I don't think any of the human kingdoms were allied in any way for quite a while. That was part of the reason the orcs dominated the shit out of them for so long. I'm not really as read up on the lore as I could be, but I sort of remember that from other people giving synopses.
I mean what human kingdoms are left? Its basically just Stormwind and its outlying cities isn't it? Dalaran I guess?
You have every mount? Every toy? Every heirloom to 100? Every battle pet rare and max level? Every achievement?
Content that I don't care about is not content
This is super goosey.
I'm just saying that pets and achievements aren't relevant to the point.
Cosmetic stuff has always been in the game, and I had plenty to do in vanilla and TBC without grinding for cosmetic stuff, and now I don't have plenty to do without grinding for cosmetic stuff. "Hey, I know we took away all the content you like doing, or made it so easy and short as to be pointless doing anyway, but here's some stuff you don't like doing and have never liked, that totally negates your argument!".
Catch-up mechanics are not a bad thing, at all. Just the way they've implemented them has become bad.
BC had a catch-up mechanic, and that continued right into Wrath. Badges however were phased out when they allowed older content to still be relevant. I can get the point you're making though, the problem is it's hard to see how they'd make it happen.
Fandral Staghelm: Why choose between the lesser of two evils when you can have both?
Fandral Staghelm: Night elves crazy old racist grandpa.
Pretty sure he was making a hearthstone reference and fandrals new card.
I would actually be 100% ok with attunement quest chains so long as they are interesting and most importantly, account-wide achievements. The biggest issue in vanilla and tbc was doing attunements on alts. There are only so many times you want to do jailbreak. Doing it on 6 characters in addition to helping other guildies and their alts could be rough. With the introduction of achievements there is a way to do it account wide. There are even already some account wide quest completion things, such as some of the weekly quests, and the random extra pet battle quest person.
As it stands now, the legendary ring is basically your attunement to doing higher tiers of hfc. If you dont have it you cant do it. Same with AotC too. They are both just de facto attunements. I'd prefer they get rid of things like that that people can use to deny people access. Just make an actual attunement that can show someone has done the legwork on at least 1 character.
I mean what human kingdoms are left? Its basically just Stormwind and its outlying cities isn't it? Dalaran I guess?
Just looking at the wikia, apparently arathor/stromgarde, alterac, stormwind, dalaran, gilneas, kul tiras, and lodaeron were the 7 human kingdoms. Most of them are just ruins now though.
Catch-up mechanics are not a bad thing, at all. Just the way they've implemented them has become bad.
BC had a catch-up mechanic, and that continued right into Wrath. Badges however were phased out when they allowed older content to still be relevant. I can get the point you're making though, the problem is it's hard to see how they'd make it happen.
TBC's catchup mechanic was very slow, and was honestly content in itself.
You were looking at 5-6 heroics to earn enough badges for a single piece of gear, and heroics were not trivial easy content, they were challenging gameplay in and of themselves, so although you were "grinding" badges, you still enjoyed the journey as well as the destination. If you were a fresh level 70, you also weren't just going to step into heroics. You went through normals first to get some gear (Dungeon sets??) and to earn the reputation to unlock them (Revered at first, later changed to Honored because some of the reps like Lower City were too grindy). Then you moved into heroics and started earning badges. The badge gear was roughly equal to Karazhan loot at first, so it was a great way to grab a few pieces to get ready for Karazhan. Then, once 2.4 dropped, there were a few more badge pieces which were t6 loot quality. You weren't going to be full t6 quality in a few days, but you'd be decently geared after a couple months.
When you compare that to the Warlords catchup mechanic in Tanaan - a week of doing Tanaan dailies and your fresh level 100 can be item level 670-680+.
I mean, let's imagine TBC's environment if it was in Warlords. let's imagine the Isle of Quel'Danas dropped the equivalent of baleful tokens.
You're a fresh 70. You look up what to do. Do I do normal dungeons? No, don't bother, they are a waste. Heroics? You can do them if you want to, but the gear is bad. What do you do? You want to raid, so you look up how to get geared. Everyone says to go to the Isle of Quel'Danas. You do that. You do the dailies for a week, and you're t5-geared equivalent from the token drops. In a week. Now you're ready to raid. What do you raid?
Karazhan? Pfft, no. What a waste. Karazhan is old news, nobody runs that, and none of the gear would be useful for you anyway. Gruul? Magtheridon? Nope. Crap gear, no groups, why bother. Serpentshrine Keep and Tempest Keep? Well, you can do them, but the gear is just as good as what you just got from Tanaan, so why bother? Just go and jump into Black Temple with everyone else.
Does that sound like fun?
That's exactly the situation we're in now with Warlords. Replace Karazhan/Gruul with Highmaul, replace SSC/TK with Blackrock Foundry, replace Black Temple with Hellfire Citadel. IF TBC had worked that way, everyone would have been moaning about the lack of content just as heavily as they do now. But back then, you did not accelerate through things so quickly, so no matter how much you did, there was always a vast journey stretching ahead of you of more content.
