World of Warcraft: Current Year

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Ukerric

Ukerric

Bearded Ape
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Vimeseh said:
I know most people will say I'm crazy but getting rid of both artifact weapons and legendary's is probably the worst decision that blizzard made in the transition from Legion to BFA.
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No. Getting rid of them isn't the worst decision. REPLACING THEM with Azerite gear is the real culprit. If they simply scrapped the artefact system for normal gear and put something new to do with your legendary item (because everyone is legendary these days), that would have been ok.

As it stands they will have to spend their entire expansion trying desperately to tweak the azerite system, and they will probably never end up with a coherent, let alone good system. What's in 8.2.5? Alternating rings for each specs? A sixth ring because everyone hates the fifth? Residuum WQ? (I expect those in 8.3.5 if we have an 8.3 and the expansion does not peter out after 8.2)
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

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xzi said:
It makes sense to purposely inflate the bosses instead of everyone completely blasting through them cause it's tuned for entry-level normal gear I guess. But it's kind of annoying.
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This encapsulate WoW's overall design for the last decade.

You will progress at the same average speed all the time, rather than whenever you want to. They are absolutely terrified of people blowing thru content, so they've placed bars and catch-up treadmills everywhere.
 
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rinthea

rinthea

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Ukerric said:
This encapsulate WoW's overall design for the last decade.

You will progress at the same average speed all the time, rather than whenever you want to. They are absolutely terrified of people blowing thru content, so they've placed bars and catch-up treadmills everywhere.
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It's sad. Short term gain that has brought long term destruction.

I'd like to know how much of their revenue is from cash shop transactions. While not in the '2% of whales generate more than 98% of everyone else' of most free to play games, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still quite high. High enough to force them to cater to these players (catch up mechanisms) at the expense of quality development decisions.


You just have to let players burn through PVE content. Then steer them towards player generated content and social progression, such as PVP, social/server reputation. Content that never ends and can hold most people (or better yet incentivize people) for half the distance in between the next lot of PVE content. But that's all been killed off long ago, let alone built on.

Those early Vanilla days, when you could take your PVE gear into some PVP and one shot some clown. Or a guild raiding a faction leader in a city. That whole high warlord grind was ridiculous, but it was the right idea. Steering people towards player driven content after they've done everything else. Adding some social reputation to the game.

Now it's log on, do your chores. Log off.
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

Bearded Ape
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rinthea said:
Now it's log on, do your chores. Log off.
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Worse, it's "log on or you'll be set back one day behind, do your chores, log off". Except that, since there's hardcores, there's more and more chores (currencies) piling up so that the hardcore still display "high engagement metrics" while semi-casual are slowly getting to the "why do I bother, I'll never finish all of this anyway" point.
 
BoozeCube

BoozeCube

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Here is a crazy idea I know, but hear me out. What if, the game doesn’t need some faggoty artifact grind system or azerite and they can both be tossed in the fucking garbage, also not every fucking player needs some bullshit legendary for all to jerk off on.
 
Vimeseh

Vimeseh

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Ukerric said:
No. Getting rid of them isn't the worst decision. REPLACING THEM with Azerite gear is the real culprit. If they simply scrapped the artefact system for normal gear and put something new to do with your legendary item (because everyone is legendary these days), that would have been ok.

As it stands they will have to spend their entire expansion trying desperately to tweak the azerite system, and they will probably never end up with a coherent, let alone good system. What's in 8.2.5? Alternating rings for each specs? A sixth ring because everyone hates the fifth? Residuum WQ? (I expect those in 8.3.5 if we have an 8.3 and the expansion does not peter out after 8.2)
Click to expand...

While I agree with you on the overall crap that is azerite. Simply doing away with artifacts all together still leads to this totally insipid and boring class design where you are playing with half a character for most specs. Since they did nothing to address that, having the golden traits and different boosts from an artifact would have somewhat dealt with that issue like it did in legion.
 
