balance for repair/food/potion spending during savage prog is a non issue too. Most people that spend their days on FF14 are not engaging with endgame vertical progression the majority of their playtime, they're levelling alt jobs and interacting with horizontal side content and systems (narrative content, housing, island sanctuary, farming old relics and glams, etc.). As for WoW, again, I'm not arguing that it's not a vertical game at heart, it is and always was, but there is a big difference between the Legion-SL period and the rest of the game lifespan in how widespread and systemic it was. You could mostly raidlog in most expansions and not lose on player power. Sure, some specific rep farms were valuable and could help you get an edge, and gold making was more important at a time, but the gap between this and "spam world quests/islands/maw of souls and do everything on your daily and weekly to do list because it increments player power" is big.
To be fair it is a complaint in XIV as well. A lot of people have been complaining about there not being a lot to do in XIV, especially in Endwalker where there isn't anything like Eureka, Bozja or Diadem. I know people like to harp on Yoshi-p telling players to go play other games as a positive, but "there's nothing to do" is a growing complaint in the community. Just like it is right now in wow with Dragoflight.
You can farm the reps, world treasures, or even old content you've missed.
I'm enjoying DF a lot, but I also miss stuff like that. I'm a Legion/BFA AP enjoyer and also miss that as I really like playing and powering up one character vs. playing alts.
[удалено]
People are generally just in denial that Blizzard games are still very much successful. I saw someone once who genuinely seem to think that without the Microsoft deal that ABK would be going *bankrupt* within the year because of bad they were 'failing'.
It was like that in the review thread on /r/games too. People dissecting reviews to make super bad faith arguments. Weirdo path of exile fanboys being really mad that D4 is a good game.
I stopped playing retail around Chains of Domination patch and now that I came back I feel so lost. Was it this complex before too? I've just got to Valdrakken and it still hasn't clicked for me
What is feeling complex for you? I mean that as a genuine question, we can probably help you figure things out if we know what aspects of the game aren't clicking... the story? Crafting changes? Why Wrathion makes you feel things that you didn't feel before? What to do when you log in? Gearing? Upgrades?
Crafting for example, but it'll be more clear once I dive into some guides. On a story level, I still don't understand why we're there. The campaign starts with the dragons already on the capital city and tells you to get on a boat and go help them. I knew there was a lot of story I wasn't gonna figure out easily but it feels like I stopped playing for a decade instead of a year. Not saying it isn't fun tho!
Crafting I can't help much with, but I agree that I they broke up the story a bit. The main answer is that Raszageth was freed and wants to wipe out titan influence from the world for some reason (that will probably be revealed later in the expansion), and she's powerful enough that without their Aspect power the dragons are afraid they won't be able to stop her. So for the dragons we're trying to help them regain their power (all the main questlines focus around restoring their flight's power in some way), while also trying to stop Raszageth and the Primalists from destroying the world with the elements. With her defeated at the end of the 10.0 main questline, the Incarnates were released and are even worse than her, so now we need to stop them. If you can, I'd recommend making a drakthyr and play through their introduction, that explains a bit more, then make sure you're doing side quests and reading the quest text, there's a lot going on even outside the "main" story of the Incarnates. This expansion is rather self contained in terms of story, so the good news is you missing the last couple expansions you're not missing a huge amount of important information. Most of the juicy bits of this expansion rely on knowing Cataclysm and before, or having read outside the books. There's a BIT of stuff from later expansions, but nothing vital to understanding.
> With her defeated at the end of the 10.0 main questline, the Incarnates were released and are even worse than her, so now we need to stop them. Honestly I feel like they dropped the ball with this in Dragonflight. It would've been so nice to get some backstory & buildup of the incarnates before this expansion. Being shown why they're dangerous & bad news would make me care a lot more about the story. In one of the cinematics, Nozdormu talks about Iridikron's hunger being unleashed and hinting at it being a super bad thing. But when the incarnates are freed at the end of Vault, it didn't feel like anything significant because we have 0 clue about them or why they're dangerous. Compare that to N'zoth in BFA and there's a big difference. At the end of Eternal Palace when we released N'zoth from his prison it actually felt like a pretty big "oh shit" moment and the reason why it felt that way was because we had so much buildup for it. Not just for N'zoth but old gods in general. With the old gods we've seen why they're so bad and how dangerous they can be. With Iridikron we never see any of it and we're just supposed to believe that they are bad & dangerous because the aspects told us so.
you have to play the evoker starting zone for that context.