The problem is not a lack of content. Sure, there's a bit less content, but the main problem is that we get through content too quickly, and an expansion's earlier content is obsoleted by every content patch.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited May 2016
I think the main problem is that somebody at Blizzard decided that catchup paths have to be quick. Lightning quick.
They certainly need to exist, but I don't think they need to be quick. I don't see why you couldn't have a catchup path like TBC's badges, that required a month or two of effort to be raid-ready. If a guild needed to gear a new recruit quickly, they could carry them through raids, but for a solo player trying to get started I don't see why they need to be ready to jump into Hellfire Citadel a week after hitting 100. That's stupid.
A lot of the catch-up mechanic problems stem from how enormous they are making the gaps between tiers. A catch-up mechanic is needed when there's a full 100 ilvls between fresh 100 and one that wants to do hfc. Even though bwl and aq40 came out, there were still reasons to go back and do MC. There were some BiS pieces that dropped in MC because the ilvl differences weren't crazy, as well as the tier 2 pants dropped off rag, also the 2 legendaries. As it stands now, there is 0 reason to go back to highmaul unless you want a specific achievement. I don't think people should be able to get fully geared in just a couple days to a week. Make people care about when they get a piece of gear. Yes, that does drag the game out, but there is also a much bigger sense of accomplishment when you finally finish it.
People did mc and bwl for a long time to get full T2, but the set bonuses were very strong, still the best looking tier in the game for most classes, and due to the server community, people knew others that actually finished their sets. People would be envious of something that you grinded weeks if not months for. Warriors did the entirety of ZG in order for just a CHANCE at zin'rohk even dropping, when people finally got it there was always lots of congrats tossed around inevitably followed by "lets go test this bad boy out in pvp". When stuff drops now it's basically "whatever, throw it in the pile". Slowing progression down and giving reasons to repeat places in addition to the normal gear would be a great change in design. It doesn't really take away from the casual experience either. It might be frustrating how long it takes, but when they do get their pieces of gear they are truly happy about it.
Warriors did the entirety of ZG in order for just a CHANCE at zin'rohk even dropping
And the immediate counterargument is "That's not fun gameplay, that's just frustrating grinding".
To which my answer is - so what? Developing content takes a hundred times longer than consuming content. The only way for an MMO to even exist and keep people busy is to pad content artificially with lengthy grinds. Those grinds make the destination satisfying, which keeps people coming back.
This is truly an example of "players don't know what they want". MMOs have always functioned on the principle of "put in effort, get reward."
Every change Blizzard has made over the last eight or nine years has steadily reduced the effort required. Each individual change has been a great quality of life improvement by itself, but overall you can't reduce required effort without simultaneously reducing the significance of the reward. As long as the reward is desirable in and of itself, the more effort required to get it, the more a player will value having it. And conversely, the less effort it takes to get something, the less a player will value having it, regardless of what the reward actually is.
And I, for one, don't like the tradeoff. If I want to have gear handed to me in a week, I'll go make a private server where I can press a button and get mythic gear in my mailbox.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
A lot of the catch-up mechanic problems stem from how enormous they are making the gaps between tiers. A catch-up mechanic is needed when there's a full 100 ilvls between fresh 100 and one that wants to do hfc. Even though bwl and aq40 came out, there were still reasons to go back and do MC. There were some BiS pieces that dropped in MC because the ilvl differences weren't crazy, as well as the tier 2 pants dropped off rag, also the 2 legendaries. As it stands now, there is 0 reason to go back to highmaul unless you want a specific achievement. I don't think people should be able to get fully geared in just a couple days to a week. Make people care about when they get a piece of gear. Yes, that does drag the game out, but there is also a much bigger sense of accomplishment when you finally finish it.
People did mc and bwl for a long time to get full T2, but the set bonuses were very strong, still the best looking tier in the game for most classes, and due to the server community, people knew others that actually finished their sets. People would be envious of something that you grinded weeks if not months for. Warriors did the entirety of ZG in order for just a CHANCE at zin'rohk even dropping, when people finally got it there was always lots of congrats tossed around inevitably followed by "lets go test this bad boy out in pvp". When stuff drops now it's basically "whatever, throw it in the pile". Slowing progression down and giving reasons to repeat places in addition to the normal gear would be a great change in design. It doesn't really take away from the casual experience either. It might be frustrating how long it takes, but when they do get their pieces of gear they are truly happy about it.
Most of the big gaps between tiers come from there being 4 difficulties, and Blizzard's insistence that the Normal items from the new raid are equal to the Mythic ones from the previous raid. Why does that have to be the case? Why can't Mythic Highmaul loot be better than Heroic BRF loot?
Dalphir, I am honestly not sure if you are like doing a bit or something?
You were just complaining about how you can use catch up gear to skip content, but now you want content from the previous raid to be better than content from the new raid, so there is no reason to do the new raid?
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Dalphir, I am honestly not sure if you are like doing a bit or something?
You were just complaining about how you can use catch up gear to skip content, but now you want content from the previous raid to be better than content from the new raid, so there is no reason to do the new raid?
