World of Warcraft: Current Year

Araysar said:

How many people are still playing this 20 year old game?

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Sometimes it's nice to go back and play some classics, sometimes you just want the gaming equivalent of fast food.

Playing a game when other people are for the social aspects significantly raises it's value.

I'm seriously considering it but I'm not sure the timing will work for me as I'm back to work when it releases.

If I get bored of PoE and D4 this week I may look at Dragonflight.

Am I raiding hard while I grind out every rep for the tiny gains locked behind rep gating? Hell no.

Am I maybe doing a world boss, checking if any world quests have useful rewards twice a week for 30 minutes tops, and only spending more time for a point release? Yep.

For me the make or break feature is probably delves. If they are closer to mage tower in legion, then great it will give me a reason to play. If they aren't then I'll probably do the quick patch tour through this expac.

TBH the whole story seems completely shitty at this point, hero specs don't seem like anyone will care after a week and the rest of the content is going to be rinse and repeat from the last decade.

I do loath what mythic plus has done to dungeons and what the focus on mythic world first has done to raiding. It's degenerate and kills most of my interest.

Just got an email asking me to sub for 6 months. Not even really about War Within. It even has a picture of my character in all his Emerald Nightmare glory from Legion. Why is this interesting? Because they straight up banned that account in Legion for Honorbuddy use. Fucking retards.

Palum said:

For me the make or break feature is probably delves. If they are closer to mage tower in legion, then great it will give me a reason to play. If they aren't then I'll probably do the quick patch tour through this expac.

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Delves will probably be mediocre. This is just another version of the mostly shitty scenario mechanic and their third revision of really trying to make it a core gameplay feature. Islands in BFA were the worst and Torgast in SL, while not terrible, got old fairly quickly.

The chance that they can balance flex difficulty scenarios to the same challenge level as the Mage Tower when multiple class combinations are involved, and have proper rewards for it, is 99 to 1.

Burns said:

Delves will probably be mediocre. This is just another version of the mostly shitty scenario mechanic and their third revision of really trying to make it a core gameplay feature. Islands in BFA were the worst and Torgast in SL, while not terrible, got old fairly quickly.

The chance that they can balance flex difficulty scenarios to the same challenge level as the Mage Tower when multiple class combinations are involved, and have proper rewards for it, is 99 to 1.

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Well the problem is I want it to be fun and challenging, but they keep making everything competitive instead.

Palum said:

Well the problem is I want it to be fun and challenging, but they keep making everything competitive instead.

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They haven't tried to E-Sportify the scenarios before, but that doesn't mean they wont try now! I'm not thinking there is a very high chance that they will do that; I just doubt they will be able to make the right level of challenging and still able to give any meaningful reward. You will probably get some lame reskined mount and collecting mounts is a bit silly when there are 1000s of them now.

Burns said:

They haven't tried to E-Sportify the scenarios before, but that doesn't mean they wont try now! I wouldn't think they would, I just doubt they will be able to make the right level of challenging and still able to give any meaningful reward. You will probably get some reskined mount and collecting mounts is a bit silly when there are 1000s of them now.

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Well the difference I suppose is that in Legion mage tower didn't scale so you could get progressively more gear, but it was still mechanically tight enough that you couldn't fuck up that much (at least for most of them). To me that's reasonable for the highest tier of difficulty.

However you are probably right more generally as there's no way they can actually make this work with what little effort they will put in since it has to accommodate every spec and solo or groups. The best we can hope for is there will be an "easy" way to beat the scaling (e.g. like 2 dps only) and everything will get buffed to where that one is a decent challenge but still quick and easy to do.

RobXIII said:

I couldn't get into the Mythic+, I like fun and challenging, but putting a timer on things takes fun out of the equation for me.

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The timer is one thing, sure. But the dungeons before Legion, in Legion and to a much lesser extent in BFA - They all feel like they were built from the ground up. "This mob will fit really well into this group of mobs and give them a surprise in challenge!" ... Where now, everything is so quantifiable that you get that feeling when you're doing them. Dungeons are only different skin deep. If I had to make a spreadsheet of each dungeon, I could compare it side by side with the others when it comes down to mob density, time to completion, does it have invis potion access, etc. etc. Like a Check List. Fucking boring ass DND GM right fucking there.

Shadowlands actually had some really good dungeons that I enjoyed quite a bit. Like Mists was really fun and unique. Theatre had you ultra aware of your position. But even then, the mobs were very stale and curated. I think the Affix system in general is fucking lazy and I really only started to realize how lazy it was when they added it to D4. Why in the hell would you ask some shit for brains developers with zero imagination to come up with something fun and interesting? That stupid fucking pylon that chases you around in D4? Awful. Trying to get inside a bubble so lightning doesnt strike you? Awful. But at least they have some kind of visual difference. What does WoW do? It buffs mobs HP and DMG when one dies and they all get a bit bigger. Wooo... exciting. Heard that ones out, though. But Im sure that ying/yang affix for the season is going to be just WONDERFUL, too.

Basically, Mythic+ has made them create a "Method" in how they make the dungeons and.. it's sapped a lot of the fun out of them altogether. Never mind the arbitrary fucking kill percentage or the timers. Or how tanking has went from "Control aggro of this group of mobs and dont stand in bad shit" to "Get aggro on everything and run the fuck away until its all dead."

IIRC, they were hoping Mythic+ would turn into an E-Sport and that most of the changes was them trying to make it more "watchable" for an audience. *gouges eyes out*

M+ hit rock bottom in Dragonflight. Most of the M+ pros opted out of the expansion entirely after beta before Dragonflight launched.