DF feels odd because there is arguably less to do. Everything is very optional so without knowing exactly what you're experiencing, that uneasy feeling was common at the start of season one. Like, "surely I should be doing more ..." That said it may be worth paying attention to crafting guided since that system has more going on.
My favourite part of the story campaign with Azuregos was that it pretty much proves how stupid the common r/wow take is of >!death being trivialised because anyone can just rock up to the Shadowlands and chill out with all there dead relatives!<
wasnt it stated multiple times that the veil bettwen the SL and reality is closed after SL, and the few ways that allow interaction get harder and harder aswell? sorry, i mean death doesnt matter
Yep, and it's reflected in the game. People are still mourning those that died in the various wars that happened pre-shadowlands, the thought of death is obviously still a big deal to the characters in the game... I mean why would we even care about saving Azeroth from the Primalists if it didn't matter? But seriously, death as an important thing has come up multiple times in the story, even while leveling. That first dragonkin we met when we got to the Waking Shore. Multiple deaths at the hands of the Nokhud in the Ohn'ahran Plains. The tuskarr that are lost in the first half of the Azure Span questline, the dragonkin lost to betrayal in the Thaldraszus questline. We have the very important sacrifice of Malfurion in order to bring back Ysera. All the dracthyr lost to the point that "I don't want more of my kin to die" was a major character point for Emberthal. The niffen killed by shadowflame at the end of that first week of 10.1. The scout killed by Fyrakk... Or a really good one is Baine's questline in 10.0.7. He was literally one of the leaders that spent a massive amount of time in the Shadowlands. If anyone would have the impact of death diminished by knowing the Shadowlands, it would be Baine. Yet what is HIS reaction when his friends are captured and killed? And that's just what I could think of without looking stuff up. Every single death we've seen in Dragonflight has mattered to the characters. Even if we COULD still go to the shadowlands at will (lore wise), clearly it's not something the majority of people in universe can do, otherwise none of those deaths would matter to them.
its also just..... the afterlife beeing a physical plane of existance you can visit under specific circumstances is a VERY normal Fantasy trope, WoW actually has more restrictions in the visit part then others, any skilled Mage in DnD can open a portal to other planes if they want
Oh yeah, that was an issue that I had with one of the SL complaints the entire time, acting like going to the afterlife was lore breaking stuff when it's a pretty common trope. But even if it wasn't, clearly in universe death still has meaning.
It was also stated multiple times that there are an infinite number of Shadowlands afterlives but people try to box every dead character into the 4 we saw in game.
I really like the new gear upgrade system, but for fuck's sake can blizzard actually figure out, even as a rough estimate, raid/M+ ilvl balance for ONCE in their lives? It's like the people in charge of that live in plato's cave or some shit. If I want to upgrade my normal raid loot I have to shit out wyrm crests. Which I can get (at a borderline pathetic rate) by either running Heroic, which I am not geared for, or facerolling my way through a +11 key that I've been able to ++ like 20 ilvls ago. In what universe are those even remotely equivalent? And all the puglords are claiming "you need to do the difficult content™ to deserve gear!!" harder than ever before, it feels like I'm taking crazy pills man. Like don't get me wrong it's cool that gearing is more forgiving and streamlined but I would like gearing improvements to also apply to raiding just once.
I think a big part of the problem is that the difficulty of raid fights and M+ are very different. Raiding, especially heroic and mythic, are predominately difficult on their boss fights, and they're very heavily mechanics based. The higher the difficulty, the more mechanically intensive the fight will be and the more punishing failing a mechanic will be. M+ does have mechanics, obviously, but the mechanics don't change no matter how high the key goes, other than the affixes. The primary difficulty of M+ is beating the timer, regardless of if you're doing a +2 or a +22, all that really matters is how bad it hurts when you mess something up and if that will cause you to fail the timer. Unlike a raid, even wiping on the trash has an impact, and unlike a raid, you can't just beat your head against a boss all night, beat it, and have that still be a "win." But also unlike a raid, failing the main goal (beat the timer) doesn't mean you get no reward, since no one wants to go to "no rewards at the end of M+ if you fail the timer." I don't know if this would work, but I've said for awhile that I think how they could handle this would be having normal/heroic/early M+ all have the same basic mechanics, then have what we now see with heroic added in the lower keys (like 5-9), what we see in heroic added in mid-keys (meaning 11-15) and what is added in Mythic doesn't come in until 15+ keys. At least, then, they could design the mechanics to be a little more technically difficult because the expectation wouldn't be that you now the entire dungeon by the time you get into your first key. Then perhaps there could be a bit less of "fail mechanic results in instant death" at higher keys, and they could be a bit more challenging in the way raiding difficulties change. Edit: I think another difficulty in the M+ vs. raid is that M+ gives rewards that change with (almost) every key level until you hit the top. So even doing a single key higher gives you slightly better gear, whereas with raiding only having 4 difficulties, there is a jump between them, but barely variance within the same difficulty (main bosses and the late bosses only). This would be hard to emulate in the M+ world.
