World of Warcraft: Current Year

MMO PvP is trash in general. In groups, it basically becomes Zerg wins and small scale is never actually balanced.

Lodi said:

I think ability bloat in general made pvp obnoxious/bad

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I'd agree in like WOTLK-MOP but atm I have 4 buttons on most of my characters. Except resto shaman and holy paladin has a billion niche buttons on top of those 4.

xzi said:

I'd agree in like WOTLK-MOP but atm I have 4 buttons on most of my characters. Except resto shaman and holy paladin has a billion niche buttons on top of those 4.

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And a thousand forms of CC being thrown left and right. The bloat comes in the form of utility that each and every class can take on. Most everyone one has a counter to a counter to a counter. It gets so frustrating to do any kind of group fight. I used to just blow things up or get blown up. Simple, but fun.

random ramble, but I'm kind of optimistic about shadowlands tbh. I enjoy the gameplay of BFA in its current state, on most of my characters. But I really can only play 2 of them at an actual competent (in my eyes) level.

There's only a handful of things going into shadowlands I'd really love them to change and that's to do away with the GCD changes. Just revert all of them to how they were in legion. I understand it's better for arenas but holy fuck I have near 70 days played in BFA alone and I am STILL not used to the change as prot pally. The heal being on GCD is fucking weird to me when things like ignore pain were taken off, and the heal itself has been nerfed several times anyways.

Essences were fantastic.. to acquire once. (I'm still not doing it on my alts lmao) They're just more talent points and I understand that but my paladin has a different build for literally every type of content, even old raid farming content. It's the first time in a long time in the game that I felt like I could build my character how I wanted rather than how blizzard wanted, and I love that more than anything. I hope they aim for more of that in the future.

Well, WoW isn't an MMO it's just an action rpg that occasionally has raids. The servers can't even handle more than 60 people in one zone without drastically lagging. We're never going back to how classic or EQ is lmao

Mist said:

I've been playing a lot of 2s and some things and it's about as balanced as one would ask for. Sure, there's a couple real dog specs out of the 36, but I can't think of a single class that doesn't have at least 2 good pvp specs with a bunch of talent and pvp talent options, plus azerite options.

I think people are way too picky.

Btw, what was so good about Legion that everyone says was much better than BFA? Was it just the way the expansion/story/raiding progressed? Or more mechanical things?

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The world quests gave mounts so they were totally cooler and not a hamster wheel. Or so I am told. I thought no world quests are shit. There is basically no difference between the two expansions except the gcd change. Everything else is the same just reskinned.

Yes, I'm sure that's why there was a massive drop in players between Legion and BFA.

Mist said:

I've been playing a lot of 2s and some things and it's about as balanced as one would ask for. Sure, there's a couple real dog specs out of the 36, but I can't think of a single class that doesn't have at least 2 good pvp specs with a bunch of talent and pvp talent options, plus azerite options.

I think people are way too picky.

Btw, what was so good about Legion that everyone says was much better than BFA? Was it just the way the expansion/story/raiding progressed? Or more mechanical things?

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Azerite gear has been bad the entire expansion. It was a bad system from the jump and still is. Warfronts are largely boring and worthless. Islands basically just AP grind/cosmetic shit that are just faceroll. Essences not being account wide is dumb.

Legion just seemed far more engaging to play multiple characters with Mage Tower challenges, artifact weapons/stories, class order halls, etc. A lot of the main features for BFA feel pointless or are terrible for multiple toons.

But if you're Fyff, it's just the GCD changes.

Merrith said:

Azerite gear has been bad the entire expansion. It was a bad system from the jump and still is. Warfronts are largely boring and worthless. Islands basically just AP grind/cosmetic shit that are just faceroll. Essences not being account wide is dumb.

Legion just seemed far more engaging to play multiple characters with Mage Tower challenges, artifact weapons/stories, class order halls, etc. A lot of the main features for BFA feel pointless or are terrible for multiple toons.