BoozeCube

BoozeCube

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Vimeseh said:
While I agree with you on the overall crap that is azerite. Simply doing away with artifacts all together still leads to this totally insipid and boring class design where you are playing with half a character for most specs. Since they did nothing to address that, having the golden traits and different boosts from an artifact would have somewhat dealt with that issue like it did in legion.
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Exactly why that style of design needs to be abandoned. Your class should be able to play and perform on it's own without a certain piece of gear or equipment. I am fine with things like trinkets/tier sets providing slight variances to change up rotations and things but that really should be it. At the very base level a class should function and feel smooth to play. The loss of the artifact and GCD stuff just made everything feel like shit.
 
moonarchia

moonarchia

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Vimeseh said:
Because then you would have every piece you wanted in a month and supplement pieces in two. I get why they wouldn't want it to be argus levels of attainment but they should have launched azerite purchasing at the ToS pace for acquiring a legendary.

I also dont agree that the artifact system had to go away anytime soon. It gave them a lot of flexibility and could have been shifted to various gear slots with minor tweaks since obviously you wouldn't be collecting ring appearances. They could have milked the system for 2-3 expansions assuming the game lasted that long. Using a different piece of gear would allow them to iterate on it as well as giving a built in excuse for class design directions.
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Khadgar sticks both fists up Jaina's ass and finds that what was stuck up there is.... Kanai's Cube. Juice box those legendary effects and use the best 3 in future xpacs!
 
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xzi

xzi

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BoozeCube said:
Here is a crazy idea I know, but hear me out. What if, the game doesn’t need some faggoty artifact grind system or azerite and they can both be tossed in the fucking garbage, also not every fucking player needs some bullshit legendary for all to jerk off on.
Click to expand...

I think the rogue legendary daggers, or even the legendary dragon staff were perfect legendary systems that they should consider doing more of. You had to hit difficulty content, then you had to do relatively difficult solo content (for the time), and a big fuck quest chain overall. But will those even matter anymore when every single patch is a full gear reset? probably not
 
a c i d.f l y

a c i d.f l y

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BoozeCube said:
Exactly why that style of design needs to be abandoned. Your class should be able to play and perform on it's own without a certain piece of gear or equipment. I am fine with things like trinkets/tier sets providing slight variances to change up rotations and things but that really should be it. At the very base level a class should function and feel smooth to play. The loss of the artifact and GCD stuff just made everything feel like shit.
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One of the things I really liked about Wrath, was how your character changed over time to play even better at higher stat levels. Over a certain crit, eclipse would proc so much more consistently for Balance spec, and damage escalated in a near logarithmic fashion. BfA is like the most diminished, inverse log curve. Better your gear, the less benefit you feel from upgrades. Legion was Wrath on steroids. Your strength at Emerald Nightmare geared was absolutely dwarfed by your power with Argus gear. Between ilvl320 and ilvl370+, strength changed by 5%, sometimes. Inconsistently, because there's so many secondary rolling, rng buffs now.
 
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Valishar

Valishar

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One of the major problems with BFA is that so much developer time spent on new distinctive content to seperate it from Legion was wasted because there is no motivation for players to do it and there is no good reward structure in place for it, and the actual design of the encounters is super shallow.

Islands are just Azerite farms, and extremely repetitive, totally underutilized.

Warfronts are unloseable scenerios mostly used once for the quest or to grind up alts.

That's probably 50% of the new content of the expansion and 90% of the uniquely BFA systems. It is just squandered away. Say what you will about WOD garrisons but they were at least relevant content.
 
Ukerric

Ukerric

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Valishar said:
Warfronts are unloseable scenerios mostly used once for the quest or to grind up alts.
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And rather than make a new one in 8.2, they're making Heroic Warfronts (which require pre-made groups).
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

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Heroic ones! Meaning the enemies have heroic Nazjatar levels of health and damage (but the warfront yields Mythic Nazjatar ilvl gear once per reset, vs LFR levels of gear for normal). See, I've made heroic warfronts in less than 5mn! The beancounters will love all that additional content for cheap!
 
Kuro

Kuro

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Will I have to click each tree multiple times to lumberjack it, since these are Meaty Epic Trees?
 
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