I want there to be reasons to do the old raid, not the new raid. If a new raid comes out while you're still working on the old one, there should not be such a difference in gear in the new raid that it makes sense to leave the old one unfinished. My guild didn't finish Heroic Highmaul before BRF came out, but BRF gear from Normal was as good as Heroic Highmaul stuff, and the Heroic Gear was better, so why even bother finishing Highmaul?
I think if a raid team starts raiding together, they should be starting at the first raid instance and making their way through the expansion to the final raid. Not leaping into the latest raid immediately because catchup mechanics are so quick and easy.
A raid team that started in 2008 during TBC still had to start with Karazhan, even though Black Temple had been out for over six months. That's the way it should be.
Obsoleting previous raids every time an expansion comes out is fine, but obsoleting them with every content patch is stupid as hell.
Normal Foundry is the same item level as Heroic Highmaul, not Mythic.
Mythic Highmaul is the same item level as Heroic Foundry.
Its just a 15 point difference between the same difficulties of the raids.
Due to HFC scaling throughout its own difficulties, you can get LFR Gear that is the same item level as Blackrock Foundry Heroic and only 5 item levels lower than Normal HFC.
I personally liked how they did it for much of WotLK. Still did Naxx, Sarth, Malygos etc for badges. Heroics gave me badges. I could run old stuff and work towards catching up, it definitely couldn't be done in a week there.
With the difficulty thing, goes back to my lamenting them not using Ulduar's neat mechanic to activate Hard-Mode for fights or something kind of similar. Having maybe two difficulties but mechanics to ramp things up just makes the encounters more fun. I definitely felt like the way things were tuned for WoD was... horribly off. In MoP I saw LFR as a decent way to learn mechanics, Normal was good for running stuff with your buddies(even while drunk) and Heroic was for when you put your serious pants on. People expected this to be similar in WoD, at least for Normal on up. Instead that just wasn't the case, and the mechanics just became so overwhelming even on Normal.
It feels like instead of taking 2-3 interesting mechanics for a boss and focusing on those, they simply throw more and more in.
Dalphir, I am honestly not sure if you are like doing a bit or something?
You were just complaining about how you can use catch up gear to skip content, but now you want content from the previous raid to be better than content from the new raid, so there is no reason to do the new raid?
I want there to be reasons to do the old raid, not the new raid. If a new raid comes out while you're still working on the old one, there should not be such a difference in gear in the new raid that it makes sense to leave the old one unfinished. My guild didn't finish Heroic Highmaul before BRF came out, but BRF gear from Normal was as good as Heroic Highmaul stuff, and the Heroic Gear was better, so why even bother finishing Highmaul?
I think if a raid team starts raiding together, they should be starting at the first raid instance and making their way through the expansion to the final raid. Not leaping into the latest raid immediately because catchup mechanics are so quick and easy.
A raid team that started in 2008 during TBC still had to start with Karazhan, even though Black Temple had been out for over six months. That's the way it should be.
Obsoleting previous raids every time an expansion comes out is fine, but obsoleting them with every content patch is stupid as hell.
Ok well two points;
In your scenario, there is now no reason to move to the next raid, because the gear they got from the previous one is just as good if not better. So you haven't fixed anything, there is never a reason to introduce more than one raid per tier.
Also, your entire point seems to be, "Other people aren't playing the game how I want them to play, so they need to change it." Which is a pretty goosey stance.
Well the point that people end up playing The Patch rather than playing The Expansion is definitely a legit problem. Content that was available at the start of an expansion just becomes completely obsolete. For a lot of people dungeons are what they liked to go with, and that just fizzled out really quick in WoD.
But something to keep in mind with Legion is that... well they're doing some interesting stuff. According to a recent video by Preach, he was able to get a character a full set of stuff at 110 from the World Quest system. They were blues, yes. But I suspect the more difficult ones would allow you to get better gear. That entire system would allow for an interesting way to naturally incorporate the whole catch-up mechanic system. You still run into the issue of there maybe not being a reason to run the old raids, though.
To be fair, the people that want to play the game like him have just stopped playing, because the game isnt as good as it used to be.
The game is far better than it used to be, people stop playing because it is an 11 year old game that they personally may no longer enjoy, in a genre with an absolute glut of free alternatives. That doesn't mean it is a worse game.
The game has content issues, but the issue is not the lack of possible grinding, it is pacing between drops and replay-ability of the content.
There is absolutely nothing preventing you from grinding through the same content repeatedly like you did in the old days, now until the next expansion. The content is still there, it is still available to be played through. People don't play that way anymore, because most people did not enjoy it, and for good reason. It is skinner box content rather than actual gameplay.
TBC dungeons were also actually a thing. The heroic versions you actually had to use CC instead of just running in an aoeing down everything. Because of their difficulty, you could actually get epics from them, as well as crafting mats to make reasonable gear. Magisters terrace was actually a really fun 5 man that was released far into the expansion. It had higher ilvl drops, as well as a mount, and a toy. Pretty sure there was rep too that let you buy a couple epic pieces. It was a very good implementation of keeping dungeons relevant and rewarding. It's just too bad there was only one.
