World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

[J1M]

Maybe they had achieved things like indoor plumbing, you titan bigot.

 

[BlizzardStockholmSyndrome]

You are teleported back in time to the black empire, during a quest for the bronze dragons, doesn't look to have been a good time, so not sure what that lore bit is on about in uldaman.

Exactly! You are pulled back into the same raid zone you did 2 years ago which was literally hell on earth and we're supposed to assume it was not all that bad?
I remember the Legion pre-patch event where the capital cities had cultists spreading pamphlets saying that the Legion was actually a force for the good of the universe or other that said that it's impossible to fight the Legion so we better surrender or kill ourselves. Typical divide and conquer tactics that you would expect from a demon. Reading all the propaganda gave you an achievement, I think.

This seems like it's the same, except it's played straight and much, much dumber. In BFA you had to go into possible futures of Azeroth where you saw what would happen in case the Old Gods win and it sure wasn't pretty. Now the deconstruction of the story has reached the level where R'lyeh is equally good and you are a Titan supremacist if you disagree.

 

[Cromwell]

Now the deconstruction of the story has reached the level where R'lyeh is equally good and you are a Titan supremacist if you disagree.

you can write that again and again but it isnt there (yet).

 

[Dr1f7]

WoW's still better than it's ever been really
Legion made the game actually somewhat playable and every xpac since has just made it better and better

 

[Dr1f7]

fine since you all don't believe me:

Legion

• invented mythic+, finally some end game fun that isn't 30 sweaty losers shitting around a raid boss and taking bio breaks every 5 minutes
• invented mega dungeons
• invented mage tower

BFA

• some of the best dungeons in WoW (atal'dazar, king's rest, shrine of the storm, siege, underrot, waycrest manor are all cool af)
• visions
• islands
• warfronts
• horde side zones had dinosaurs

Shadowlands (HUGE W)

• Gave flying for every xpac (idk if you all realize this but before shadowlands you needed to do like 10 achievements in each xpac if you wanted flying...)
• Chromie time - now when leveling an alt you can run dungeons from any xpac you want at any time
• revamped levelling
• vault for gear progression - do what you want, get gear, simple as
• some banger dungeons (necrotic wake, plaguefall, theater, depths are all cool)
• torghast was fun to run every now and then

Dragonflight

• finally access flying immediately instead of being timegated
• new talent trees are great
• afaik no more dumb skinnerbox progression things like legion artifacts/bfa necklace. just do what you want and get gear

---------------

basically they've just been adding good dungeons for leveling to the game every xpac, getting rid of the shitty skinnerbox elements and bullshit grinds (pathfinder), turning the game into more of "play how you want" instead of "spend 5000 hours doing this crap you hate before you can do what you want"

 

[Late Bloomer]

 

[Dr1f7]

here's underrot from bfa btw
but yeah keep rating "cringe" or whatever and keep getting your opinions from ebic youtubers and redditors

 

[Reever]

This has to be bait

 

[Churrasco]

underrot was not fun on M+15

 

[Dr1f7]

underrot was not fun on M+15

that's probably your problem, if you're playing the game so much that you even get to M+15 it's time for a break

WoW is like, sub for a few months every year or so then move on, not like, obsess over meta strategies install clown horn addons and dump every waking hour of your life into it no wonder you hate the game

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

invented mythic+

Time trial dungeons have been in the game since MoP. They were a fun gimmick but they're not content that has longevity. Running through the same corridors over and over again, but faster for the sake of increasing your ilevel is not a compelling reason to play a game.

invented mega dungeons

Blackrock Mountain has been there since vanilla, Blizzard just got lazy and stopped doing them.

invented mage tower

Okay. Learning the tank challenge and then finally triumphing over it was actually fun. Sadly you do the challenge once and then that's it. Blizzard never added more challenges, and then eventually removed the MT to drive more FOMO engagement. Rerunning the same exact challenge you already beat before again but for a different cosmetic isn't fun.

some of the best dungeons in WoW (atal'dazar, king's rest, shrine of the storm, siege, underrot, waycrest manor are all cool af)

They visually look decent, but running through the same corridors over and over again isn't fun gameplay.

visions

Balancing tradeoffs is fun but sadly never extended past 9.3. Really highlights how shallow WoW class customization is.

islands

I did like Island Expeditions. I found BFA questing to be boring, and I hate spamming dungeons to level up, so I used Island Expeditions to level up to 120. Sadly, once again Blizzard didn't develop the gameplay and abandoned the feature.

warfronts

Failed to deliver on the fantasy of participating in a war. There was no challenge. Most of the team AFKed while a handful of guys did all of the work. There should have been PvP warfronts. If they were like Alterac Valley then it would've been cool.