The M+ E-sport scene was dead after SL. Not sure if War Within will turn that around, haven't even looked into anything besides Hero talents.

Possibly the best outcome of delves would be they make m+ pointless for gear and get abandoned en masse so Blizz is forced to reconcile reality instead of spreadsheets.

I'd buy War Within not once, but twice if delves eliminated M+ as the primary gear progression system. Specializing in M+ in Dragonflight, I was still able to get 421 ilevel season 1 while the rest of my raid guild was stalled around 415.

Getting rid of M+ titanforging system from BFA went a long way to cutting the legs out of mandatory M+, but it needs another blow. I hope it's going to be these delves.

jayrebb said:

I'd buy War Within not once, but twice if delves eliminated M+ as the primary gear progression system. Specializing in M+ in Dragonflight, I was still able to get 421 ilevel season 1 while the rest of my raid guild was stalled around 415.

Getting rid of M+ titanforging system from BFA went a long way to cutting the legs out of mandatory M+, but it needs another blow. I hope it's going to be these delves.

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Shit is just awful when you dont have a full group of friends to do M+ with. Or worse, you come back halfway into a season and everyones doing 15's and even though the catch up gear has put you up at an item level not too far behind them, no one will take you into their group because your raider.io score is MIA.

We already know Delves wont replace M+, though. Delves are the continuation of the "strategy" that they've been trying to do since Dragonflight release with the world being the "Third Pillar" if you remember that, of equipment gathering. Thats where all that faction grinding, time gated, bullshit came from.

Daidraco said:

Shit is just awful when you dont have a full group of friends to do M+ with. Or worse, you come back halfway into a season and everyones doing 15's and even though the catch up gear has put you up at an item level not too far behind them, no one will take you into their group because your raider.io score is MIA.

We already know Delves wont replace M+, though. Delves are the continuation of the "strategy" that they've been trying to do since Dragonflight release with the world being the "Third Pillar" if you remember that, of equipment gathering. Thats where all that faction grinding, time gated, bullshit came from.

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The point is no one will bother playing M+ if you can get gear other ways that don't require the logistics of raiding. So it's not going to replace it, but if popularity takes a nose dive then my suspicion will be correct. Of course M+ participation has been declining for some time because it's a retarded concept for one of two permanent PvE game modes.

jayrebb said:

I'd buy War Within not once, but twice if delves eliminated M+ as the primary gear progression system. Specializing in M+ in Dragonflight, I was still able to get 421 ilevel season 1 while the rest of my raid guild was stalled around 415.

Getting rid of M+ titanforging system from BFA went a long way to cutting the legs out of mandatory M+, but it needs another blow. I hope it's going to be these delves.

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I was in the opposite boat for the 1.5 months of DF I played. Most of the heroic raid was running 10 or more M+ runs a week to max the vault choices and I was doing maybe 3, since they get stale super fast. I went from first on the DPS meters on week one, to mid-bottom with no hope of closing the gap, unless I wanted to dedicate hours to M+ runs, including slumming it with PuGs.

Burns said:

I was in the opposite boat for the 1.5 months of DF I played. Most of the heroic raid was running 10 or more M+ runs a week to max the vault choices and I was doing maybe 3, since they get stale super fast. I went from first on the DPS meters on week one, to mid-bottom with no hope of closing the gap, unless I wanted to dedicate hours to M+ runs, including slumming it with PuGs.

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That's the thing, as Daidraco mentioned M+ isn't even a real option for most players, which makes it even more dumb to funnel people into it for forced progression. The sweat is out of control in the M+ scene, and I have PTSD just from how much +20 or -20 rating can completely lock you out of getting any groups by the time mid-season rolls around, or god forbid you skipped Season 1 and only started playing in Season 2. Nobody will be interested in inviting you to a static group if you have no Season 1 history when Season 2 starts.

You have to be on a FOTM in-demand M+ class, FOTM in-demand M+ spec, and start grinding rating immediately as soon as the expansion launches. If you fall behind in rating, you'll never get PUGs that are ascending up, just stagnation.

There is so much red tape on M+. It's been 3 expansions now they claimed they are going to address M+ and it's just been lip service. Like I said the most they ever did was gut the titanforge system from BFA so M+ couldn't surpass Mythic raid gear per piece. Nothing else was done since besides adding set armor to raids.

TJT said:

Didn't watch all of it but its a solid take from old Asmon. We all know it, but every developer since 2004 has been trying to recreate WOW 2004. Rather than trying to figure out what the next thing actually is or needs to be. Very few people in the industry have that kind of insight and passion right now. Especially the current generation of devs behind WoW.

His dumbass flow chart here is correct. Everything revolves around gay ass high skill ceiling combat to such an extent that nothing else actually matters. I have always called this structural difficulty versus tactical difficulty. As a social game you absolutely need to be able to bring 10-20 dumbasses to your raids who are cool people. Maybe not good at games per se but they are social and fun enough to game with and can learn to do at least a few things without fucking it up too badly. At the same time they can be useful to the group effort by crafting, farming, being on time and present, and so on.

Today its none of that. Only combat matters and nothing else. The genre going to the sweatiest poopsockers benefits nobody. Go play dark souls or some other game known for its difficulty. With the all consuming profit of MTX mobile games the desire to make a truly next generation MMO is small. There is a market but its back to the niche and nerdy circles for it.

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Yeah. One person being able to blow a raid is bad design for most people. Doesn't FF14 or whatever have casual friendly raids?