I'd love to see some kind of reclamation of old dungeons. For example, after clearing uldaman, no part of the alliance is going to station a garrison there or anything, let some faction take up residence and use it as their new stronghold. Some way of making the world feel more dynamic would be preferred over just adding more continents.
edit: avoiding double post.
The game may be better from a technical point of view. But most everyone agrees the community feel to it is much much worse. MMO to me requires a community. you can play WoW now without any other person. Also, the free alternatives are most completely terrible or are P2W.
There is something preventing me from grinding through the same content repeatedly, and that is that I BEAT it. People ran MC and BWL repeatedly because there was always something more they could get. Even if you had all of say resto gear, you could start going for some of the spell power gear and be a truly special snowflake moonkin that had it in vanilla. Now, I can spend an hour in tanaan and have full 650 - 705 gear and have absolutely no reason to ever step foot in highmaul, there is nothing there. You can effectively do it once to see it at that point, but there is no goal of getting that one item, and there is no community that you are doing it with that you can be excited for when they get the drop they are going for. There was always that one rogue that religiously attended BWL for maladath and it didnt drop for months, but when it finally dropped, you were happy for them, even though it wasn't for you. That simply does not exist today.
I will agree that their (and other companies) over reliance on raids is definitely a misstep. Extremely static content that you play until you master, then never again, is a bad usage of time and resources. People should want, and be able to use whatever content they want in order to progress through the game. Dungeons, PvP, Raids, and World content should all be viable.
I should be choosing what I play because I find it enjoyable, not because it has the carrot I want.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
TBC dungeons were also actually a thing. The heroic versions you actually had to use CC instead of just running in an aoeing down everything. Because of their difficulty, you could actually get epics from them, as well as crafting mats to make reasonable gear. Magisters terrace was actually a really fun 5 man that was released far into the expansion. It had higher ilvl drops, as well as a mount, and a toy. Pretty sure there was rep too that let you buy a couple epic pieces. It was a very good implementation of keeping dungeons relevant and rewarding. It's just too bad there was only one.
I'd love to see some kind of reclamation of old dungeons. For example, after clearing uldaman, no part of the alliance is going to station a garrison there or anything, let some faction take up residence and use it as their new stronghold. Some way of making the world feel more dynamic would be preferred over just adding more continents.
You had to use CC in early Warlords heroics, when everyone was item level 610-615 in the first couple weeks. And if you've done Mythics at the tuned item level of 660, they also require a ton of CC and very careful and good quality play.
There's nothing wrong with the dungeons. It's just that Tanaan Jungle is too quick as a catchup mechanic for heroics to be at all worthwhile, and the item level that Tanaan throws at you, when combined with raid finder gear, makes mythics not very challenging either.
Just imagine if tanaan had done what sunwell did. outdoor zone, 5 man, and raid. An outdoor zone that dropped 650 gear is ok, so long as the 5 man that they release with the zone is similarly scaled up. Instead they just made it a whole rarespawn fest where people just sell the medallions that help you get flying faster, woo content.
I did skip about a year of playtime though. I stopped a couple months into wod, and started after 6.2 came out. I got geared super fast in tanaan, did ashran for pvp gear, and then all of a sudden i was basically full gear and wrecked everything. I was kind of disapointed they took out the daily challenge mode quest (or moved it to some place i havent found yet). It is a mode that should have been promoted more, though it is super imbalanced for some classes, like DK. The mythic+ dungeons in legion look like they will solve a lot of the problems we've been discussing, they just have to make loot keep up with the expansion or it will also just become obsolete and people won't do it as soon as 7.1 comes out.
I tanked a lot of heroic's, CC was never required.
Mythic's maybe, but I can't be bothered to find a group manually for them, so I never tried them.
Dungeons were quickly obsoleted by raids, before Tanaan was even out, so I am not sure why you think that is the problem.
Dungeons being obsoleted for raiders is not a problem.
Dungeons being obsolete for everybody even before they step into a raid is a problem.
It's really...not.
Tanaan exists, because dungeon player population drops off as raid progression advances. The majority of the player base is no longer playing dungeons, so anyone who would come into the game late expansion, will no longer be able to find matches to even get gear to catch up.
Tanaan is a bandaid for the fact the content no longer gets played, not the reason it doesn't.
Adding any form of grinding isn't going to fix the issue, because everyone who started on release is still going to have already moved past it, still leaving only a trickle of players unable to progress.
Also you are being very facetious with the term "everyone". Tanaan was not available for "everyone", because it did not come out until far into the expansion.
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AngryThe glory I had witnessedwas just a sleight of handRegistered Userregular
I personally liked how they did it for much of WotLK. Still did Naxx, Sarth, Malygos etc for badges. Heroics gave me badges. I could run old stuff and work towards catching up, it definitely couldn't be done in a week there.
With the difficulty thing, goes back to my lamenting them not using Ulduar's neat mechanic to activate Hard-Mode for fights or something kind of similar. Having maybe two difficulties but mechanics to ramp things up just makes the encounters more fun. I definitely felt like the way things were tuned for WoD was... horribly off. In MoP I saw LFR as a decent way to learn mechanics, Normal was good for running stuff with your buddies(even while drunk) and Heroic was for when you put your serious pants on. People expected this to be similar in WoD, at least for Normal on up. Instead that just wasn't the case, and the mechanics just became so overwhelming even on Normal.