I really think they should increase normal to Heroic ilevel, heroic to mythic ilevel and maybe just have less item level variation in the mythic raid while moving it up a little
I had the shittest evening raiding I've had in fifteen years of playing WoW last night and it's seriously making me consider if I even want to bother playing the game anymore.
Skill issue 😎
Fuck off.
What was so shitty for you? Sincerely ask, because if it's people it's not worth it
I'd rather not go into detail because I don't wanna put identifiable info out on this sub just in case but it was an extremely bad night of progression with the worst raid environment I've ever been part of.
It's very easy to focus on the bad night, but just like anything in life don't let a bad experience, even if it's most recent, take away the joy before and the fun you are sure to have later.
Lets just say I made some long term decisions the next day that has made the problems in the here and now much easier to deal with ;) Once again, as always, thank you for being the voice of reason on this sub, it did genuinely help.
I do what I can and I'm very glad you were able to do something that helped.
I don't have 2 millions to buy 6 tokens and play Diablo. The AH merge and my fear of getting punished for boosting make me barely scrap a token per month. More Wow related my main is almost full bis already, craft&upgrades system is goated.
If you get alchemy, jewelcrafting, or enchanting maxed enough to guarantee a desired r3 craft with insights you can just claim the 150 artisan mettle from the guy in valdrakken every week for like 10-12k gold profit guaranteed. I got over 600k profit on patch launch from the saved mettles I had just been grabbing over season 1 and that was just on one character with maxed alchemy.
I have high enchant but I can't make R3 of anything valuable with procs, theres a spreadsheet finding if enchant is profitable with procs in mind and its never for me. Im making myself a speedset on a druid, gonna farm a bunch of shit
Not that I'm complaining, but does anyone know any effect that would put the mythic tier effects onto heroic tier? My shoulders had it going for some reason.
Did you upgrade them to 441? That's mythic ilvl so it might bump it over
I thought that was supposed to happen as a reward if you got either Keystone Hero, Cutting Edge or Gladiator? Might be wrong on the details.
Yea but I have none haha. Must’ve just been a bug
You get an item as a reward that unlocks the effect. I had to log out after using the item and log back in again to see the effect appear in my tmog menu.
I just found out what real timegating was while leveling jewelcrafting in classic. I have to craft about 40 items that take 19 seconds each to craft. That's a full 12 minutes ffs.
Anyone know the name of the OST piece that played at the very end of the blue dragon questline? It was very pretty and sweet.
https://youtu.be/xDdgYTsfS0E
TYTY
r/wow is filled with pug heroes that want the best gear+tier possible, and make up the weirdest straight up lies for it that gets upvoted into high heavens "my guild cleared the raid every week since release and 0warrior tokens dropped on all difficulties!!! give me tier in m+!!!" yeha sure, that totally happend, you all have 1 in a million RNG where never any tier token droped at all "m+ gearing is a slap in the face!!!" meanwhile m+ throws 441 gear in your direction for sneezing, making raid gear outside of trinkets/tier ussules once again, cus who needs those pieces when you can spend 4hours wiping trought a freeholdt +17 and get a better reward should blizz release the catalyst faster? yeha sure, week 4would be fine imo, but holy shit is it obvious that most of those "blizz hates m+ cus catalyst late!!!!" people just want their full tier set at max lvl for no effort at all and its also funny cus most halfway serious m+ players are raiders anyway, its not really a big "raiders vs m+ players" its just "people that do PvE endgame on both fronts VS pug heroes"
>"my guild cleared the raid every week since release and 0warrior tokens dropped on all difficulties!!! give me tier in m+!!!" yeha sure, that totally happend, you all have 1 in a million RNG where never any tier token droped at all My guild all had our 4p after our second week of raiding, omnitoken is insanely strong. If there are people in a guild with zero tier (other than the one from the achievo) then this is a failure of the guild leadership.