But if you're Fyff, it's just the GCD changes.

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And...

Raiding still had tier sets that changed your rotations a bit, kept things a little fresher, and kept people playing a few more weeks/months each tier. The artifact weapons had at least 1 active ability, and a bunch of different power-ups for other things (sub rogues became immune to fall dmg, for example). They added more traits to artifacts mid way through. The Legiondaries were a stupid and frustrating RNG system with vast differences in power, but they also changed your rotation, and they added more good ones (for most specs), mid way though.

But no, just that GCD change...

The Artifact Weapons felt so much better than the Necklace + 3 pieces of gear tied to it. Significantly less RNG as well.

The RNG on Azerite pieces is massive and while they have 'tried' to bring traits into line, there are always outliers that can make or break a competitive build (not that it should matter to 99% of the game's population). Combined with the 'shine' having worn off of Artifactzerite Power in it's second expansion, it leads to higher burn out.

Then add Essences not being account wide and some rank 3 essences requiring MASSIVE (relatively speaking) of effort to obtain, means you are not playing your Alts as much, which lowers your investment to the game.

The storyline is probably the worst it has ever been... and that is saying something for a game that has lifted almost it's entire premise from other franchises. Horde is evil monsters, nope! Just the leader, so we can all be friends again! Sylvanas v Lich King soured many people. I have not seen that many 'nerds' butthurt since the abortion Deadpool with razor arms/teleporting/laser eyes.

Toss in a slew of good-to-amazing single player games that came out in 2019, it means WoW is on the low end of it's population, if it's numbers were not being propped up by combining Classic+Retail subscriptions.

Not sure I am getting the RNG on azerite pieces? Azertite pieces are static the same piece always has the exact same options so if you know what azerite shit you want you can focus on getting that specific piece and it will always have its specific stuff. Its about as non random as possible.

Essences not being account bound is annoying but the artifact stuff in legion was spec specific and not account wide so it had a lot of the same alt issues of having to recreate the wheel each time to get their stuff. I think a bunch of the essence stuff really should go account wide but the worse issues is fresh players who have not done it before are going to be stuck doing a TON of old content to unlock them which is unusual for blizzard. Normally you just do whatever is current to be caught up and that is not the case this time.

For the RNG on Azerite pieces, I primarily mean the M+ cache and the vendor being the only way to get higher tier pieces and it being so incredibly random. Which was also an issue in Legion with the relics, but it feels different, I guess?

Relics weren't as important as Azerite traits. And the currencies used to buy them were far easier to obtain.

Mist said:

Oh yeah I do hate how they give out the higher tier azerite pieces, it is a stupid system. There's no good fucking reason why they can't be on the normal drop table.

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Originally, the only way you could get the mythic raid equivalent (top tier, currently 445), was randomly dropped from the weekly M+ chest. I think the reason you couldn't get heroic raid level (currently 430), from the M10 end of dungeon chests is because it couldn't titanforge. I guess the devs were afraid of people getting discouraged after getting 10 azurite 430s in a row, when they were really fishing for the TF 455 trinket with a socket and leach.

They made the Azurite system a centerpiece of the xpac, implying that it was more friendly to M+ than tier sets, and then gave them (the M+ only people) a 1 out of 100 chance, once per week, to get the top tier azutite item they wanted. Suffices to say, people were a bit upset. The current system is what they could throw together, while still letting mythic raiding have the gear advantage (faster, in /played, to gear up to top ilevel in raid than m+).

The Azurite system is a system that is indicative of the xpac, as in, it's a failure. Unlike the tier sets of old, it didn't change change how people speced or how the spec was played, for the most part (the times it did change the spec, they usually nerfed the trait until is was worse than others). It took them as much time, or more to balance azurite traits, than it took them to balance tier sets. Many, if not most specs needed at least 2 sets anyway, a M+ set that was built for trash speed, and a raid set that was built for bosses.

So, they wrote off their xpac defining system and locked it in place (other than scaling) ...half way through the xpac.