World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

[RapineDel]

Over 5 million, and it never dropped. How do people find justifications to continually pay to play a game for years? Especially with all I hear about it being complete shite.

They'd be lucky to have 2 million players now as we're 10 years on from those expansions.

They make most of their money from selling microtransactions to the morons who've stuck around and will defend just about anything.

 

[Theodora]

Does modern WoW still go moths and months between content patches? That was always the reasoning I heard for others quitting, simply boredom from doing the same content over and over and over in attepts to grind out whatever bs for their artifact weapon, or equivalent 'borrowed power' that would inevitably be taken away again at the end of an expansion's lifecycle.

 

[Tacgnol]

Does modern WoW still go moths and months between content patches? That was always the reasoning I heard for others quitting, simply boredom from doing the same content over and over and over in attepts to grind out whatever bs for their artifact weapon, or equivalent 'borrowed power' that would inevitably be taken away again at the end of an expansion's lifecycle.

Anywhere between 3-6 months between raids usually. I think Shadowlands ended up quite infamously being awful for that due to the stuff going on internally at Blizzard.

 

[Cromwell]

I heard for others quitting, simply boredom from doing the same content over and over and over in attepts to grind out whatever bs for their artifact weapon, or equivalent 'borrowed power' that would inevitably be taken away again at the end of an expansion's lifecycle.

Its quite funny that that was never much of a problem in classic or bc where you actually had less to do in terms of endgame content than later.

 

[Tacgnol]

I heard for others quitting, simply boredom from doing the same content over and over and over in attepts to grind out whatever bs for their artifact weapon, or equivalent 'borrowed power' that would inevitably be taken away again at the end of an expansion's lifecycle.

Its quite funny that that was never much of a problem in classic or bc where you actually had less to do in terms of endgame content than later.

It generally took a lot longer to progress the end game content in vanilla and TBC. The difficulty in Wrath onwards was made a bit more variable with the addition of the different modes (10 man and 25 in Wrath and then the more dedicated difficulties later).

Though a lot of the difficulty I actually remember in Vanilla was just getting 40 people together for a raid. Wasn't always easy depending on server and guild populations.

 

[Tyrr]

Anywhere between 3-6 months between raids usually.

I still remember this:

The numbers are days between major patches (= raids).

 

[Tacgnol]

The numbers are days between major patches (= raids).

Jesus, I remember the gap between MOP and WoD. Everyone was sick to death of Siege.

At least with Wrath they added that filler raid a few months before Cata was released.

 

[Theodora]

Honestly, from my relatively minor experience with WoW (WotLK and then Legion) I couldn't help thinking that the toleration of 'boss mods' really ruined the game in a lot of ways, between making the normal bosses too easy to learn, and harder encounters becoming terribly warped by Blizzard outright deciding to design bosses around the assumption that they'll be used.

BigWigs wasn't too bad, but DBM was absurd, and I'm not sure I can aptly put to words my disdain for people normalising the use of, and 'need' for, an alarm that screams at you when you stand in fire.

 

[Tacgnol]

Honestly, from my relatively minor experience with WoW (WotLK and then Legion) I couldn't help thinking that the toleration of 'boss mods' really ruined the game in a lot of ways, between making the normal bosses too easy to learn, and harder encounters becoming terribly warped by Blizzard outright deciding to design bosses around the assumption that they'll be used.

BigWigs wasn't too bad, but DBM was absurd, and I'm not sure I can aptly put to words my disdain for people normalising the use of, and 'need' for, an alarm that screams at you when you stand in fire.

Biggest Blizzard sin with encounter design was making it so you had to pre-empt abilities on most boss fights and actually move before they were cast in many cases. This meant keeping an eye on timers became essential.

Became a bit of an arms race between raiders/modders and Blizzard's encounter design team. Best way around it probably would have been to put some variance in the frequency of when bosses used abilities but also make the windows for dodging/avoiding slightly more forgiving.

I did notice towards the end a lot of fights did start having slightly more random elements of whether a boss used Ability A, B or C. Rather than using Ability A every 30 seconds and Ability B every 60 etc.

 

[Cromwell]

It generally took a lot longer to progress the end game content in vanilla and TBC. The difficulty in Wrath onwards was made a bit more variable with the addition of the different modes (10 man and 25 in Wrath and then the more dedicated difficulties later).

Though a lot of the difficulty I actually remember in Vanilla was just getting 40 people together for a raid. Wasn't always easy depending on server and guild populations.

that was my point. When you "finished" in classic most people just started another character or something by making everything extremly easy, fast and absolutely about the endgame they worsened the problem of not having enough endgame. I remember the first time this was an issue was probably at the end of wrath maybe earlier but I dont remember that.

eidt: ah there was already a graph for that

 

[Theodora]

Yeah, I don't think any MMO can truly do well in the long run with such a pure focus on "endgame", really makes too much of the content basically irrelevant at best and a chore at worst.