It feels like instead of taking 2-3 interesting mechanics for a boss and focusing on those, they simply throw more and more in.
I don't know if the WotLK badge system was perfect, but it's the model I remember feeling the most satisfied with. I'd certainly prefer moving back in that direction at some point.
I personally liked how they did it for much of WotLK. Still did Naxx, Sarth, Malygos etc for badges. Heroics gave me badges. I could run old stuff and work towards catching up, it definitely couldn't be done in a week there.
With the difficulty thing, goes back to my lamenting them not using Ulduar's neat mechanic to activate Hard-Mode for fights or something kind of similar. Having maybe two difficulties but mechanics to ramp things up just makes the encounters more fun. I definitely felt like the way things were tuned for WoD was... horribly off. In MoP I saw LFR as a decent way to learn mechanics, Normal was good for running stuff with your buddies(even while drunk) and Heroic was for when you put your serious pants on. People expected this to be similar in WoD, at least for Normal on up. Instead that just wasn't the case, and the mechanics just became so overwhelming even on Normal.
It feels like instead of taking 2-3 interesting mechanics for a boss and focusing on those, they simply throw more and more in.
I don't know if the WotLK badge system was perfect, but it's the model I remember feeling the most satisfied with. I'd certainly prefer moving back in that direction at some point.
Although it did eventually turn into running the ICC/ToC dungeons exclusively, the badges were just a neat bonus from doing those.
Honestly 5-mans aren't going to be important and challenging content while they keep up with the insane ilvl inflation. 4 Raid difficulties with huge jumps in item level between each tier just isn't sustainable. We're already going to need another squish halfway through Legion at the rate they're going.
I hear you on the item squish thing. I was watching someone play alpha on twitch and he was looking at numbers after an arena and was like "ok i did 3 million damage" and chat was like, you did 36million. I dont like that the numbers are so big you cant easily distinguish them. Being large enough that missing a 0 is a thing is a problem. Maybe at least do what diablo did and add K or M to the end. I miss when a 1500 crit was a big deal. The numbers were much easier to parse.
Grinding random drop mounts aren't content. Grinding pet battles isn't content. Grinding PvP isn't content. Grinding reputation isn't content.
Content is lore, quests, substantial activities that either expand more on the current patch's tale or provide some kind of tangible benefit to completing the entirety of the questline beyond unlocking a grind.
Raids are content. Dungeons are content. Zone-spanning questlines with lore implications are content. Random batches of daily quests that are beyond Kill X, Kill Ten of X, pick up X" and grant some glimpse of unique lore are content.
Theyre content in that they exist and are something to do. For a lot of people I dont think they cross a threshhold for being meaningful enough. Pet battles and running old instances are what I do during queues or if I need gold. It isnt really something I want to be doing, its just there because otherwise im going to just be spastically jumping around incircles. I dont mind little busywork things, but if they disnt change how mods worked in vanilla id play poker and tetris to fill those gaps.
Yeah, that is fine if you don't personally enjoy that kind of thing. But I know people who absolutely do see those things as content they enjoy working towards.
I'm not saying you have to like them, but you can't just dismiss them as not being content. Otherwise PvP and non-LFR raids aren't content.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Yeah, that is fine if you don't personally enjoy that kind of thing. But I know people who absolutely do see those things as content they enjoy working towards.
I'm not saying you have to like them, but you can't just dismiss them as not being content. Otherwise PvP and non-LFR raids aren't content.
I absolutely can dismiss them for the purposes of discussing whether the game has enough content.
TBC and Wrath kept me plenty busy without needing to complete that kind of stuff.,
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
I don't understand why we can't have 5 ilvl jumps between difficulties instead of 15. Why do we need 15?
I think part of it is just that blizzard focuses so much on one type of content(raids) everything else suffers for it. I really liked the celestial tournament in mop, but there is nothing close to that in wodunless you count beating the same old fights with the elekk plushie. Thats like telling a raider, great you beat SoO, now unspec your character and do it again!
Dungeons are kind of meh to do, and they nerfed the cta bags. Also they took out the valor to honor conversion which I hated. You cant pvp until you have blues, let me do dungeons for them. I know ashran is their solution but the same undergeared problem exists there and i dont like being a detriment to the team.
My wife likes doing completely different things so i can see how other people like to do X. I just see pet battles and mount farming as having a rather low ceiling on progression before they get overly tedius or not rewarding. They can occasionally be fun, but they seem to lose their draw much quicker than other things for me. Part of it is just lack of support. But i hear there is going to be a dalaran tournament in legion so we'll see how that goes.
Also f childrens week and tbc timewalking being events during my finals weeks. Those are things i want to do but have papers to write.
Diablo is not the role model you want. You cannot tell how much damage you are doing their either.
The answer is to never have your characters in a position where they are doing such ludicrous amounts of damage.