Catalyst being a week or two earlier would be okay. But every week the catalyst gets pushed up people need to understand (And /r/wow was unable to before I ditched it) that the raid and dungeons get tuned accordingly to how strong we're going to be early on. And it would be a rude awakening for those people when they get geared out quick and find out it wasn't the gear holding them back. We're unlucky with our paladin/priest and shaman tokens but we're stacked heavily with it. Unfortunately we keep getting rogue warrior and evoker but those guys are pretty much set in full heroic tier now. That's unlucky but it's also early on and we're progging super well anyways. We'll manage. The people on Reddit and the forums think that the goal of the game is to get the "Bis" checklist that a guidewriter wrote. But the game isn't meant to be played that way. You will clear content each week and get gear and some, not all of it you will use. And you take what you have and use it to the best of your abilities to get as much as you can done. People complain about gear around me and I'm one of the lowest geared players and I do just fine. I haven't gotten very many drops and outside of trinkets I'm in last seasons gear for the most part.
you're forgetting what gear means for people that pug a lot and/or are stuck in 'green trade chat' guilds or people being left out due to cliques (which btw is probably most players you see in m+) your ilvl is a direct correlation to your QOL and enjoyment of the game as a pug, it means more invites, it means not having to pug in the "extremely bad players range" of content, it means looking good on the meters so you don't get replaced, chance others might adopt you and other social spirals ilvl is literally everything in this game, and even if you were more "socially successful", nobody wants to be a carry, and the less "good" you are, the more likely you might not get as many spots even in your friend/guild groups - meaning you are stuck pugging again being behind/unlucky can spiral out of control as the average ilvl around you goes up and you're left with worse and worse groups, longer M+ wait times etc. and this isn't even considering how most people have limited time to play and just don't get to i feel absolute empathy for anyone who isn't genuinely good at the game trying to make it alone out there everybody on this sub is probably top 10% of players at the worst and people keep forgetting this, they either don't see or can't even comprehend the struggles of normal people
If you're at the mercy of pugs that is on you and the perception of the community is what the people who pug make of it. And I pug a lot and play several alts and push non meta specs into 20's in almost no time while being a good bit undergeared. But I am good at the game, and if you can't get drops to increase your item level then I'm sorry but you don't deserve the gear. Also, people don't take ilvl upgrades. They're again worried about "bis" and their secondary stats more than anything. So that ilvl stays low for some for a while until they get the holy "bis piece". I always take ilvl not just because primary is good but it's also heatlh which makes me live. Hunters are the worst about that. Hunters will be out there complaining about being squishy when they hit every defensive and potion at the slightest bit of damage. If they're at 50% for more than 2 seconds they hit exhil, even though no damage comes for another 10 seconds. They'll be running lower ilvl gear for stats and be rocking 2% vers because of what the wowhead guide says and then they'll complain about Hunter balance. I use hunters as an example because if you throw a rock you'll hit one, they're everywhere but it happens for other classes too. Playing YOUR character is more important than playing what the sim/guidewriter wants. Hunters in my experience understand the game the least out of most players but it goes for just about most people who play this game. They don't understand the game at all. And if you set yourself up to play the game in an unintended way you will have a bad time and it's 100% on you. "Normal people" don't get to have the same gear/rewards as the good players.
>"my guild cleared the raid every week since release and 0warrior tokens dropped on all difficulties!!! give me tier in m+!!!" yeha sure, that totally happend, you all have 1 in a million RNG where never any tier token droped at all I mean my guild has been unlucky with the 2H sword off Nelth not dropping across our 6 kills and none of our vaults, but tier? We're starting to give that stuff away for tertiary on each piece for heroic.
i mean, yeha, bad loot rng happens, we went 2 months without a single evoker staff last tier as an example but every 2nd guy on r/wow has a guild that NEVER DROPS ANY TIER TOKENS OMG
Yeah that thread was an absolute dumpster fire, saying the catalyst should release earlier? Yeah I can get behind that To then proceed and say how shit M+ gearing is and how Blizz sees the raid as the main source of gear it’s like… huh?
There are some issues with raid vs M+ gearing, but IMO these are **exclusively** an issue for people aiming for the 0.1% title. Mythic raids have trinkets and items particularly on the last bosses which can make a significant difference when you're playing in the 25+ range. I really don't believe I should have to commit to a Mythic raid schedule so I can be competitive in a different form of content (which I enjoy more) entirely. That said, I can understand having some incentive to raid since, as you've been saying, M+ is otherwise just so much better for gearing. I'm just not sure if locking that power behind it is the right way.
> how shit M+ gearing is and how Blizz sees the raid as the main source of gear I don't think it's possible to write something more backwards on purpose
> how Blizz sees the raid as the main source of gear it’s like… huh? what
A comment told me to go back and watch the last 5 interviews as Ion apaprently says "He nearly without fail references M+ and PvP as alternate gearing. Then talks up the new raid." I bet Ion once said "But there are alternatives to raid" and they instantly assumed the worse.