Gave flying for every xpac (idk if you all realize this but before shadowlands you needed to do like 10 achievements in each xpac if you wanted flying...)

That doesn't retroactively diminish how unfun it was to try to navigate those zones before, when Blizzard began designing environments to be as frustrating to navigate as possible and amped up the mob density so you couldn't go 10 feet without aggroing a mob and getting dazed.

Chromie time - now when leveling an alt you can run dungeons from any xpac you want at any time

A start in the right direction but it was poorly implemented. Old content still poses no challenge whatsoever and is not engaging. It's a lonely experience where the world outside of the latest zones are dead.

some banger dungeons (necrotic wake, plaguefall, theater, depths are all cool)

Again, rerunning the same set of dungeons over and over for two years isn't fun.

finally access flying immediately instead of being timegated

This is a band aid and doesn't address the core problem that Blizzard has become incapable of designing zones that are fun to navigate on foot. Also, WoW dragonflying isn't anywhere near as fun as GW2's flying. The animation work isn't on par. WoW flying still feels floaty in comparison, the zones aren't designed to be flown through like in GW2, and you can ascend in WoW which trivializing navigating the environment.

new talent trees are great

You have been deceived by the presentation of the UI. You see that you have more choices but in reality the vast majority of those choices do not meaningfully change your gameplay at all. There are still only a small handful of meaningful choices. Otherwise, you're time is being wasted as you have to pick trivial nodes. The old MoP talent tree cut out most of the fluff and saved you more time. If WoW's character customization is to become more indepth, then Blizzard needs to actually invest effort into making it so, rather than just dressing up the same shallow character customization and pretending that there is more than there actually is.

afaik no more dumb skinnerbox progression things like legion artifacts/bfa necklace. just do what you want and get gear

Nice but still doesn't change the fact that there is the little in the way of fun things to do every day for months on end once you finish the levelling questlines and hit level cap.

that's probably your problem, if you're playing the game so much that you even get to M+15 it's time for a break

You reiterate five times how WoW has added dungeons to rerun over and over as if that is a selling point, and then criticize a customer for finding out that rerunning dungeons over and over is not enjoyable?

 

[Churrasco]

M+15 was not hard to get to, I just played like 2 hours on the days I logged in and on raid days I played for like 3 hours

 

[J1M]

In vanilla the higher level dungeons were dangerous places you could explore for hours without seeing all of the interactive elements.

In retail they are hallways that expire after 20 minutes. Mythic+ is the worst addition to the game.

I would like to see new endgame activities, but they will never have time to craft worthy ones when they insist on every raid tier being full of unique art and mechanics and several difficulty levels and promoting mythic+. They don't even have time left to make the tier sets look good.

I don't understand why they can't reuse assets and mechanics anymore like they used to. Most people trapped in the raid/m+ treadmill only care about the item upgrades.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I don't understand why they can't reuse assets and mechanics anymore like they used to. Most people trapped in the raid/m+ treadmill only care about the item upgrades.

It's not enough for their fragile selves to merely crow about their ilvl, you need to be able to see their e-peen grow in real time, not just when measuring with others to see who has the bigger one.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Mythic+ is the worst addition to the game.

 

[Puukko]

Mythic+ is one of the best additions to the game and could keep me subbed on its own. It's very fun to hone both your own and the team's gameplay and push higher and higher keys. Make use of new alternate routes and lesser used talents for niche situations.

 

[Maculo]

I reached 15-16+ level and tanked normal raids on my Blood DK, but I hit a wall on my holy play. I am struggling to break 10+ on my holy paladin and even LFR felt off. Being 380s ilvl doesn’t help, but certain DPS just make it miserable, such as ignoring explosion affix.

 

[Puukko]

I've played with exactly one pug player in M+ this expansion. Everyone else has been guildies, guildies' friends, friends' guildies. Having a stable core group of friends to play with is essential for me.

Explosive seems to be largely delegated to healers nowadays.

 

[abija]

They don't even have time left to make the tier sets look good.

Bitch pls... that's in the lack of skills and no fucks given category. Nothing to do with time.

 

[Reever]

Mythic+ is one of the best additions to the game and could keep me subbed on its own. It's very fun to hone both your own and the team's gameplay and push higher and higher keys. Make use of new alternate routes and lesser used talents for niche situations.

Maybe it's a matter of opinion, but I think that has more to do with the fact that you found a group that you enjoy playing with, rather than M+ being a good addition.

 

[Puukko]

Mythic+ is one of the best additions to the game and could keep me subbed on its own. It's very fun to hone both your own and the team's gameplay and push higher and higher keys. Make use of new alternate routes and lesser used talents for niche situations.