When I hear someone say they did millions of damage, my first thought is, "Did you drop a nuke on them?"
the diablo approach isn't bad, it's just that in diablo there are so many hits happening every second that the screen becomes a jumble of numbers anyway. You can use combat text addons to strip out the non-critical damage numbers, which makes things a bit more readable. They ought to make that a default option.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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I'm just saying that pets and achievements aren't relevant to the point.
Cosmetic stuff has always been in the game, and I had plenty to do in vanilla and TBC without grinding for cosmetic stuff, and now I don't have plenty to do without grinding for cosmetic stuff. "Hey, I know we took away all the content you like doing, or made it so easy and short as to be pointless doing anyway, but here's some stuff you don't like doing and have never liked, that totally negates your argument!".
BC had a catch-up mechanic, and that continued right into Wrath. Badges however were phased out when they allowed older content to still be relevant. I can get the point you're making though, the problem is it's hard to see how they'd make it happen.
Pretty sure he was making a hearthstone reference and fandrals new card.
I would actually be 100% ok with attunement quest chains so long as they are interesting and most importantly, account-wide achievements. The biggest issue in vanilla and tbc was doing attunements on alts. There are only so many times you want to do jailbreak. Doing it on 6 characters in addition to helping other guildies and their alts could be rough. With the introduction of achievements there is a way to do it account wide. There are even already some account wide quest completion things, such as some of the weekly quests, and the random extra pet battle quest person.
As it stands now, the legendary ring is basically your attunement to doing higher tiers of hfc. If you dont have it you cant do it. Same with AotC too. They are both just de facto attunements. I'd prefer they get rid of things like that that people can use to deny people access. Just make an actual attunement that can show someone has done the legwork on at least 1 character.
Just looking at the wikia, apparently arathor/stromgarde, alterac, stormwind, dalaran, gilneas, kul tiras, and lodaeron were the 7 human kingdoms. Most of them are just ruins now though.
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TBC's catchup mechanic was very slow, and was honestly content in itself.
You were looking at 5-6 heroics to earn enough badges for a single piece of gear, and heroics were not trivial easy content, they were challenging gameplay in and of themselves, so although you were "grinding" badges, you still enjoyed the journey as well as the destination. If you were a fresh level 70, you also weren't just going to step into heroics. You went through normals first to get some gear (Dungeon sets??) and to earn the reputation to unlock them (Revered at first, later changed to Honored because some of the reps like Lower City were too grindy). Then you moved into heroics and started earning badges. The badge gear was roughly equal to Karazhan loot at first, so it was a great way to grab a few pieces to get ready for Karazhan. Then, once 2.4 dropped, there were a few more badge pieces which were t6 loot quality. You weren't going to be full t6 quality in a few days, but you'd be decently geared after a couple months.
When you compare that to the Warlords catchup mechanic in Tanaan - a week of doing Tanaan dailies and your fresh level 100 can be item level 670-680+.
I mean, let's imagine TBC's environment if it was in Warlords. let's imagine the Isle of Quel'Danas dropped the equivalent of baleful tokens.
You're a fresh 70. You look up what to do. Do I do normal dungeons? No, don't bother, they are a waste. Heroics? You can do them if you want to, but the gear is bad. What do you do? You want to raid, so you look up how to get geared. Everyone says to go to the Isle of Quel'Danas. You do that. You do the dailies for a week, and you're t5-geared equivalent from the token drops. In a week. Now you're ready to raid. What do you raid?
Karazhan? Pfft, no. What a waste. Karazhan is old news, nobody runs that, and none of the gear would be useful for you anyway. Gruul? Magtheridon? Nope. Crap gear, no groups, why bother. Serpentshrine Keep and Tempest Keep? Well, you can do them, but the gear is just as good as what you just got from Tanaan, so why bother? Just go and jump into Black Temple with everyone else.
Does that sound like fun?
That's exactly the situation we're in now with Warlords. Replace Karazhan/Gruul with Highmaul, replace SSC/TK with Blackrock Foundry, replace Black Temple with Hellfire Citadel. IF TBC had worked that way, everyone would have been moaning about the lack of content just as heavily as they do now. But back then, you did not accelerate through things so quickly, so no matter how much you did, there was always a vast journey stretching ahead of you of more content.
The problem is not a lack of content. Sure, there's a bit less content, but the main problem is that we get through content too quickly, and an expansion's earlier content is obsoleted by every content patch.
They certainly need to exist, but I don't think they need to be quick. I don't see why you couldn't have a catchup path like TBC's badges, that required a month or two of effort to be raid-ready. If a guild needed to gear a new recruit quickly, they could carry them through raids, but for a solo player trying to get started I don't see why they need to be ready to jump into Hellfire Citadel a week after hitting 100. That's stupid.
People did mc and bwl for a long time to get full T2, but the set bonuses were very strong, still the best looking tier in the game for most classes, and due to the server community, people knew others that actually finished their sets. People would be envious of something that you grinded weeks if not months for. Warriors did the entirety of ZG in order for just a CHANCE at zin'rohk even dropping, when people finally got it there was always lots of congrats tossed around inevitably followed by "lets go test this bad boy out in pvp". When stuff drops now it's basically "whatever, throw it in the pile". Slowing progression down and giving reasons to repeat places in addition to the normal gear would be a great change in design. It doesn't really take away from the casual experience either. It might be frustrating how long it takes, but when they do get their pieces of gear they are truly happy about it.