One of my favourite things about OldSchool RuneScape is that there isn't really an endgame; there are raids you can do, but they're just one aspect of the game among many. Very much about the journey, rather than the destination; something I wish more MMOs could get on board with, horizontal progression and all that.

But even if Blizzard realised that issue I'm not sure if they even could pivot their game's design and focus meaningfully so late into its history -- if only for fear of alienating the people that hung around despite everything, if nothing else.

 

[J1M]

TBC and Vanilla had attunements. The idea that each patch invalidated everything that came before was probably the single worst idea they had.

Years of time and systems wasted on catch up gear. Could have just doubled drop rates of old raids each time a new tier came out until they were 8x.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

DBM wouldn't have been necessary if WoW boss fights weren't overdesigned and their mechanics poorly presented to the player base. They are 10+ minute long fights with 20+ different unique mechanics and adds going off, depicted as tiny buff/debuff icons beneath the already small boss' nameplate, which you may or may not be looking at because you are also having to look at your cooldowns so you can play your rotation and the HP of your teammates and what is going on in chat. The fights are incoherent and you die for reasons that cannot be easily deciphered. Maybe you can spend an hour studying for just one boss, like a trial in FFXIV or a strike in GW2, but in WoW if you're PUGging you're expected to kill at least a half dozen or so bosses within an hour. It's impractical to study for all of them. DBM is the only way to somewhat make sense of what's going on and get your clears done in a timely fashion.

Contrast that with FFXIV or GW2, where the boss fight slowly tutorializes the mechanics to you, each mechanic in isolation with clear and consistent visible indicators of what is happening with clear, extremely visible indicators, before combining them all at once later on in the fight..

 

[mediocrepoet]

DBM wouldn't have been necessary if WoW boss fights weren't overdesigned and their mechanics poorly presented to the player base. They are 10+ minute long fights with 20+ different unique mechanics and adds going off, depicted as tiny buff/debuff icons beneath the already small boss' nameplate, which you may or may not be looking at because you are also having to look at your cooldowns so you can play your rotation and the HP of your teammates and what is going on in chat. The fights are incoherent and you die for reasons that cannot be easily deciphered. Maybe you can spend an hour studying for just one boss, like a trial in FFXIV or a strike in GW2, but in WoW if you're PUGging you're expected to kill at least a half dozen or so bosses within an hour. It's impractical to study for all of them. DBM is the only way to somewhat make sense of what's going on and get your clears done in a timely fashion.

Contrast that with FFXIV or GW2, where the boss fight slowly tutorializes the mechanics to you, each mechanic in isolation with clear and consistent visible indicators of what is happening with clear, extremely visible indicators, before combining them all at once later on in the fight..

Not to mention the experience of a WoW raid healer. I used to play one. Good luck seeing anything other than the party's status bars.

 

[Reever]

Not to mention the experience of a WoW raid healer. I used to play one. Good luck seeing anything other than the party's status bars.

That reminds me of this game I used to play on my phone while commuting years ago which was pretty much a distilled healer experience.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Not to mention the experience of a WoW raid healer. I used to play one. Good luck seeing anything other than the party's status bars.

That reminds me of this game I used to play on my phone while commuting years ago which was pretty much a distilled healer experience.

Oh my God, I hate it so much! That's perfect.

 

[Myobi]

DBM wouldn't have been necessary if WoW boss fights weren't overdesigned and their mechanics poorly presented to the player base. They are 10+ minute long fights with 20+ different unique mechanics and adds going off, depicted as tiny buff/debuff icons beneath the already small boss' nameplate, which you may or may not be looking at because you are also having to look at your cooldowns so you can play your rotation and the HP of your teammates and what is going on in chat. The fights are incoherent and you die for reasons that cannot be easily deciphered. Maybe you can spend an hour studying for just one boss, like a trial in FFXIV or a strike in GW2, but in WoW if you're PUGging you're expected to kill at least a half dozen or so bosses within an hour. It's impractical to study for all of them. DBM is the only way to somewhat make sense of what's going on and get your clears done in a timely fashion.

Contrast that with FFXIV or GW2, where the boss fight slowly tutorializes the mechanics to you, each mechanic in isolation with clear and consistent visible indicators of what is happening with clear, extremely visible indicators, before combining them all at once later on in the fight..