Maybe it's a matter of opinion, but I think that has more to do with the fact that you found a group that you enjoy playing with, rather than M+ being a good addition.

Chicken, egg. I used to do Mythic raid leading so all of these people joined my guild and now we still play together. But they wouldn't be here if the game didn't have such a robust offering of endgame content. I still meet new people I regularly play with because we did m+ together.

 

[Dr1f7]

It seems like we agree on a lot, I just said that WoW now is better than it's ever been, not that it's perfect or anything. I can understand the charm of vanilla-wrath but it's just way too slow and time consuming to do anything for me. Anyway I think we're mostly on the same page but just a few clarifications

Running through the same corridors over and over again, but faster for the sake of increasing your ilevel is not a compelling reason to play a game.

Right, I'm with you 100% here but increasing the size of the dungeon pool by adding quality for like 4 xpacs in a row is nice. Now when levelling an alt you have such a huge variety of good dungeons to run through that even if you stick to recent ones you probably won't run them more than twice each so they won't get stale.

Yeah I'm not a fan of running the same 8 dungeons in current xpac more than like once normal, once heroic, 2-3 times mythic, then a few mythic+, and when I've had my fill I'll either unsub or make and level an alt or do some other shit.

I did like Island Expeditions. I found BFA questing to be boring, and I hate spamming dungeons to level up, so I used Island Expeditions to level up to 120. Sadly, once again Blizzard didn't develop the gameplay and abandoned the feature.

Failed to deliver on the fantasy of participating in a war. There was no challenge. Most of the team AFKed while a handful of guys did all of the work. There should have been PvP warfronts. If they were like Alterac Valley then it would've been cool.

Yup blizz has a bad habit of coming up with cool ideas then totally abandoning them when the metaslave sperglords light a fire on youtube/reddit. At least they tried something but it's sad to see cool ideas get dropped just because some youtuber who plays 12 hours a day doesn't like how it impacts their raid parses or whatever.

That doesn't retroactively diminish how unfun it was to try to navigate those zones before, when Blizzard began designing environments to be as frustrating to navigate as possible and amped up the mob density so you couldn't go 10 feet without aggroing a mob and getting dazed.

Yeah but at least it's not frustrating to navigate with flying and you don't need to spend hundreds of hours unlocking flying pre-reqs for each xpac anymore. That was total bullshit and the game's better now that it's gone.

A start in the right direction but it was poorly implemented. Old content still poses no challenge whatsoever and is not engaging. It's a lonely experience where the world outside of the latest zones are dead.

idk I only really run dungeons and do pvp to level up so chromie is great for that. you'd be surprised though that randomly some of the dungeons are actually really tough, though I don't know if it's intentional or not (ubrs for example from WoD is hard af in chromie time but really fun).

I hate (and have always hated) WoW's world questing content so I can't speak on that.

You have been deceived by the presentation of the UI. You see that you have more choices but in reality the vast majority of those choices do not meaningfully change your gameplay at all. There are still only a small handful of meaningful choices. Otherwise, you're time is being wasted as you have to pick trivial nodes. The old MoP talent tree cut out most of the fluff and saved you more time. If WoW's character customization is to become more indepth, then Blizzard needs to actually invest effort into making it so, rather than just dressing up the same shallow character customization and pretending that there is more than there actually is.

Meh I've only explored death knight talent tree so far but I was able to make a semi-ranged necromancer type death knight build which is totally unheard of. It's probably not meta but idgaf I'm having fun tinkering. Also there's not really a ton of 'fluff' in the dk tree at least, most talents give new abilities or alter the purpose of existing ones

 

[Dr1f7]

oh and one more thing

Nice but still doesn't change the fact that there is the little in the way of fun things to do every day for months on end once you finish the levelling questlines and hit level cap.

just unsub once you're bored.. I sub for a month or two, have fun, then when it gets tired unsub and move onto something else. I'm not expecting the game to keep me entertained every day for two years; but that doesn't mean it's a bad game

 

[J1M]

Dr1f7

A just-as-viable ranged unholy DK was possible in the old talent system as well. There was one ability you couldn't modify into a ranged attack. As you said, not optimal, but viable enough for solo/group finder content.

 

[Dr1f7]

Dr1f7

A just-as-viable ranged unholy DK was possible in the old talent system as well. There was one ability you couldn't modify into a ranged attack. As you said, not optimal, but viable enough for solo/group finder content.

oooh i guess I never noticed but I just looked it up and yeah.
the old system though made you choose between infected claws, all will serve, and clawing shadows though, all three of which seem to me to be important for the ranged build while in the new system you can take all

similar issues in other places as well, like you'd need to choose between defile and pestilence, gargoyle and army of the damned, etc.. when I really want both for the build
now you can kinda just take whatever you want