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And the immediate counterargument is "That's not fun gameplay, that's just frustrating grinding".
To which my answer is - so what? Developing content takes a hundred times longer than consuming content. The only way for an MMO to even exist and keep people busy is to pad content artificially with lengthy grinds. Those grinds make the destination satisfying, which keeps people coming back.
This is truly an example of "players don't know what they want". MMOs have always functioned on the principle of "put in effort, get reward."
Every change Blizzard has made over the last eight or nine years has steadily reduced the effort required. Each individual change has been a great quality of life improvement by itself, but overall you can't reduce required effort without simultaneously reducing the significance of the reward. As long as the reward is desirable in and of itself, the more effort required to get it, the more a player will value having it. And conversely, the less effort it takes to get something, the less a player will value having it, regardless of what the reward actually is.
And I, for one, don't like the tradeoff. If I want to have gear handed to me in a week, I'll go make a private server where I can press a button and get mythic gear in my mailbox.
Most of the big gaps between tiers come from there being 4 difficulties, and Blizzard's insistence that the Normal items from the new raid are equal to the Mythic ones from the previous raid. Why does that have to be the case? Why can't Mythic Highmaul loot be better than Heroic BRF loot?
You were just complaining about how you can use catch up gear to skip content, but now you want content from the previous raid to be better than content from the new raid, so there is no reason to do the new raid?
I want there to be reasons to do the old raid, not the new raid. If a new raid comes out while you're still working on the old one, there should not be such a difference in gear in the new raid that it makes sense to leave the old one unfinished. My guild didn't finish Heroic Highmaul before BRF came out, but BRF gear from Normal was as good as Heroic Highmaul stuff, and the Heroic Gear was better, so why even bother finishing Highmaul?
I think if a raid team starts raiding together, they should be starting at the first raid instance and making their way through the expansion to the final raid. Not leaping into the latest raid immediately because catchup mechanics are so quick and easy.
A raid team that started in 2008 during TBC still had to start with Karazhan, even though Black Temple had been out for over six months. That's the way it should be.
Obsoleting previous raids every time an expansion comes out is fine, but obsoleting them with every content patch is stupid as hell.
Mythic Highmaul is the same item level as Heroic Foundry.
Its just a 15 point difference between the same difficulties of the raids.
Due to HFC scaling throughout its own difficulties, you can get LFR Gear that is the same item level as Blackrock Foundry Heroic and only 5 item levels lower than Normal HFC.
With the difficulty thing, goes back to my lamenting them not using Ulduar's neat mechanic to activate Hard-Mode for fights or something kind of similar. Having maybe two difficulties but mechanics to ramp things up just makes the encounters more fun. I definitely felt like the way things were tuned for WoD was... horribly off. In MoP I saw LFR as a decent way to learn mechanics, Normal was good for running stuff with your buddies(even while drunk) and Heroic was for when you put your serious pants on. People expected this to be similar in WoD, at least for Normal on up. Instead that just wasn't the case, and the mechanics just became so overwhelming even on Normal.
It feels like instead of taking 2-3 interesting mechanics for a boss and focusing on those, they simply throw more and more in.
Ok well two points;
In your scenario, there is now no reason to move to the next raid, because the gear they got from the previous one is just as good if not better. So you haven't fixed anything, there is never a reason to introduce more than one raid per tier.
Also, your entire point seems to be, "Other people aren't playing the game how I want them to play, so they need to change it." Which is a pretty goosey stance.
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But something to keep in mind with Legion is that... well they're doing some interesting stuff. According to a recent video by Preach, he was able to get a character a full set of stuff at 110 from the World Quest system. They were blues, yes. But I suspect the more difficult ones would allow you to get better gear. That entire system would allow for an interesting way to naturally incorporate the whole catch-up mechanic system. You still run into the issue of there maybe not being a reason to run the old raids, though.
Regardless, my overall point is that raiding needs to become more like it was in TBC, with the exception of attunements.
The game is far better than it used to be, people stop playing because it is an 11 year old game that they personally may no longer enjoy, in a genre with an absolute glut of free alternatives. That doesn't mean it is a worse game.
The game has content issues, but the issue is not the lack of possible grinding, it is pacing between drops and replay-ability of the content.
There is absolutely nothing preventing you from grinding through the same content repeatedly like you did in the old days, now until the next expansion. The content is still there, it is still available to be played through. People don't play that way anymore, because most people did not enjoy it, and for good reason. It is skinner box content rather than actual gameplay.
I'd love to see some kind of reclamation of old dungeons. For example, after clearing uldaman, no part of the alliance is going to station a garrison there or anything, let some faction take up residence and use it as their new stronghold. Some way of making the world feel more dynamic would be preferred over just adding more continents.
edit: avoiding double post.
The game may be better from a technical point of view. But most everyone agrees the community feel to it is much much worse. MMO to me requires a community. you can play WoW now without any other person. Also, the free alternatives are most completely terrible or are P2W.