Not to mention the experience of a WoW raid healer. I used to play one. Good luck seeing anything other than the party's status bars.

This really hit me hard the other day, jumped into wotlk classic, rolled up a resto druid, spent a few weeks healing in a really small and chill guild... then, what the actual fuck am I even doing?

Now I'm just playing mount & blade 2 and Sevtech =/

 

[abija]

DBM wouldn't have been necessary if WoW boss fights weren't overdesigned and their mechanics poorly presented to the player base. They are 10+ minute long fights with 20+ different unique mechanics and adds going off...

Nope, is definitely what Tacgnol said, the need to pre-empt or react very fast to abilities, not the complexity of the fight. They took it even farther with having to do teamwork in very short time (x number of players, randomly chosen, having to coordinate positions in couple of seconds) which is trivial to handle with addons but VERY difficult to do with comms.

Everything you mentioned needs to be known anyway on top of the addon info. And the fun of the game is learning the encounters. Your complaint that you can't just jump in and do them is borderline retarded. Going normal->heroic->mythic also helps with not getting hit by information overload.

 

[BlizzardStockholmSyndrome]

Contrast that with FFXIV or GW2, where the boss fight slowly tutorializes the mechanics to you, each mechanic in isolation with clear and consistent visible indicators of what is happening with clear, extremely visible indicators, before combining them all at once later on in the fight..

The best part about FFXIV is that, between bosses, the indicators don't change. There's an indicator for "get the hell away from everyone", there's an indicator for "group up" and the floor has indicators for "stay here" and "get away"; also, the random mobs have icons for "kill asap" or "soak". This is kept static across all dungeons and all bosses. Sometimes a boss may pull a fast one on you but it's never a full party wipe. Also most bosses are beautiful to look at, they are distinct, they telegraph the attacks.

Compare to WoW:

• Same fucking recycled models over and over. Oh, I'm killing Giant Fell Orc number 40, Giant goat legged demon 69 or Recolor dragon with fell spikes 451? Who knows? But each one has a different mechanic
• Player has an arrow and now you have 1.5 seconds to know - do I get close, do I get far, do put a hand of protection on them, do I prepare my panic button because they will die.
• 25 guys in, 2 DPS died because the tanks swapped too fast, "ok gang, everybody wipe". Simply no room for error, if you miss one single kick then that's it, you have to start over.
• Schitzophrenic bosses: boss starts the fight by shitting a pool of lava on the floor. Tanks have to move him around the room. He shits a pool every 60 seconds...then he shits one at 30 then suddenly he takes 75.

And that's just the 4 that I can remember off the top of my head. There are at least 100 little things that makes efficient WoW raiding unfulfilling. I can't get immersed in a world that expects me to die 30 times just to understand the boss. Now multiply it 8-12 per raid.

But if I had to choose one single gripe, it would be mechanc timers. FFXIV gives you, at the very least 6-8 seconds to understand what's going on. WoW gives you 3 at best.

The funniest part is that WoW is not even a difficult game. There literally are 4 mchanics: For tanks, a swapping exercise. For healers, a heavy damage phase and for DPS, a positioning mechanic and an enemy priority mechanic. You can paint it any way you want but all the bosses do a combination of these. It's the fact that you have to do it flawlessly on the fist try where the difficulty comes from.

 

[Black_Willow]

Contrast that with FFXIV or GW2, where the boss fight slowly tutorializes the mechanics to you, each mechanic in isolation with clear and consistent visible indicators of what is happening with clear, extremely visible indicators, before combining them all at once later on in the fight..

The only GW2 pve mechanics are "wear zerkers" and "get out from the red circle" and also "dodge when there's area-wide aoe".

 

[Black_Willow]

So many casuls ITT

 

[mediocrepoet]

So many casuls ITT

The poop sockers always identify themselves.

 

[J1M]

Starting tomorrow is when you can make enough gold over a few weeks to pay for the next expansion. The main thing about the new professions seems to be that the work order system means everyone has access to BoP crafted gear without taking the profession.

I'm going to go with gathering professions while levelling, then drop one of them for enchanting and disenchant all of the questing items. Made over 50K in Shadowlands just from the crystals I disenchanted that way. Not really sure what I would drop enchanting for after that though.

Will be interesting to see how region-wide auction house for some items but not others impacts things.

 

[J1M]

For some reason Blizzard decided not to mark these on your map, even though they marked random treasures and every other inane thing.

Worth picking up so you don't have a neutered version of the feature:

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/handynotes-dragon-glyphs
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/handynotes

 

[Late Bloomer]

As if flying isnt enough. You need every single thing marked on your map. Might as well trade in the dragon for a teleport to quest spell.