There is something preventing me from grinding through the same content repeatedly, and that is that I BEAT it. People ran MC and BWL repeatedly because there was always something more they could get. Even if you had all of say resto gear, you could start going for some of the spell power gear and be a truly special snowflake moonkin that had it in vanilla. Now, I can spend an hour in tanaan and have full 650 - 705 gear and have absolutely no reason to ever step foot in highmaul, there is nothing there. You can effectively do it once to see it at that point, but there is no goal of getting that one item, and there is no community that you are doing it with that you can be excited for when they get the drop they are going for. There was always that one rogue that religiously attended BWL for maladath and it didnt drop for months, but when it finally dropped, you were happy for them, even though it wasn't for you. That simply does not exist today.
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I should be choosing what I play because I find it enjoyable, not because it has the carrot I want.
You had to use CC in early Warlords heroics, when everyone was item level 610-615 in the first couple weeks. And if you've done Mythics at the tuned item level of 660, they also require a ton of CC and very careful and good quality play.
There's nothing wrong with the dungeons. It's just that Tanaan Jungle is too quick as a catchup mechanic for heroics to be at all worthwhile, and the item level that Tanaan throws at you, when combined with raid finder gear, makes mythics not very challenging either.
Mythic's maybe, but I can't be bothered to find a group manually for them, so I never tried them.
Dungeons were quickly obsoleted by raids, before Tanaan was even out, so I am not sure why you think that is the problem.
I did skip about a year of playtime though. I stopped a couple months into wod, and started after 6.2 came out. I got geared super fast in tanaan, did ashran for pvp gear, and then all of a sudden i was basically full gear and wrecked everything. I was kind of disapointed they took out the daily challenge mode quest (or moved it to some place i havent found yet). It is a mode that should have been promoted more, though it is super imbalanced for some classes, like DK. The mythic+ dungeons in legion look like they will solve a lot of the problems we've been discussing, they just have to make loot keep up with the expansion or it will also just become obsolete and people won't do it as soon as 7.1 comes out.
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Dungeons being obsoleted for raiders is not a problem.
Dungeons being obsolete for everybody even before they step into a raid is a problem.
It's really...not.
Tanaan exists, because dungeon player population drops off as raid progression advances. The majority of the player base is no longer playing dungeons, so anyone who would come into the game late expansion, will no longer be able to find matches to even get gear to catch up.
Tanaan is a bandaid for the fact the content no longer gets played, not the reason it doesn't.
Adding any form of grinding isn't going to fix the issue, because everyone who started on release is still going to have already moved past it, still leaving only a trickle of players unable to progress.
Also you are being very facetious with the term "everyone". Tanaan was not available for "everyone", because it did not come out until far into the expansion.
Have you seen some of the affixes as you go higher and higher? There's not going to be a lot of brute forcing through those.
I don't know if the WotLK badge system was perfect, but it's the model I remember feeling the most satisfied with. I'd certainly prefer moving back in that direction at some point.
Although it did eventually turn into running the ICC/ToC dungeons exclusively, the badges were just a neat bonus from doing those.
Honestly 5-mans aren't going to be important and challenging content while they keep up with the insane ilvl inflation. 4 Raid difficulties with huge jumps in item level between each tier just isn't sustainable. We're already going to need another squish halfway through Legion at the rate they're going.
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The answer is to never have your characters in a position where they are doing such ludicrous amounts of damage.
When I hear someone say they did millions of damage, my first thought is, "Did you drop a nuke on them?"
Content is lore, quests, substantial activities that either expand more on the current patch's tale or provide some kind of tangible benefit to completing the entirety of the questline beyond unlocking a grind.
Raids are content. Dungeons are content. Zone-spanning questlines with lore implications are content. Random batches of daily quests that are beyond Kill X, Kill Ten of X, pick up X" and grant some glimpse of unique lore are content.
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I'm not saying you have to like them, but you can't just dismiss them as not being content. Otherwise PvP and non-LFR raids aren't content.
I absolutely can dismiss them for the purposes of discussing whether the game has enough content.
TBC and Wrath kept me plenty busy without needing to complete that kind of stuff.,
Dungeons are kind of meh to do, and they nerfed the cta bags. Also they took out the valor to honor conversion which I hated. You cant pvp until you have blues, let me do dungeons for them. I know ashran is their solution but the same undergeared problem exists there and i dont like being a detriment to the team.
My wife likes doing completely different things so i can see how other people like to do X. I just see pet battles and mount farming as having a rather low ceiling on progression before they get overly tedius or not rewarding. They can occasionally be fun, but they seem to lose their draw much quicker than other things for me. Part of it is just lack of support. But i hear there is going to be a dalaran tournament in legion so we'll see how that goes.
Also f childrens week and tbc timewalking being events during my finals weeks. Those are things i want to do but have papers to write.
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Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
the diablo approach isn't bad, it's just that in diablo there are so many hits happening every second that the screen becomes a jumble of numbers anyway. You can use combat text addons to strip out the non-critical damage numbers, which makes things a bit more readable. They ought to make that a default option.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget