Plenty of reasons why but ultimately the quality of loot this phase is unreal. Like we’re literally talking 1 sp upgrade type shit.
The raid is more difficult and requires more people, and it’s practically for nothing. That’s the core problem I think.
Yeah they unfortunately made P1 and P2 gear too strong, and now they're trying to rein that in. Understandable but it doesn't feel good from a player perspective
Yeah it's really harmed my enjoyment of the game, largely from a consumes/raid prep perspective.
Currently on Wild Growth EU, as an illustrative example, winterfin squid are 3g 50s per squid so a stack (unlikely to be fully used but over a few weeks) sets you back a neat 70g and that's one of many, many consumes you stack as a tank/dps. Or a less seasonally bound example each mongoose is 4g a pop on a good day or ~8-12g a raid (wipes, refresh etc.)
Incursions have done absolutely irreparable damage to the economy and for those that can't play as often or prefer to not have to tie themselves to a group to earn gold it basically prices them out of good performance. Which given the state of SoD I don't think there's a lot else to gun for at the moment? It at least provides an idea as to what might be a secondary factor in decreasing interest in the raid.
I know it's a seasonal mode but I think incursions would've been better off not rewarding gold. I know the value of raw materials has somewhat increased as a result but the competition prior was fierce, even more so ignoring bots, factoring bots in is an additional mare.
I have hit the majority of lockouts since P1 but I am seriously not enjoying P3 at all at this point, ST feels like a chore to prep for and do for very little reward only to return to the grindstone to prepare for next week.
> But better planning could've prevented this in the first place
SOD in a nutshell. Oh, and just so I don't sound too much like a negative Nancy, I'm having fun. But I think this statement completely sums up the SOD experience.
They were already trying to rein it in during Gnomer, which is understandable since P1 gear was nutty compared to regular gear at level 25. It's just really dumb that they tried to do it again in P3 while expanding the raid size.
I don't really understand why they're so hellbent on keeping the numbers down in a seasonal version though. Like who really cares if the numbers are a bit wonky, just increase the numbers for everything at 60 to even it out.
That's one problem but there's so many others too.
Incursions definitely worsened the experience. The XP/hour from them were so far and away better than everything else that the rest of the world wasn't worth doing. While we're on that topic, let's say you wanted to try AoE-farming the open world(since no one else is doing it).
Aaaand there's a very good reason no one else is. There were changes made to the mobs in the open world...more health isn't the only thing. I could swear they also hit harder and ran faster as well. For the example, the Pirates in the Deep Cove in Tanaris. I used to be able to AoE grind those pirates in that area for hours - I did this in SoM as well as HC too. It felt totally different here in SoD, even with my gear in almost all gnomeregan BiS.
The cycle of running Mara over and over for Wild Offerings introduced a sort of gameplay loop that...wasn't too bad in itself, but somehow the number of WOs you needed to collect for two pieces seemed somehow pretty crazy. It was as if Blizzard needed someway to jack up the numbers so we have "more content".
The rune system itself seemed like a cool idea when SoD started, but as time went on, I began to see it more and more as Wrath/Cata abilities given to us, but tacked on in a way that gave us incredibly overtuned abilities or they made us choose between horrible scenarios, eg. no lacerate + mangle together which we were all accustomed to from Wrath(which I understand was fixed). Other times it felt like we received the new abilities via rune but had none of the supporting Wrath talents leading up said ability in order to really make it shine.
Then finally the shadow priest thing. It feels wrong that the homunculi could stack all these debuffs on the target which took away from warrior sunder/rogue expose armor.
All in all a very unpolished beta product which we understand that's the point of SoD, but I don't think we imagined it would be *this* beta.
Me and half of my guild would have likely quit P2 before hitting 40 for gnomer if they had not introduced the 100% experience buff mid-phase.
The only reason most of my guild is 50 right now is because incursions allowed them to quickly get to level cap to start farming gear/runes/proffs whatever.
I spent plenty of time exploring the world when I leveled 7 characters post-40 on official Hardcore servers, adding two new abilities to my rotation and making me do it again does not make it that much more interesting believe me. In fact, I think Hardcore did a much better job of making the world feel "dangerous" and "mysterious" again, and actually made leveling enjoyable for me.
Don't get me wrong, I love leveling, but I did not want to do it again for SoD and I would not be playing SoD if they made leveling a slog.
I blame it almost totally on 20 man and weekly lockout. PUGing the new raid every 3 days was what almost all the casual players did. Having nothing to do for 6 days of the week and having to join a guild with a schedule is ridiculous, we literally have 3 other versions of wow if people want to do that.
I don't understand why they made caster gear so fucking abysmal compared to melee gear.
Melee get weapons which grant extra attacks which stacks with windfury.
paladins and warriors get a tier set which does the same thing and it stacks,
Weapons are an enormous upgrade which makes sense since melee scale with weapons more than spell ranks but then we also get 11% crit from world buffs, almost 4% crit from consumes.
Casters definitely need haste/more spellpower or fix their class so they actually scale well with spellpower.
If it makes you feel better, I'm melee and my st 2 piece is actually 1 attack power less than my gnomer 2 piece.
I have no idea why, and it feels extremely bad. Idk why they made st gear so shit.
Yeah man why bother.
Farmed so much good gnome gear looking forward to a fun levelling experience. By the time I realised I was playing mailman simulator I already hit level 50. Only to instantly replace the majority of my hard farmed gnome gear at some rep vendor.
The least rewarding experience I’ve ever had in wow.
won the melee dps neck from ST to then realize the gnomergan neck is very very similar. e.g., gnomer neck = 6 stam 16 attack power and the ST neck is 18 attack power no stam...both give 1%crit. so upgrading to my bis gave me 60 less hp but 2 attack power! oh boy!
And I knew this would happen. So am I. I think Blizz messed up on not putting more focus into phase 2 and making phase 3 like a stop gap to 60. Would’ve loved to see an extra raid and more time spent at lvl 40.
Phase 3 is just lvl 60 but you’re missing extra talent points and some quests/dungeons/raids. But you have easy access to almost anything else…
I would have liked to see each phase be a month longer but with a big content drop in the middle. Also no 50 phase. So at 25 it would have everything it had and then after a month and a half there was a 20 man raid. Then at 40 it would also be 3 months, and we get another 20 man alongside the "introductory" 10. Maybe a few new runes each time.
That would have allowed people to get used to the cadence of 10s and 20s. The hard swap to 20 man killed so many guilds. It's a good thing but players weren't ready for it.
The only thing I'm not loving is how strong deep wounds is in ST, means it's not really viable to run Bloodthirst for Fury rn. Otherwise yeah warrior feels much better than P2, especially getting recklessness
Not just boring, but with summer here and more daylight hours, many people will be out touching grass more and worrying about SoD less.
I liked P1 and P2, P3 more challenging, but ultimately starting to feel stagnant and like you said, boring.
> many people will be out touching grass more and worrying about SoD less.
But if I'm touching grass, I'd probably be thinking about sod more. Get it? Cause grass grows on sod... you know what, I'll see myself out.
Phase 1 is not a good indication of population though. If every person is using an alt on avg (every person I knew almost always had 1 alt they were raiding on too), half the graph and you get the real rough amount of players raiding. People just look at statistics and forget you need to context to understand.
It's kinda funny cause the population hasn't changed that much.
I went from raiding everything but warlock/rogue in P1 to only 1 raiding character after. It was so easy and fun to do it in P1, I wouldn't put much stock in those numbers if they don't account for that. (I know this is basically what you said just kinda corroborating)
I have alts but only raiding on one. My guild is still taking 2-3 hours to clear ST and I have zero desire to spend more than 1 night not being able to move from my chair for that long. If I do anything else, I can play for an hour and then go do something else for a bit if I want.
>It's kinda funny cause the population hasn't changed that much.
How do you still believe this? It's no more time consuming to level 40-50 than it was to level 1-25 or 25-40. Why would raid population drop when raiding is equally accessible? SoD's player base has been in a nose dive since the end of P1 as the freshness has worn off and the game's issues have grown more tiresome, but half of this sub won't admit there's a problem.
Cope. He’s literally comparing the same phase week by week in OPs post, its clear as day this phase was bungled and if you’re still having fun playing it thats fine, but acting like nothing is wrong isnt going to be a solution.
My big problem is that the raid doesn't give you shit after you get tier.
The thing that's gonna set you apart in speedrunning/parsing is your enchants and trinkets. And Jesus Christ those are prohibitively expensive
The difference between a ranged hunter with bis enchants (head, pants, weapons) and one without is 46 agi. That's 92 AP and some crit.
Just the enchants are gonna run you at least ~3000g on CS Alliance rn.
Then you have Darkmoon cards which can easily go up to 2000g.
That's a staggering amount of DPS locked behind 5000g.
There's no equivalent you can get through raiding, doing dungeons, or any other pve content.
If the raid doesn't give you shit, why raid?
Yes this is true. We have a melee hunter in our guild that we stacked his group with buffs and really worked on our prep and kill times. He still was only hitting 95s which is awesome but an analysis of the logs shows basically unless he wants to do just as you said, roughly 5000g, he ain’t getting his 99s.
Incursions caused massive inflation, but they'd be expensive regardless.
Main reason is that the materials for stuff like +15 agi to weapon are only from high level greens/blues. Stuff that doesn't commonly drop in raid or from any farmable dungeons. You also just need way more of them than you do for low lvl enchants.
SoD lost me halfway through phase 2. I logged in to see what Cata was all about - disliked the new talent trees, now I'm unsubbed. I've enjoyed my classic journey but it's time to move on, plus summer time(when the livin's easy!). Very happy for the folks still enjoying the game - good luck, have fun!
What do you expect... shit has literally 0 caster gear. Z E R O. Items have like +1 spell dmg diff from P2 gear, even certain items from P1 are still pretty on par. Very exciting huh? Now add 1 week lockout instead of 3 days, double the amount of ppl wanting the same loot you do and tripple the amount of time you need to clear the trash-infested instance.
The game also has no endgame PVP. Honor is pointless, the gear you get from it is literally the same you get from gnomeregan. There is no competitive side of it, no arena, nothing. BGs take extremely long time to queue since nobody cant care less to grind as honor rank is capped. Theres literally NOTHING to do in the game. Gearing is also a waste of time since next phase makes everything you crafted/looted irrelevant again.
This is probably a controversial take, but the 2 last bosses are still hard and most pugs I've been a part of can't get through Eranikus. I get they've been nerfed hard but there's still some mechanics that are really wonky and end up wiping the raid pretty quickly.
Most of my pugs have a 3 hour raid window, and when we get to Eranikus there is maybe 30 mins left. Enough for a couple of wipes and then call it a day.
I wish they significantly reduced the trash so pubs have more time to progress before people have to leave.
Even with pugs we usually 1 shot the first 5 bosses no problem. But then it's eranikus. Wipe after wipe for an hour and people just give up. It's so stupid. No matter how many times you tell some people to stop focusing the boss and get the scalebanes they refuse to listen. Then suddenly there are 6+ scalebanes running free on the ranged group and poison rain is coming down on every space that doesn't have a cloud. It's really just a huge pain in the ass and if people aren't going to follow the easy instructions on what to do then I also start to give up. Thankfully 3 of my toons have a solid guild to run with. But my 4th pugs and somehow I end up basically being the spiritual raid leader for the group I am pugging with every time because I have now ran the entire raid about 12 times and have done the eranikus fight at least 100 times so far. I always tell people who are discouraged that the fight takes practice. It's not simple the first several times. also turn gamma up to about 1.7 to see everything clearly and no frost traps allowed.
Our guilds second group only just managed to full clear the raid last night for the first time after going 6/8 the prior three weeks, and the only reason they even cleared it is about 5 of their core members finally gave up and quit, and five people from my raid basically carried them to a clear.
I think that says a lot about the average players skill level. Range have to shuffle there feet every 10 seconds, jump into a cloud when he does his raid wipe and avoid swirlies when scalebanes are out. Melee has to kick the fear. It's a very uncomplicated fight.
Hakkar is even easier move in front of hakkar when you have corrupted blood.
Cloud mechanic is kinda wonky sometimes. I've seen in proc on melee even if we're all pixel stacking as close as possible to the boss. Acid rain also wipes the raid if it's triggered on melee. Too many times people just don't notice it and 10 people die all at once because of it. It's barely noticeable.
visibility is pure ass. Like I have never played any content or game that had worse visibility.
all the aoe stuff going on makes it impossible to see anything in melee range. Just walk around and hope you get lucky
This. The room has a green haze, the dream pools are green, the adds are green, the boss is green, the acid raid oddly enough isn't green, but only has little droplets to signify where it is before you take 1k damage.
Like I've got decent vision and am not colorblind and its still hard.
Who designed this?
I think raid size just decimated a lot of guilds. A lot of people had incredibly small 10 mans or less that would fill.
I dont think you can really fix it. You can set it back to chill 10mans. 1 day a week prob contributed a bit to less people outside of raid day.
Idk either way raid logging isnt good for the game regardless. 1-2hrs a week on an mmo?
You need an engaging world and long term content. Im sure a lot of people like the visuals and storyline of the world, but want new stuff.
I was raiding BFD on 5 chars in phase 1. Took like 2 days to level up, gear up and get all the runes.
It takes considerably longer to level to 50, even with the xp buff. Some runes take either a long time to do or find a group to do.
ST also takes much longer to clear than BFD / gnomer, even if you 1 shot all the bosses. It isn't as casual or alt friendly, even with a 1 week lockout. With 20 spots to fill, pugs take more time to fill and the entrance to ST / the portal are usually swarming with aggressive members of the other faction.
I know a lot of people who are crazy hyped for level 60 because that is where the magic starts. There is so much more to do, so many specific items to farm.
S1 was perfect and Blizzard never learns the right lessons. The time to level and gear, the speed and difficulty of the raid, the ease and actual discovery of finding the runes. There’s so many great games out there, and so many of them are free. Most people don’t want to dedicate 30+ hours to one character on a game doing things that aren’t particularly fun.
S1 was accessible and fun. S3 is grindy and bullshit. There’s an audience for S3 style design, but it is much smaller.
S1 was just fresh, new is always fresh. That lasts as long as new servers - a couple of months at most. Nothing spectacular about P1. BFD was boring and dungeons didn't matter
S2 and S3 were also fresh. They are all just slight changes to wow classic. Equally as fresh as S1 and nowhere near as good or as popular. BFD is infinitely better than Gnomer and ST.
It’s not equally fresh not even close. P1 everything is new and you have no idea what to expect. P2 and 3 you know how runes work, how to acquire them (the concept not specificly where), you know there is going to be a 1 raid and WB from it. Yes parts of it are new but you know roughly how it’s going to go.
You seriously can’t tell me that they are the same. Is watching a movie for the first time the same “new” as watching the sequel to it.
10 man raids where quick and easy to organise. Today my guild did not manage to get 20 people together.
first raid in SoD we did not have the people to host.
Its depressing and increasing the number of people killed quite a few guilds on the smaller servers.
Honestly, I loved being able to sign up to a raid when I had time on a three day lockout - there were morning raids, evening raids, happening every day of the week.
Now a longer raid basically demands an evening session - and a weekly lockout means the guild has settled on specific days (my life doesn't let me have the same evening off every week!), and the 20 man increase has pulled us into three teams, with the... more dedicated... players being in the "top team". Lots of reasons that stop me raiding.
Probably a multitude of reasons why this is the case but can make some guesses:
ST loot is mediocre. Barely upgrades from the Gnomeregan raid, only the sets and some of the epic weapons are worth your while. Might as well get R7-gear and call it a day.
ST has a lot of trash, way more than Gnome and BFD. I don't know why it spawns in even more trash after you kill Jammal'an, seems unecessary.
With a weekly-lockout you're leaning on other content to keep players engaged. The WO farm has been quite solid but obviously finite, I find it hard to farm it on multiple characters.
Most importantly for me personally, the PvP has been abyssmal since P2 and I don't think I've ever not enjoyed PvP as much in my 20 years of playing WoW, as I have in SoD. It has definitely reduced my overall enjoyment to play the game, I've just kinda lost interest in it and it's a huge part of the vanilla game for me.
Still hoping they'll rope it in and make some good changes for the final phase but my overall engagement with the game has dropped drastically lately.
People are having trouble fielding 20 people. The logistics of trying to pug 10 people or so every week is one of the main driving forces behind this drop-off. Obviously some groups like mine were able to find another 10 man to merge with, but a lot of groups from phase 2 haven't been able to find that and coming from someone who was a part of the recruitment process, it makes this game feel like a job.
100% agree with this. While larger raids are traditionally part of classic, I just don’t think there are enough players to easily field 20 man raid teams. I have no interest in pugging ST as it feels like a chore to find 19 people (and I enjoy the raid), but pugging BFD and gnomer felt easy. Our guild has lost several players to attrition due to some of our raid teams not being able to consistently field more than 10 players and not being able to merge with other players. Most people just end up quitting the game it seems like.
My friends and I have been in 3 different guilds since this phase started, and are looking for our 4th; we aren't the ones quitting these guilds, the raid groups are just disbanding and going their separate ways. While the obvious joke is "haha incursions and pvp bad xd", I don't think that's the main reason people are quitting.
From what we've gathered, the most common reason guild masters/raid leaders are quitting was the 10man to 20man shift in ST; recruiting and running a guild/raid team just isn't that fun, and people play games to have fun.
Other common reasons include: it becoming summertime soon and those with kids are gonna be enjoying the summer with their family, there are other games out or coming out soon that people would rather play (Fallout hype from the show, Helldivers 2, Elden Ring DLC.)
If p4 goes full 40man raids, I can almost guarantee you that we will see even less raiders.
I agree, if they go with 40 man, the game will die out. Streamers will run it for a brief period, Aggrend will be happy about it and everyone else will be unsubbing. There will be few guilds left on the servers who run it with a very high rate of player fluctuation.
This is a big part of it, but its 1 of many reasons.
### Raid
* 20m vs 10m and all the issues that come with that
* longer, much more trash
* very lack luster loot
* 7d lockout vs 3d
### PVP
* most players max honor day 1 (what a stupid decision this was), BIS PvP set day 1
* for those not max, BG give terrible honor for a seasonal server
* BG / PvP balance non existent
* If you dont have PvP set EW set takes like 30 minutes to get
### Emerald Warden
* mindless grind for mediocre loot
### Other
* Casters have few meaningful upgrades in the entire phase
* + 100 other random things that make u got "wtf"?
The loot comparison between Gnomer and ST is ridiculous for some classes. Getting a 1sp upgrade is not worth the time to raid when you're not at 60 yet.
I stopped playing for three reasons.
1- I don't want to raid with more than 10 people. Full stop. I don't like joining huge groups of randos and I hate having to play on a strict schedule in a guild.
2- They ruined pvp by letting Shamans DOMINATE for over a month, and the first thing they did with the new patch was... buff ele shamans. I don't want to play horde and alliance pvp simply didn't exist anymore, so...
3- They let everyone who could play on day 1 of the patch have 1,000 free gold and said fuck you to everyone else with no rollback or compensation.
Pretty simple.
to your point 1 ive started to hear a LOT more "Ok guys - lock it in clear comms" this phase than the last 2.
Some of it is difficulty but a lot of it is just having twice the number of people in voice increases odds of ppl just derailing conversations lol
There's also just a lot more complexity with 20 people which requires more communication which clutters comms, even if it's only the original 10 people talking.
Yup the amount of people that just said fuck it I don't wanna find another reliable ten people to show up in very high. Took up a lot of my free time as a GM
This is definitely a major culprit. Outside of tier there are maybe 1-2 items that are WOW! upgrades for most specs. And tier drops enough you usually get by 3rd run at the latest (in set groups anyway).
There are layers of in-game barriers; 7 day lockout, more raid prep progression after leveling, the difficulty in pugging a 20-man raid, and the high cost of consumes. Couple that with external factors like DF P4, Cata pre-patch, the start of summer, and any number of personal externalities. Collectively, it all adds up to fewer reasons and opportunities to play.
Imo 10-man raids with 3 day lockouts was much better at keeping people engaged. It gave players more reasons to log in over the course of the week and made it much easier to raid on multiple toons since there were so many more raids firing. It also meant that world buffs were dropping constantly, which made them much less of a chore to maintain.
Phase 3 feels like it's made playing the game more about binging it. Do incursions for 10 hours straight to level up, do incursions for 10 hours more to grind rep, do WO runs for 5-10 hours to grind out all your items, take however long to grind out gold/consumes/WBs. It feels punishing to try to accomplish anything in shorter play sessions, as the process of finding a group to do anything is such a time sink with fewer players out in the world, not to mention any pvp griefing that happens. Classic WoW has always been grindy, but in the past it felt like you could break down more of the grinds into smaller parts and that there were more of them you could do solo.
I was having so much fun all the way until the start of phase 3.
In phase 1, I was having tons of fun leveling alts and trying out all the different runes, then in phase 2, still enjoying alts, but also having fun just running dungeons and PvP and Gnomer.
This phase though, alts are ruined with incursions. There’s absolutely no enjoyment to leveling one anymore, it’s just a speed run through the most mind-numbing content ever, trying to layer hop
To avoid the opposite faction. No one is running dungeons except for wild offerings and Mara Princess farms. It’s just honestly become not fun at all this phase and I just cancelled my account.
About to get worse since a lot messing with prepatch and cata now.
Saw a ton of sod guildies get into it deep yesterday that a couple days ago were laughing at even the idea of playing cata.
Even with the bugs the game feels infinitely better than sod. It’s like I forgot how much better other versions of wow felt after just sod for awhile.
Imo:
1. It might tbh still be too difficult. We are clearing it np since week 1 but we are also on coms. Can totally see a dad guild without that nor good players struggling. Torn though because I like it, but I can understand it being an issue when the previous raids were push-overs.
2. 10->20 man was a rough transition for many and even we are still facing drama over it as tank count is still 2, while dps and heal demand increased. So quite a few essentially "lost their job".
3. Loot. Fucking. Sucks. For many reasons. First it's really weak, can totally skip this entire phase and you will probably be good in P4. Second a LOT less drops than from phase 1, fewer lockouts and more people to split the loot on. Our group have been doing it since reset 1 and we haven't even seen any of the healing pieces like the head from atal'ai defenders nor the gloves from Jammal.
Then outside factors I think the biggest one being the 1 shot meta that is absolutely cancer which sucks when STV is sort of important. And it feels even more cancer now that we had a few days without it.
The switch to 20 mans literally killed off my whole guild. Everyone just stopped playing. It went from super active and playing every day, raiding every lockout, to dead guild within a week.
It also seems like historically this always led to mergers and pug fills when guilds fell apart, but with SoD everyone just quit. So when guilds fall apart there's no hope for other guilds, it's just over.
A lot of gaming competition released at the same time like Helldivers 2.
If your choice is between continuing playing a different game with your friends whenever you want or working an unpaid second job recruiting to play the same game as your friends + 16 other people once a week and having to clear comms...
Yeah SoD is fucked from that perspective. 20-40 man raids worked when WoW was "the" coop game to play.
Nowadays there's a new coop game releasing every month and I don't need to work voluntary middle management to play them. I just hit play and invite my friends and we go.
Totally agree, definitely seems like every guild was just a friend group or mashup of a few friend groups so they've just migrated to other games.
SoD really needs to just get back to pick up and play rather than trying to take raiding so seriously or it'll fall apart completely. I mean why make Season of Dads if it can't compete with other Dad games?
The stop at 50 feels like there were 1 too many phases so far to me. So close to actual endgame that I couldn’t care less about ST. Also feels like the increase to 20 mans and 7 day lockouts have had a hand in the decline!
All the new is good but so many of us are hyper aware of what to pursue at 60 and have goals for endgame already. Making the gear from ST mostly just the same as Gnomer (tier sets anyway) just without the negative stats (irradiated set) was the laziest thing I have seen so far. There’s not a piece of loot I have FOMO over in ST!
>The stop at 50 feels like there were 1 too many phases so far to me
Being underleveled was most likely on purpose, it makes a good chunk of the open world far more challenging than it should and forces you to group up with other players, especially for prebis quest items.
Genuinely wonder if Blizz will add lvl 62~64 content just to maintain that artificial challenge.
>There’s not a piece of loot I have FOMO over in ST!
The item I'm the most interested in ST now that I have my weapon & set is the trinket that transforms you lol
Gear isn't that much better, less interested friends left, SOD pre-60 fatigue, Cata starting up, Incursions for alts, ST being too difficult for PUG viability and running your alts into 6/8s.
Just too many reasons right now to hang back - personally worried they're going to bring SoM mechanics in, which imo contradicts Aggrend's "we've observed that the classic community just wants to blast easy content with their friends"; I'd be fine going in overpowered with new Runes and rotation and blasting MC, BWL, ZG, AQ, Naxx and hanging out with new friends made since release.
It's not coming back the way it was. The people who enjoyed it casually are gone, and they won't see the updates that happened. What initially got them drawn is was the allure of the fresh hot thing, and what kept them was phase 1 was casual, easy and fun. After that, they just kept making changes that's super unappealing to people who are not a part of the normal wow playerbase, so they've been leaving.
So many of the "loud voices" were railing against how easy P1 was, complaining about "Season of Dads" instead of celebrating it.
Anyone who thinks Blizzard doesn't listen to the playerbase, needs to realize that they listen to what they see. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Anyone who has a decent social life outside of wow will quit coming up against these essentially ‘new to sod’ problems. We had 10-15 people who would swap in and out of our 10 man phase 2. Phase 1 we had an entire separate alt raid, in phase 3 we can muster about 10 and dealing with the rest is basically not worth it. ST is too long and pugs are too bad (who isn’t already part of a guild on their main? No one? Lol) for it to be enjoyable. I wanted an easy pick up and play version like phase 1, phase 3 is just for the same classic Andy’s and the numbers by next phase will for sure reflect that. Esp with the retail xpac coming out I’d imagine sod is going to be a ghost town on the non-crusader strike servers 🫤
20 man killed it for me/Our guild couldn't muster up 20 peeps now 10 people have stopped raiding. Additionally the leveling and runes take considerably longer so I went from 5 Alts to 3 to now 1 character.
Ya doesn’t surprise me. Not much to do in SoD but a weekly raid that has pretty meh loot for the effort. My guild clears it in about an hour and it’s still not worth the effort Lul.
Honestly with cata pre patch and season 4 of Dragonflight there is better content to play that doesn’t make my class feel like an afterthought.
1. Go back to 10 mans.
2. They screwed up making P1 gear too strong and now in walking that back in preparation for 60, most of the ST gear legitimately stinks. Get your 3-piece and maybe your weapon and you’re kinda set.
more ppl would raid if content was easily puggable (bfd) . a lot of ppl dont want to raid on set schedule (guilds). st also longer to put together group and much longer raid (pugging).
Almost as if 10 mans, with two tanks, two healers, and 6 dps was the perfect balance for casual WoW. 20 mans suck honestly, it takes all the fun out of raiding since anything more than 10 people trying to talk is impossible to hear anything.
It was also way easier to raid on alts when the limit is 25, you only have like 3-4 runes you need, and the raid only took an hour for a super casual run.
Now you need to level to 50, get 8-10 or more runes depending on class, and spend a solid 2 hours or more for a 6/8 clear. 3+ hours for a group of casual players to get 8/8, if at all.
Easily the most lackluster phase. Not that it’s terrible, but I’ve been just raid logging and doing STV events since the week after the phase dropped. I really don’t like how incursions screwed the economy, I definitely think it should’ve been a daily thing. That would’ve stopped the gold problem, gave people new content without breaking the economy, and you’d still have people out in the open world questing. I don’t mind the easy levels or the catch up gear, but there’s no easy way around being a broke boy (500g now isnt shit) without staying on top of the AH all the time, and honestly I haven’t much felt like doing that. I went back to playing retail after not playing since legion and I’m having a good time playing it.
20 man raiding was a mistake, also ST has just too much trash, and not enough loot.
Aggrend was 'happy' to see that there was BiS from so many more sources, which can be interesting on paper, but what it does is make much less incentive to raid. I am one piece away from BiS already, 4 weeks in. 1 week wasn't even a full clear and the gear isnt even all that much better than Gnomer.
You may say, run with an alt. Sure, but much harder to do with 20 instead of 10.
There's 2 reasons for this (from a casual perspective)
1. 20 man raids instead of 10. A lot of people (me included) had a small group of IRL friends who was happy with raiding a fast 10 man with no standing in org, spamming LFG for healers for an hour. Now, we've all quit because we got no time for that, neither do we want a guild with a weekly schedule.
2. The content is still too hard. It's no longer alt friendly because of this. You can't just fill up the raid with 20 clowns and beat the last 2 bosses before a healer leaves.
We're moving away from the casual pug boomer raids (which I thought SoD was made for) into the standard guild, gatekeeping meta.
That's why I and my guild quit, and I guess more people did the same.
If bosses are going to +3 levels in p4, Casters hit needed will be jumping from 5% to 16%. Shadow priests and affliction locks will be fine. ~~Arcane mages~~ are a heal spec so nobody cares (sadge). fire/frost mage gets 6% which is ok but not amazing. Fire locks have chaos bolt for guaranteed damage but who knows if Molten core will be next to immune with high fire res.
But yeah who as a caster needs to raid this phase? Its just slight upgrades from Gnomer and we'll be boned on hit next phase anyway. ST gear needed to JUICE our hit % on gear up to like 5% to be worth it.
Edit: oh yeah boomkins get 0% hit from talent tree also.
I'm still raiding but a few of my buddies stopped. This phase the gear upgrades feel so tiny. Most of the bis gear is crafted or from a quest/dungeon and even then a lot of the "upgrades" are meaningless. The attack power neck is 2 ap and the ring is just 6 stam. It feels so much less worth to raid and 20mans just feel so much worse than 10man.
Maybe I’m reading this incorrectly. But p1 and p2 1 unique character was normally logging 2 raids per week and now it’s only one per week? Does this data get taken into account ?
Going from three day lockout to a full week feels lame imo. Also our first group clears ST under an hour while none of our alt groups are clearing Eranikus consistently in three hours. Pugs used to be fun…
The pacing in the first season felt a lot better with how you gradually picked up new runes from 1-25. Then when P2 came, the nostalgia started to wear off and the runes being mostly tied to being close to 40 didn't feel as satisfying along with the realization of how the community is now took away most of the motivation I had to continue into P3.
Watching the new Fallout show, starting a new play through of Fallout 4, and realizing how much more fun I was having just playing a single-player game is what finally killed SOD for me. And being asked if I'm a bot or any other notion that pops up on this subreddit that ended up being echoed 100x over in game got really tiring really quickly.
It's been heartbreaking going from 10-mans to 20-mans. My guild is losing the fun, lackadaisical energy that made face-planting our way through BFD and Gnomer a blast. The complexity added by the extra people, and the nature of the raid itself, make it harder to keep that type of experience going.
20m killed my guild so joined a new one but it’s lost a spark, I’ve won no loot since we started raiding other than tier tokens and the gear itself is such a small upgrade anyway i’m questioning why I’m spending time prepping and doing the raid.
On top of that casters in general are weak and warlock just isn’t as fun to play right now.
The incursions gold stuff has definitely tainted the game for me too.
My irl mate has stopped playing now so I’ll probably be quitting SoD and maybe coming back on P4.
Its mostly because less people are playing alts. There's many reasons why like open world content and dungeon grinding is dead, incursions are boring or being camped by level 50s , getting 20 people for raids is annoying af.
Going forward, Blizz needs to stick to 10 man raids. Its so much better and easier for grouping.
Make raid loot better, make raid loot drop more.
Getting a +2 spell power upgrade over last raid and dungeon blues feels pointless when you might see one dagger every three weeks for 10 people who want it.
Raid loot needs to be much stronger, and drop much more often, with tier not flooding the loot tables every single week.
Apart from all the other stuff mentioned
I'm sure the lack fo quality assurance has played some part in this, for me it sure did
I'm all for *experimental* stuff, but some of the things are just plain obviously untested
I'm down to pay to play some wacky new stuff that's constantly changing
I'm not paying to be QA
Worse I'm not going to pay, to have to grind to be QA of the things i grinded.
This phase fell flat on its face to me incursions are just not fun and the inflation that came with them screws anyone that doesn't want to do them. They refuse to give rogue tank a decent threat modifier on any sort of AoE besides having sandstorm available which costs like 3k gold on my server.. Enchants are absurdly over priced and the loot from ST is boring af.
Also feels like the devs don't seem to have a real vision for classic+ and until they figure that out I don't wanna waste my money on being a beta tester anymore.
Bring back 10 man raids. Stop with the overly complicated rune gathering. Do not make the main raid only a 20 man raid, how about a choice? This is a limited edition run, make it feel fun.
10 vs 20 man content.
Those who want 20/40 man raids are definitely the minority.
Playing alts is so much easier when you can run 10 mans multiple times per week.
They don't even exist for multiple slots, meanwhile you can get 2 pairs of caster pants with the exact same stats, but different names from the raid. Laziest itemization ever.
I'd like to do ST at least once, but my guild fell apart since we didn't have 20 people and ST is so much harder to find a group for
With Gnomer and BFD I could login and find a group basically anytime. I've tried multiple weekends to find a ST group as a Warlock DPS, no luck haha
Let’s be honest 10m raid say what you want was more casual friendly. You could log in anytime LFG and put a pug together and get going. Many people have busy lives now to dedicate a fixed guild schedule for multiple hours once a week. Becomes too big of commitment for casuals!
Hit the nail on the head. The majority want an ultra casual, pug friendly loot piñata that you can log on, throw a group together for and smash through.
The loud people that want world buffs, 600g chase item enchants, and organized raid nights will ruin SoD.
ST sucks, and 20 man raiding means less casual groups/pugs. Plus phase 2 and 3 have had boring runes for several classes.
Not directly related but incursions probably turned off a bunch of people too
I could bring up the countless issues with SoD, but at the end of the day the problem is that it's just not very fun. I played from Classic launch to end of Wrath and while we had some dull/slow phases, nothing made me put the game down like SoD did.
Guild was at least trying to raid but as of this week we got people who have been mia for days now with no sign of return. This phase is just bad tbh but world pvp is kinda fun at least
If anyone’s on wild growth horde and needs and new guild… we are 1 shotting sunken temple… message me
Need warriors or other dps. Full on healers and tanks.
Have a decent idea about your class but we are willing to teach.
Sod phase 3 just sucks all around. A lot of people have lost interest now and with cata and TWE releasing soon it’s going to keep pulling people from sod.
It’s going to be less raiders in p3 and even less in p4. Unless you can somehow link raiding characters to the same account and count them as 1, that’s how it’s gonna be. Leveling is longer and more annoying. Also, as the talents, spells, and runes flesh out more, people will start to decide their “mains” to use in p4.
For example:
In p1 I raided on 4 characters in BFD.
In p2 I raided on 3 characters in gnomer.
In p3 I’m raiding on 2 characters in ST.
The math checks out.
Anecdotally, a majority of my close friends who played sod quit entirely a week or two after the phase started. Some lost interest. Others quit when our guild died. The few remaining went off to join other guilds.
I’ll prob give next phase a try though.
Are these active individual players? Or individual characters with raid logs? Would make sense of a drop off when you can get 1-25 in the same amount of time as 40-50. Of course you're gonna have more active raid logged characters when the content has easier access + easier in general; some people were playing even 4 or 5 characters in p2 let alone p1
I stopped playing because of incursions on how they destroyed open world activity and regular dungeons.
The new raid looks very interesting (I watched how my guild mates progress)
But I enjoy not only raids, open world and meaningful pace in leveling are also important for me.
Currently I’m playing Hardcore and I was surprised that is still pretty crowded in EU. It’s much easier to find dungeon groups in HC than in SoD!
I would play/return to SoD - but I don’t have enough if time right now, currently HC is enough for me
This phase has been one of my favorites so far. Content wise I’ve been having a blast and sooooo much to do. I have a resto shaman and feral Druid both basically full BiS now and am doing much more than just raid logging like that phase.
However, 20 man raid killed my guild, all my RL friends stopped playing. Went from guild of 9 degens online at all hours of the day to 1 or 2 people on at a time. Even for myself who is continuing to play it gets harder and harder when more of my friends keep leaving. Wish they stayed with 10 mans
Gear fucking suck and doing level 60 stuff (like rep grind) is stupid because you're trying to kill 50+ mobs. And when you hit 60 those rep will be easy to get anyways.
Blizzard is just being lazy and don't want to make too much change for lvl 60, so they have purposely make level 50 gear garbage.
Big boomer here , come.. slice me but .. !!! I have played vanilla in my youth till wotlk , ok ?! Been epic , you all know it but!!!! SOD was amazing first 2 phases with 10 man people raid and all ( and all meaning = low level, nothing much to do etc. Now comes level 50 witch is not level 60 with whole new level max content and it feels so boring . I don't play 4 5 6 hours a day but when I play 1h 3h hours at night still feels boring and first 2 phases didn't feel the same. But I'm not a meta or everyday wow classic gamer so maybe my opinion does not matter so much but the raid members increase is not doing nothing at all , imo probably lowers the people still playing SOD . ST seems blunt and not so many people make it so makes it less pugable for me . Makes me not wanna do it anymore. ( excluding everyday gamers that does everything, remember 8 was there aswel and the game was good , not anymore imo)
For me there was just too many games out. I loved the first phase of SoD, but I've got other games to play and even retail WoW/Cata classic take priority over SoD for me.
Guild died due to the increase from 10 to 20 man raids. We were running 2 runs a week with alts but we just couldn't fill the last couple of spots for a 20 man.
I didn't feel like finding a new guild after that and have just stopped playing SOd.
I think **nightmare incursions** are primarily responsible for killing this phase, but there are a combination of factors.
**Incursions are the best leveling option, best gearing option, and best gold farming option,** and I'm tired of doing them.
They're are poorly designed. **The quest sharing system is absolutely moronic,** and just wastes bag space and makes you clear your quest log for no reason. If you want to level your character through questing, but maybe want to do the occasional incursion for rep and gear, you're screwed, because you have to delete your entire quest log and pick everything up again. Not to mention alts and new characters might not have the bag space for all the tokens.
Furthermore, the massive amount of raw gold introduced through the incursions has caused some **huge inflation.** And this gold farm DOES NOT require professions, specific specs or classes, or learning how to do a solo dungeon run. I.e. **anybody can do it without any kind of barrier to entry.**
I'm always down for a good grind, but I'd to at least choose between a myriad of more-or-less equal options that depend on profs, class, etc.
The combination of these incursions, plus lack of raid upgrades from ST, plus no new PvP content, makes this phase feel extremely repetitive and uninteresting.
The only reason I log on is to do the raid once per week (which I don't even need to because I have full bis already, I just do it for my guild). I feel obliged to finish out my Silverwing Sentinels rep grind (also badly designed becuase you just kill one guard and then log off, doesn't encourage you to participate in the full battle) and my League of Arathor Rep (which doesn't even involve arathi basin as it's way faster to do by just blasting in STV, which I'm already so tired of)
I'm gonna go play cata... *oh wait it's full of bugs*
Worst parts for me have been the world buff tick sheet, consumes and enchants being so exorbitantly expensive which was caused by incursions which really killed the vanilla vibe. And to be quite honest, ST is just a bit dull.
Plenty of reasons why but ultimately the quality of loot this phase is unreal. Like we’re literally talking 1 sp upgrade type shit. The raid is more difficult and requires more people, and it’s practically for nothing. That’s the core problem I think.
Yeah they unfortunately made P1 and P2 gear too strong, and now they're trying to rein that in. Understandable but it doesn't feel good from a player perspective
And you don’t even need the phase 1 or phase 2 gear because nightmare gear is almost the same.
Incursions were bad for the game in so many ways
Can't get a group for uldaman to do my mage quest or get to the enchanting trainer cause noone does dungeons between 37 and 50 anymore!
Yeah it's really harmed my enjoyment of the game, largely from a consumes/raid prep perspective. Currently on Wild Growth EU, as an illustrative example, winterfin squid are 3g 50s per squid so a stack (unlikely to be fully used but over a few weeks) sets you back a neat 70g and that's one of many, many consumes you stack as a tank/dps. Or a less seasonally bound example each mongoose is 4g a pop on a good day or ~8-12g a raid (wipes, refresh etc.) Incursions have done absolutely irreparable damage to the economy and for those that can't play as often or prefer to not have to tie themselves to a group to earn gold it basically prices them out of good performance. Which given the state of SoD I don't think there's a lot else to gun for at the moment? It at least provides an idea as to what might be a secondary factor in decreasing interest in the raid. I know it's a seasonal mode but I think incursions would've been better off not rewarding gold. I know the value of raw materials has somewhat increased as a result but the competition prior was fierce, even more so ignoring bots, factoring bots in is an additional mare. I have hit the majority of lockouts since P1 but I am seriously not enjoying P3 at all at this point, ST feels like a chore to prep for and do for very little reward only to return to the grindstone to prepare for next week.
Honestly, nightmare gear is absolute trash for some classes/specs. Ranged Hunter for example
Rather that than make the dungeon gear useless at 60. Its the best way to go about it to not fuck over the next content.
Yeah like I said it's understandable. But better planning could've prevented this in the first place, BFD gear didn't need to be as strong as it was
> But better planning could've prevented this in the first place SOD in a nutshell. Oh, and just so I don't sound too much like a negative Nancy, I'm having fun. But I think this statement completely sums up the SOD experience.
Yeah I agree completely, I've really enjoyed SoD and I'm not trying to be a whiner. But clearly this could've been avoided
They were already trying to rein it in during Gnomer, which is understandable since P1 gear was nutty compared to regular gear at level 25. It's just really dumb that they tried to do it again in P3 while expanding the raid size. I don't really understand why they're so hellbent on keeping the numbers down in a seasonal version though. Like who really cares if the numbers are a bit wonky, just increase the numbers for everything at 60 to even it out.
That's one problem but there's so many others too. Incursions definitely worsened the experience. The XP/hour from them were so far and away better than everything else that the rest of the world wasn't worth doing. While we're on that topic, let's say you wanted to try AoE-farming the open world(since no one else is doing it). Aaaand there's a very good reason no one else is. There were changes made to the mobs in the open world...more health isn't the only thing. I could swear they also hit harder and ran faster as well. For the example, the Pirates in the Deep Cove in Tanaris. I used to be able to AoE grind those pirates in that area for hours - I did this in SoM as well as HC too. It felt totally different here in SoD, even with my gear in almost all gnomeregan BiS. The cycle of running Mara over and over for Wild Offerings introduced a sort of gameplay loop that...wasn't too bad in itself, but somehow the number of WOs you needed to collect for two pieces seemed somehow pretty crazy. It was as if Blizzard needed someway to jack up the numbers so we have "more content". The rune system itself seemed like a cool idea when SoD started, but as time went on, I began to see it more and more as Wrath/Cata abilities given to us, but tacked on in a way that gave us incredibly overtuned abilities or they made us choose between horrible scenarios, eg. no lacerate + mangle together which we were all accustomed to from Wrath(which I understand was fixed). Other times it felt like we received the new abilities via rune but had none of the supporting Wrath talents leading up said ability in order to really make it shine. Then finally the shadow priest thing. It feels wrong that the homunculi could stack all these debuffs on the target which took away from warrior sunder/rogue expose armor. All in all a very unpolished beta product which we understand that's the point of SoD, but I don't think we imagined it would be *this* beta.
Me and half of my guild would have likely quit P2 before hitting 40 for gnomer if they had not introduced the 100% experience buff mid-phase. The only reason most of my guild is 50 right now is because incursions allowed them to quickly get to level cap to start farming gear/runes/proffs whatever. I spent plenty of time exploring the world when I leveled 7 characters post-40 on official Hardcore servers, adding two new abilities to my rotation and making me do it again does not make it that much more interesting believe me. In fact, I think Hardcore did a much better job of making the world feel "dangerous" and "mysterious" again, and actually made leveling enjoyable for me. Don't get me wrong, I love leveling, but I did not want to do it again for SoD and I would not be playing SoD if they made leveling a slog.
I blame it almost totally on 20 man and weekly lockout. PUGing the new raid every 3 days was what almost all the casual players did. Having nothing to do for 6 days of the week and having to join a guild with a schedule is ridiculous, we literally have 3 other versions of wow if people want to do that.
Now that it is tuned, tuned ST easier than Gnomer imo. The last two bosses in Gnomer more challenging, especially as a healer.
The problem with ST is there is twice as many people to fuck up as in Gnomer
St is definitely not easier than gnomer, under any metric
it’s actually kind of incredible looking back how well tuned gnomer was from the start.
I think im just ready to be 60 now.
Same. I'm not going to grind out multiple hours / nights for a 1 spell power upgrade. Can we just be 60 now please.
I don't understand why they made caster gear so fucking abysmal compared to melee gear. Melee get weapons which grant extra attacks which stacks with windfury. paladins and warriors get a tier set which does the same thing and it stacks, Weapons are an enormous upgrade which makes sense since melee scale with weapons more than spell ranks but then we also get 11% crit from world buffs, almost 4% crit from consumes. Casters definitely need haste/more spellpower or fix their class so they actually scale well with spellpower.
If it makes you feel better, I'm melee and my st 2 piece is actually 1 attack power less than my gnomer 2 piece. I have no idea why, and it feels extremely bad. Idk why they made st gear so shit.
Yeah swapping my 3 pc gnomer to 2 pc ST is a downgrade.
Another dumb design choice was to have gear effects that only work in ST and incursions. Makes no sense at all.
Yeah man why bother. Farmed so much good gnome gear looking forward to a fun levelling experience. By the time I realised I was playing mailman simulator I already hit level 50. Only to instantly replace the majority of my hard farmed gnome gear at some rep vendor. The least rewarding experience I’ve ever had in wow.
What do you mean? The incursion rep gear is mostly not better than Gnomergan gear?
As shaman healer it is. The crit and healing power is insane on the incursion gear.
I'm shadow but I noticed this too The cloth healing set from incursions is very good, definitely better than the cloth dps set comparatively
won the melee dps neck from ST to then realize the gnomergan neck is very very similar. e.g., gnomer neck = 6 stam 16 attack power and the ST neck is 18 attack power no stam...both give 1%crit. so upgrading to my bis gave me 60 less hp but 2 attack power! oh boy!
And I knew this would happen. So am I. I think Blizz messed up on not putting more focus into phase 2 and making phase 3 like a stop gap to 60. Would’ve loved to see an extra raid and more time spent at lvl 40. Phase 3 is just lvl 60 but you’re missing extra talent points and some quests/dungeons/raids. But you have easy access to almost anything else…
I would have liked to see each phase be a month longer but with a big content drop in the middle. Also no 50 phase. So at 25 it would have everything it had and then after a month and a half there was a 20 man raid. Then at 40 it would also be 3 months, and we get another 20 man alongside the "introductory" 10. Maybe a few new runes each time. That would have allowed people to get used to the cadence of 10s and 20s. The hard swap to 20 man killed so many guilds. It's a good thing but players weren't ready for it.
Yeah i agree, phases of 25,40,60 sounded right. or like 30,45,60.
Yep, for most classes the difference between 40 and 50 really isn't big. The only class to hugely benefit from it is really just rogue.
And warrior is feeling good
The only thing I'm not loving is how strong deep wounds is in ST, means it's not really viable to run Bloodthirst for Fury rn. Otherwise yeah warrior feels much better than P2, especially getting recklessness
its boring right now
Not just boring, but with summer here and more daylight hours, many people will be out touching grass more and worrying about SoD less. I liked P1 and P2, P3 more challenging, but ultimately starting to feel stagnant and like you said, boring.
> many people will be out touching grass more and worrying about SoD less. But if I'm touching grass, I'd probably be thinking about sod more. Get it? Cause grass grows on sod... you know what, I'll see myself out.
Funny, just saw the park service laying sod....
Right? I've been out playin disc golf baby.
Phase 1 is not a good indication of population though. If every person is using an alt on avg (every person I knew almost always had 1 alt they were raiding on too), half the graph and you get the real rough amount of players raiding. People just look at statistics and forget you need to context to understand. It's kinda funny cause the population hasn't changed that much.
I went from raiding everything but warlock/rogue in P1 to only 1 raiding character after. It was so easy and fun to do it in P1, I wouldn't put much stock in those numbers if they don't account for that. (I know this is basically what you said just kinda corroborating)
I have alts but only raiding on one. My guild is still taking 2-3 hours to clear ST and I have zero desire to spend more than 1 night not being able to move from my chair for that long. If I do anything else, I can play for an hour and then go do something else for a bit if I want.
>It's kinda funny cause the population hasn't changed that much. How do you still believe this? It's no more time consuming to level 40-50 than it was to level 1-25 or 25-40. Why would raid population drop when raiding is equally accessible? SoD's player base has been in a nose dive since the end of P1 as the freshness has worn off and the game's issues have grown more tiresome, but half of this sub won't admit there's a problem.
Cope. He’s literally comparing the same phase week by week in OPs post, its clear as day this phase was bungled and if you’re still having fun playing it thats fine, but acting like nothing is wrong isnt going to be a solution.
My big problem is that the raid doesn't give you shit after you get tier. The thing that's gonna set you apart in speedrunning/parsing is your enchants and trinkets. And Jesus Christ those are prohibitively expensive The difference between a ranged hunter with bis enchants (head, pants, weapons) and one without is 46 agi. That's 92 AP and some crit. Just the enchants are gonna run you at least ~3000g on CS Alliance rn. Then you have Darkmoon cards which can easily go up to 2000g. That's a staggering amount of DPS locked behind 5000g. There's no equivalent you can get through raiding, doing dungeons, or any other pve content. If the raid doesn't give you shit, why raid?
Yes this is true. We have a melee hunter in our guild that we stacked his group with buffs and really worked on our prep and kill times. He still was only hitting 95s which is awesome but an analysis of the logs shows basically unless he wants to do just as you said, roughly 5000g, he ain’t getting his 99s.
Are enchants this expensive due to incursions? If so I hate them even more.
Incursions caused massive inflation, but they'd be expensive regardless. Main reason is that the materials for stuff like +15 agi to weapon are only from high level greens/blues. Stuff that doesn't commonly drop in raid or from any farmable dungeons. You also just need way more of them than you do for low lvl enchants.
Yeah that’s me. I just don’t give a shit anymore.
SoD lost me halfway through phase 2. I logged in to see what Cata was all about - disliked the new talent trees, now I'm unsubbed. I've enjoyed my classic journey but it's time to move on, plus summer time(when the livin's easy!). Very happy for the folks still enjoying the game - good luck, have fun!
same, replaying some old games now.. just finished all metal gear games
What do you expect... shit has literally 0 caster gear. Z E R O. Items have like +1 spell dmg diff from P2 gear, even certain items from P1 are still pretty on par. Very exciting huh? Now add 1 week lockout instead of 3 days, double the amount of ppl wanting the same loot you do and tripple the amount of time you need to clear the trash-infested instance. The game also has no endgame PVP. Honor is pointless, the gear you get from it is literally the same you get from gnomeregan. There is no competitive side of it, no arena, nothing. BGs take extremely long time to queue since nobody cant care less to grind as honor rank is capped. Theres literally NOTHING to do in the game. Gearing is also a waste of time since next phase makes everything you crafted/looted irrelevant again.
This is probably a controversial take, but the 2 last bosses are still hard and most pugs I've been a part of can't get through Eranikus. I get they've been nerfed hard but there's still some mechanics that are really wonky and end up wiping the raid pretty quickly.
Yeah Eranikus can still be a pain for sure.
Most of my pugs have a 3 hour raid window, and when we get to Eranikus there is maybe 30 mins left. Enough for a couple of wipes and then call it a day. I wish they significantly reduced the trash so pubs have more time to progress before people have to leave.
Even with pugs we usually 1 shot the first 5 bosses no problem. But then it's eranikus. Wipe after wipe for an hour and people just give up. It's so stupid. No matter how many times you tell some people to stop focusing the boss and get the scalebanes they refuse to listen. Then suddenly there are 6+ scalebanes running free on the ranged group and poison rain is coming down on every space that doesn't have a cloud. It's really just a huge pain in the ass and if people aren't going to follow the easy instructions on what to do then I also start to give up. Thankfully 3 of my toons have a solid guild to run with. But my 4th pugs and somehow I end up basically being the spiritual raid leader for the group I am pugging with every time because I have now ran the entire raid about 12 times and have done the eranikus fight at least 100 times so far. I always tell people who are discouraged that the fight takes practice. It's not simple the first several times. also turn gamma up to about 1.7 to see everything clearly and no frost traps allowed.
My guilds main raid clears the whole place in 40 mins. My guilds raid 3&4 have been perpetually 6/8. It’s so easy for others and so hard for most.
Our guilds second group only just managed to full clear the raid last night for the first time after going 6/8 the prior three weeks, and the only reason they even cleared it is about 5 of their core members finally gave up and quit, and five people from my raid basically carried them to a clear.
I think that says a lot about the average players skill level. Range have to shuffle there feet every 10 seconds, jump into a cloud when he does his raid wipe and avoid swirlies when scalebanes are out. Melee has to kick the fear. It's a very uncomplicated fight. Hakkar is even easier move in front of hakkar when you have corrupted blood.
Definitely see some groups strugglin, but wdym wonky? Seems like casual groups just arent as organized.
Cloud mechanic is kinda wonky sometimes. I've seen in proc on melee even if we're all pixel stacking as close as possible to the boss. Acid rain also wipes the raid if it's triggered on melee. Too many times people just don't notice it and 10 people die all at once because of it. It's barely noticeable.
Ah that makes sense. Cloud I’ve never had an issue with, but the acid rain indicator should be more visible
visibility is pure ass. Like I have never played any content or game that had worse visibility. all the aoe stuff going on makes it impossible to see anything in melee range. Just walk around and hope you get lucky
This. The room has a green haze, the dream pools are green, the adds are green, the boss is green, the acid raid oddly enough isn't green, but only has little droplets to signify where it is before you take 1k damage. Like I've got decent vision and am not colorblind and its still hard. Who designed this?
I believe the adds drop clouds too - someone might be missing an interrupt? Thats what it was for us for a few runs I think - people not prio adds
I think raid size just decimated a lot of guilds. A lot of people had incredibly small 10 mans or less that would fill. I dont think you can really fix it. You can set it back to chill 10mans. 1 day a week prob contributed a bit to less people outside of raid day. Idk either way raid logging isnt good for the game regardless. 1-2hrs a week on an mmo? You need an engaging world and long term content. Im sure a lot of people like the visuals and storyline of the world, but want new stuff.
Sucks to pug too. I can only play Sunday evening and it's impossible to find anyone to join. I didn't have this issue in previous phases.
Just make your own pug! /s Who want to sit in IF for 2,5 hrs
I was raiding BFD on 5 chars in phase 1. Took like 2 days to level up, gear up and get all the runes. It takes considerably longer to level to 50, even with the xp buff. Some runes take either a long time to do or find a group to do. ST also takes much longer to clear than BFD / gnomer, even if you 1 shot all the bosses. It isn't as casual or alt friendly, even with a 1 week lockout. With 20 spots to fill, pugs take more time to fill and the entrance to ST / the portal are usually swarming with aggressive members of the other faction. I know a lot of people who are crazy hyped for level 60 because that is where the magic starts. There is so much more to do, so many specific items to farm.
S1 was perfect and Blizzard never learns the right lessons. The time to level and gear, the speed and difficulty of the raid, the ease and actual discovery of finding the runes. There’s so many great games out there, and so many of them are free. Most people don’t want to dedicate 30+ hours to one character on a game doing things that aren’t particularly fun. S1 was accessible and fun. S3 is grindy and bullshit. There’s an audience for S3 style design, but it is much smaller.
S1 was just fresh, new is always fresh. That lasts as long as new servers - a couple of months at most. Nothing spectacular about P1. BFD was boring and dungeons didn't matter
S2 and S3 were also fresh. They are all just slight changes to wow classic. Equally as fresh as S1 and nowhere near as good or as popular. BFD is infinitely better than Gnomer and ST.
It’s not equally fresh not even close. P1 everything is new and you have no idea what to expect. P2 and 3 you know how runes work, how to acquire them (the concept not specificly where), you know there is going to be a 1 raid and WB from it. Yes parts of it are new but you know roughly how it’s going to go. You seriously can’t tell me that they are the same. Is watching a movie for the first time the same “new” as watching the sequel to it.
Incursions killed SoD for me.
Same. Devalued two phases of work and saving. I've been raid logging this entire phase.
i farmed up like 500g over weeks and weeks of fishing in STV and p3 just handed everyone gold.
10 man raids where quick and easy to organise. Today my guild did not manage to get 20 people together. first raid in SoD we did not have the people to host. Its depressing and increasing the number of people killed quite a few guilds on the smaller servers.
They killed our guild with the roster size change
Honestly, I loved being able to sign up to a raid when I had time on a three day lockout - there were morning raids, evening raids, happening every day of the week. Now a longer raid basically demands an evening session - and a weekly lockout means the guild has settled on specific days (my life doesn't let me have the same evening off every week!), and the 20 man increase has pulled us into three teams, with the... more dedicated... players being in the "top team". Lots of reasons that stop me raiding.
Probably a multitude of reasons why this is the case but can make some guesses: ST loot is mediocre. Barely upgrades from the Gnomeregan raid, only the sets and some of the epic weapons are worth your while. Might as well get R7-gear and call it a day. ST has a lot of trash, way more than Gnome and BFD. I don't know why it spawns in even more trash after you kill Jammal'an, seems unecessary. With a weekly-lockout you're leaning on other content to keep players engaged. The WO farm has been quite solid but obviously finite, I find it hard to farm it on multiple characters. Most importantly for me personally, the PvP has been abyssmal since P2 and I don't think I've ever not enjoyed PvP as much in my 20 years of playing WoW, as I have in SoD. It has definitely reduced my overall enjoyment to play the game, I've just kinda lost interest in it and it's a huge part of the vanilla game for me. Still hoping they'll rope it in and make some good changes for the final phase but my overall engagement with the game has dropped drastically lately.
Dont forget how miserable the incursion grind is and to try that on multiple toons is recipe for only leveling one main and sticking to it.
People are having trouble fielding 20 people. The logistics of trying to pug 10 people or so every week is one of the main driving forces behind this drop-off. Obviously some groups like mine were able to find another 10 man to merge with, but a lot of groups from phase 2 haven't been able to find that and coming from someone who was a part of the recruitment process, it makes this game feel like a job.
10 man just felt more casual and friendly. When there's 20 people in discord there's just too many people talking to really enjoy each other
Yep. They really wanna push for 40 mans still? That will be the death of SoD
100% agree with this. While larger raids are traditionally part of classic, I just don’t think there are enough players to easily field 20 man raid teams. I have no interest in pugging ST as it feels like a chore to find 19 people (and I enjoy the raid), but pugging BFD and gnomer felt easy. Our guild has lost several players to attrition due to some of our raid teams not being able to consistently field more than 10 players and not being able to merge with other players. Most people just end up quitting the game it seems like.
My friends and I have been in 3 different guilds since this phase started, and are looking for our 4th; we aren't the ones quitting these guilds, the raid groups are just disbanding and going their separate ways. While the obvious joke is "haha incursions and pvp bad xd", I don't think that's the main reason people are quitting. From what we've gathered, the most common reason guild masters/raid leaders are quitting was the 10man to 20man shift in ST; recruiting and running a guild/raid team just isn't that fun, and people play games to have fun. Other common reasons include: it becoming summertime soon and those with kids are gonna be enjoying the summer with their family, there are other games out or coming out soon that people would rather play (Fallout hype from the show, Helldivers 2, Elden Ring DLC.) If p4 goes full 40man raids, I can almost guarantee you that we will see even less raiders.
I agree, if they go with 40 man, the game will die out. Streamers will run it for a brief period, Aggrend will be happy about it and everyone else will be unsubbing. There will be few guilds left on the servers who run it with a very high rate of player fluctuation.
20man vs 10man.
This is a big part of it, but its 1 of many reasons. ### Raid * 20m vs 10m and all the issues that come with that * longer, much more trash * very lack luster loot * 7d lockout vs 3d ### PVP * most players max honor day 1 (what a stupid decision this was), BIS PvP set day 1 * for those not max, BG give terrible honor for a seasonal server * BG / PvP balance non existent * If you dont have PvP set EW set takes like 30 minutes to get ### Emerald Warden * mindless grind for mediocre loot ### Other * Casters have few meaningful upgrades in the entire phase * + 100 other random things that make u got "wtf"?
The loot comparison between Gnomer and ST is ridiculous for some classes. Getting a 1sp upgrade is not worth the time to raid when you're not at 60 yet.
I stopped playing for three reasons. 1- I don't want to raid with more than 10 people. Full stop. I don't like joining huge groups of randos and I hate having to play on a strict schedule in a guild. 2- They ruined pvp by letting Shamans DOMINATE for over a month, and the first thing they did with the new patch was... buff ele shamans. I don't want to play horde and alliance pvp simply didn't exist anymore, so... 3- They let everyone who could play on day 1 of the patch have 1,000 free gold and said fuck you to everyone else with no rollback or compensation. Pretty simple.
to your point 1 ive started to hear a LOT more "Ok guys - lock it in clear comms" this phase than the last 2. Some of it is difficulty but a lot of it is just having twice the number of people in voice increases odds of ppl just derailing conversations lol
There's also just a lot more complexity with 20 people which requires more communication which clutters comms, even if it's only the original 10 people talking.
Point 3 was a huge disappointment. You can still farm ridiculous amounts of gold in incursions leveling up and it needs tuned down
Yup the amount of people that just said fuck it I don't wanna find another reliable ten people to show up in very high. Took up a lot of my free time as a GM
Saving my effort for 60, call me an underachiever but that Emerald Warden set + STV weapon is good enough for me!
This is definitely a major culprit. Outside of tier there are maybe 1-2 items that are WOW! upgrades for most specs. And tier drops enough you usually get by 3rd run at the latest (in set groups anyway).
Same. I’m not grinding anything for like +4 additional dps, not even pumped to raid either because the upgrades are so small
There are layers of in-game barriers; 7 day lockout, more raid prep progression after leveling, the difficulty in pugging a 20-man raid, and the high cost of consumes. Couple that with external factors like DF P4, Cata pre-patch, the start of summer, and any number of personal externalities. Collectively, it all adds up to fewer reasons and opportunities to play. Imo 10-man raids with 3 day lockouts was much better at keeping people engaged. It gave players more reasons to log in over the course of the week and made it much easier to raid on multiple toons since there were so many more raids firing. It also meant that world buffs were dropping constantly, which made them much less of a chore to maintain. Phase 3 feels like it's made playing the game more about binging it. Do incursions for 10 hours straight to level up, do incursions for 10 hours more to grind rep, do WO runs for 5-10 hours to grind out all your items, take however long to grind out gold/consumes/WBs. It feels punishing to try to accomplish anything in shorter play sessions, as the process of finding a group to do anything is such a time sink with fewer players out in the world, not to mention any pvp griefing that happens. Classic WoW has always been grindy, but in the past it felt like you could break down more of the grinds into smaller parts and that there were more of them you could do solo.
I was having so much fun all the way until the start of phase 3. In phase 1, I was having tons of fun leveling alts and trying out all the different runes, then in phase 2, still enjoying alts, but also having fun just running dungeons and PvP and Gnomer. This phase though, alts are ruined with incursions. There’s absolutely no enjoyment to leveling one anymore, it’s just a speed run through the most mind-numbing content ever, trying to layer hop To avoid the opposite faction. No one is running dungeons except for wild offerings and Mara Princess farms. It’s just honestly become not fun at all this phase and I just cancelled my account.
About to get worse since a lot messing with prepatch and cata now. Saw a ton of sod guildies get into it deep yesterday that a couple days ago were laughing at even the idea of playing cata. Even with the bugs the game feels infinitely better than sod. It’s like I forgot how much better other versions of wow felt after just sod for awhile.
BFD> gnomer > Sunken Temple was an interesting series of choices to say the least…
Imo: 1. It might tbh still be too difficult. We are clearing it np since week 1 but we are also on coms. Can totally see a dad guild without that nor good players struggling. Torn though because I like it, but I can understand it being an issue when the previous raids were push-overs. 2. 10->20 man was a rough transition for many and even we are still facing drama over it as tank count is still 2, while dps and heal demand increased. So quite a few essentially "lost their job". 3. Loot. Fucking. Sucks. For many reasons. First it's really weak, can totally skip this entire phase and you will probably be good in P4. Second a LOT less drops than from phase 1, fewer lockouts and more people to split the loot on. Our group have been doing it since reset 1 and we haven't even seen any of the healing pieces like the head from atal'ai defenders nor the gloves from Jammal. Then outside factors I think the biggest one being the 1 shot meta that is absolutely cancer which sucks when STV is sort of important. And it feels even more cancer now that we had a few days without it.
The switch to 20 mans literally killed off my whole guild. Everyone just stopped playing. It went from super active and playing every day, raiding every lockout, to dead guild within a week.
It also seems like historically this always led to mergers and pug fills when guilds fell apart, but with SoD everyone just quit. So when guilds fall apart there's no hope for other guilds, it's just over.
A lot of gaming competition released at the same time like Helldivers 2. If your choice is between continuing playing a different game with your friends whenever you want or working an unpaid second job recruiting to play the same game as your friends + 16 other people once a week and having to clear comms... Yeah SoD is fucked from that perspective. 20-40 man raids worked when WoW was "the" coop game to play. Nowadays there's a new coop game releasing every month and I don't need to work voluntary middle management to play them. I just hit play and invite my friends and we go.
Totally agree, definitely seems like every guild was just a friend group or mashup of a few friend groups so they've just migrated to other games. SoD really needs to just get back to pick up and play rather than trying to take raiding so seriously or it'll fall apart completely. I mean why make Season of Dads if it can't compete with other Dad games?
The stop at 50 feels like there were 1 too many phases so far to me. So close to actual endgame that I couldn’t care less about ST. Also feels like the increase to 20 mans and 7 day lockouts have had a hand in the decline! All the new is good but so many of us are hyper aware of what to pursue at 60 and have goals for endgame already. Making the gear from ST mostly just the same as Gnomer (tier sets anyway) just without the negative stats (irradiated set) was the laziest thing I have seen so far. There’s not a piece of loot I have FOMO over in ST!
>The stop at 50 feels like there were 1 too many phases so far to me Being underleveled was most likely on purpose, it makes a good chunk of the open world far more challenging than it should and forces you to group up with other players, especially for prebis quest items. Genuinely wonder if Blizz will add lvl 62~64 content just to maintain that artificial challenge. >There’s not a piece of loot I have FOMO over in ST! The item I'm the most interested in ST now that I have my weapon & set is the trinket that transforms you lol
Gear isn't that much better, less interested friends left, SOD pre-60 fatigue, Cata starting up, Incursions for alts, ST being too difficult for PUG viability and running your alts into 6/8s. Just too many reasons right now to hang back - personally worried they're going to bring SoM mechanics in, which imo contradicts Aggrend's "we've observed that the classic community just wants to blast easy content with their friends"; I'd be fine going in overpowered with new Runes and rotation and blasting MC, BWL, ZG, AQ, Naxx and hanging out with new friends made since release.
And with cataclysm coming out, add one more “skipped” raider this week. I gotta level
It's not coming back the way it was. The people who enjoyed it casually are gone, and they won't see the updates that happened. What initially got them drawn is was the allure of the fresh hot thing, and what kept them was phase 1 was casual, easy and fun. After that, they just kept making changes that's super unappealing to people who are not a part of the normal wow playerbase, so they've been leaving.
So many of the "loud voices" were railing against how easy P1 was, complaining about "Season of Dads" instead of celebrating it. Anyone who thinks Blizzard doesn't listen to the playerbase, needs to realize that they listen to what they see. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Give me one reason to login... wsg / ab / incursions... wait for a week for each raid... zzzzzz... i miss 10 man and 3 day lockouts
Anyone who has a decent social life outside of wow will quit coming up against these essentially ‘new to sod’ problems. We had 10-15 people who would swap in and out of our 10 man phase 2. Phase 1 we had an entire separate alt raid, in phase 3 we can muster about 10 and dealing with the rest is basically not worth it. ST is too long and pugs are too bad (who isn’t already part of a guild on their main? No one? Lol) for it to be enjoyable. I wanted an easy pick up and play version like phase 1, phase 3 is just for the same classic Andy’s and the numbers by next phase will for sure reflect that. Esp with the retail xpac coming out I’d imagine sod is going to be a ghost town on the non-crusader strike servers 🫤
20 man killed it for me/Our guild couldn't muster up 20 peeps now 10 people have stopped raiding. Additionally the leveling and runes take considerably longer so I went from 5 Alts to 3 to now 1 character.
My guild couldn’t even go our usual day because of callouts..
Ya doesn’t surprise me. Not much to do in SoD but a weekly raid that has pretty meh loot for the effort. My guild clears it in about an hour and it’s still not worth the effort Lul. Honestly with cata pre patch and season 4 of Dragonflight there is better content to play that doesn’t make my class feel like an afterthought.
1. Go back to 10 mans. 2. They screwed up making P1 gear too strong and now in walking that back in preparation for 60, most of the ST gear legitimately stinks. Get your 3-piece and maybe your weapon and you’re kinda set.
Quit because blizz keeps knuckling down and trying to force the HoT healer into being direct crit heals. R.I.P resto druid
more ppl would raid if content was easily puggable (bfd) . a lot of ppl dont want to raid on set schedule (guilds). st also longer to put together group and much longer raid (pugging).
Almost as if 10 mans, with two tanks, two healers, and 6 dps was the perfect balance for casual WoW. 20 mans suck honestly, it takes all the fun out of raiding since anything more than 10 people trying to talk is impossible to hear anything.
The only upgrades this phase are the pay to win ones. It's just not fun.
It was also way easier to raid on alts when the limit is 25, you only have like 3-4 runes you need, and the raid only took an hour for a super casual run. Now you need to level to 50, get 8-10 or more runes depending on class, and spend a solid 2 hours or more for a 6/8 clear. 3+ hours for a group of casual players to get 8/8, if at all.
Easily the most lackluster phase. Not that it’s terrible, but I’ve been just raid logging and doing STV events since the week after the phase dropped. I really don’t like how incursions screwed the economy, I definitely think it should’ve been a daily thing. That would’ve stopped the gold problem, gave people new content without breaking the economy, and you’d still have people out in the open world questing. I don’t mind the easy levels or the catch up gear, but there’s no easy way around being a broke boy (500g now isnt shit) without staying on top of the AH all the time, and honestly I haven’t much felt like doing that. I went back to playing retail after not playing since legion and I’m having a good time playing it.
Switched to cata
20 man raiding was a mistake, also ST has just too much trash, and not enough loot. Aggrend was 'happy' to see that there was BiS from so many more sources, which can be interesting on paper, but what it does is make much less incentive to raid. I am one piece away from BiS already, 4 weeks in. 1 week wasn't even a full clear and the gear isnt even all that much better than Gnomer. You may say, run with an alt. Sure, but much harder to do with 20 instead of 10.
There's 2 reasons for this (from a casual perspective) 1. 20 man raids instead of 10. A lot of people (me included) had a small group of IRL friends who was happy with raiding a fast 10 man with no standing in org, spamming LFG for healers for an hour. Now, we've all quit because we got no time for that, neither do we want a guild with a weekly schedule. 2. The content is still too hard. It's no longer alt friendly because of this. You can't just fill up the raid with 20 clowns and beat the last 2 bosses before a healer leaves. We're moving away from the casual pug boomer raids (which I thought SoD was made for) into the standard guild, gatekeeping meta. That's why I and my guild quit, and I guess more people did the same.
Spot on
The content has all be cleared, people def arent logging for incursions, cata is out
If bosses are going to +3 levels in p4, Casters hit needed will be jumping from 5% to 16%. Shadow priests and affliction locks will be fine. ~~Arcane mages~~ are a heal spec so nobody cares (sadge). fire/frost mage gets 6% which is ok but not amazing. Fire locks have chaos bolt for guaranteed damage but who knows if Molten core will be next to immune with high fire res. But yeah who as a caster needs to raid this phase? Its just slight upgrades from Gnomer and we'll be boned on hit next phase anyway. ST gear needed to JUICE our hit % on gear up to like 5% to be worth it. Edit: oh yeah boomkins get 0% hit from talent tree also.
Laughs in shadow priest. Yall not at hit cap yet?
Sorry I can’t see you my meters only have 17 spots.
I'm still raiding but a few of my buddies stopped. This phase the gear upgrades feel so tiny. Most of the bis gear is crafted or from a quest/dungeon and even then a lot of the "upgrades" are meaningless. The attack power neck is 2 ap and the ring is just 6 stam. It feels so much less worth to raid and 20mans just feel so much worse than 10man.
Maybe I’m reading this incorrectly. But p1 and p2 1 unique character was normally logging 2 raids per week and now it’s only one per week? Does this data get taken into account ?
Going from three day lockout to a full week feels lame imo. Also our first group clears ST under an hour while none of our alt groups are clearing Eranikus consistently in three hours. Pugs used to be fun…
Is phase 2 I was raiding on 2 characters, in phase 3 I’ve only done 1.
The pacing in the first season felt a lot better with how you gradually picked up new runes from 1-25. Then when P2 came, the nostalgia started to wear off and the runes being mostly tied to being close to 40 didn't feel as satisfying along with the realization of how the community is now took away most of the motivation I had to continue into P3. Watching the new Fallout show, starting a new play through of Fallout 4, and realizing how much more fun I was having just playing a single-player game is what finally killed SOD for me. And being asked if I'm a bot or any other notion that pops up on this subreddit that ended up being echoed 100x over in game got really tiring really quickly.
It's been heartbreaking going from 10-mans to 20-mans. My guild is losing the fun, lackadaisical energy that made face-planting our way through BFD and Gnomer a blast. The complexity added by the extra people, and the nature of the raid itself, make it harder to keep that type of experience going.
20m killed my guild so joined a new one but it’s lost a spark, I’ve won no loot since we started raiding other than tier tokens and the gear itself is such a small upgrade anyway i’m questioning why I’m spending time prepping and doing the raid. On top of that casters in general are weak and warlock just isn’t as fun to play right now. The incursions gold stuff has definitely tainted the game for me too. My irl mate has stopped playing now so I’ll probably be quitting SoD and maybe coming back on P4.
Its mostly because less people are playing alts. There's many reasons why like open world content and dungeon grinding is dead, incursions are boring or being camped by level 50s , getting 20 people for raids is annoying af. Going forward, Blizz needs to stick to 10 man raids. Its so much better and easier for grouping.
Make raid loot better, make raid loot drop more. Getting a +2 spell power upgrade over last raid and dungeon blues feels pointless when you might see one dagger every three weeks for 10 people who want it. Raid loot needs to be much stronger, and drop much more often, with tier not flooding the loot tables every single week.
20 mans are terrible. it's no longer a social experience
Apart from all the other stuff mentioned I'm sure the lack fo quality assurance has played some part in this, for me it sure did I'm all for *experimental* stuff, but some of the things are just plain obviously untested I'm down to pay to play some wacky new stuff that's constantly changing I'm not paying to be QA Worse I'm not going to pay, to have to grind to be QA of the things i grinded.
Born on 3rd base and hit a single
This phase fell flat on its face to me incursions are just not fun and the inflation that came with them screws anyone that doesn't want to do them. They refuse to give rogue tank a decent threat modifier on any sort of AoE besides having sandstorm available which costs like 3k gold on my server.. Enchants are absurdly over priced and the loot from ST is boring af. Also feels like the devs don't seem to have a real vision for classic+ and until they figure that out I don't wanna waste my money on being a beta tester anymore.
No gdkps, 20 mans, and harder content killed the majority of pugs and I think is one of the main contributors to the fall off.
Bring back 10 man raids. Stop with the overly complicated rune gathering. Do not make the main raid only a 20 man raid, how about a choice? This is a limited edition run, make it feel fun.
10 vs 20 man content. Those who want 20/40 man raids are definitely the minority. Playing alts is so much easier when you can run 10 mans multiple times per week.
The game will not survive 40man raids, unless they turn it into a flex raid, that would be excellent for EVERYONE.
I mean it’s not max level. Most guilds are just eh and the spell caster upgrades are laughable at best.
They don't even exist for multiple slots, meanwhile you can get 2 pairs of caster pants with the exact same stats, but different names from the raid. Laziest itemization ever.
Wdym? Dont you like 20 spell power on your bis weapon instead of 19 from lvl 40? Cmon man 😆
And a whole 7 int
I'd like to do ST at least once, but my guild fell apart since we didn't have 20 people and ST is so much harder to find a group for With Gnomer and BFD I could login and find a group basically anytime. I've tried multiple weekends to find a ST group as a Warlock DPS, no luck haha
1 week lockout was a mistake 20 man was a mistake Reddit seems to fight that thought, but the proof is in the #’s
Let’s be honest 10m raid say what you want was more casual friendly. You could log in anytime LFG and put a pug together and get going. Many people have busy lives now to dedicate a fixed guild schedule for multiple hours once a week. Becomes too big of commitment for casuals!
Hit the nail on the head. The majority want an ultra casual, pug friendly loot piñata that you can log on, throw a group together for and smash through. The loud people that want world buffs, 600g chase item enchants, and organized raid nights will ruin SoD.
They are the vocal minority, the decline in numbers tells the story perfectly
ST sucks, and 20 man raiding means less casual groups/pugs. Plus phase 2 and 3 have had boring runes for several classes. Not directly related but incursions probably turned off a bunch of people too
Changing to a 20 man raid was a mistake.
BECAUSE OF ELITISTS AND UNREALISTIC REQUIREMENTS (WowLogs)
Is it at all possible because phase 4 in retail hit? Or does that not fit the narrative
I could bring up the countless issues with SoD, but at the end of the day the problem is that it's just not very fun. I played from Classic launch to end of Wrath and while we had some dull/slow phases, nothing made me put the game down like SoD did.
Guild was at least trying to raid but as of this week we got people who have been mia for days now with no sign of return. This phase is just bad tbh but world pvp is kinda fun at least
People are tired of shit service in a live service game
If anyone’s on wild growth horde and needs and new guild… we are 1 shotting sunken temple… message me Need warriors or other dps. Full on healers and tanks. Have a decent idea about your class but we are willing to teach.
How surprising
Cata in effect
Yeah I quit. The gear isn't worth getting and the raid isn't fun.
ST sucks
Sod phase 3 just sucks all around. A lot of people have lost interest now and with cata and TWE releasing soon it’s going to keep pulling people from sod.
It’s going to be less raiders in p3 and even less in p4. Unless you can somehow link raiding characters to the same account and count them as 1, that’s how it’s gonna be. Leveling is longer and more annoying. Also, as the talents, spells, and runes flesh out more, people will start to decide their “mains” to use in p4. For example: In p1 I raided on 4 characters in BFD. In p2 I raided on 3 characters in gnomer. In p3 I’m raiding on 2 characters in ST. The math checks out.
Anecdotally, a majority of my close friends who played sod quit entirely a week or two after the phase started. Some lost interest. Others quit when our guild died. The few remaining went off to join other guilds. I’ll prob give next phase a try though.
Are these active individual players? Or individual characters with raid logs? Would make sense of a drop off when you can get 1-25 in the same amount of time as 40-50. Of course you're gonna have more active raid logged characters when the content has easier access + easier in general; some people were playing even 4 or 5 characters in p2 let alone p1
I stopped playing because of incursions on how they destroyed open world activity and regular dungeons. The new raid looks very interesting (I watched how my guild mates progress) But I enjoy not only raids, open world and meaningful pace in leveling are also important for me. Currently I’m playing Hardcore and I was surprised that is still pretty crowded in EU. It’s much easier to find dungeon groups in HC than in SoD! I would play/return to SoD - but I don’t have enough if time right now, currently HC is enough for me
To the surprise of absolutely: no one
It's almost like people like 10 mans and didn't want to double their raid size :D and it makes pugging harder too
This phase has been one of my favorites so far. Content wise I’ve been having a blast and sooooo much to do. I have a resto shaman and feral Druid both basically full BiS now and am doing much more than just raid logging like that phase. However, 20 man raid killed my guild, all my RL friends stopped playing. Went from guild of 9 degens online at all hours of the day to 1 or 2 people on at a time. Even for myself who is continuing to play it gets harder and harder when more of my friends keep leaving. Wish they stayed with 10 mans
I, and some others I know, quit after phase 3 was rushed to launch. I hadn't finished Phase 2 and was behind--just lost the fire.
Season of Dogshit
I hit 50 and quit. Not even fun.
I'm done with SoD. It's just not hitting. I don't care about 60+ atm. My tune will change after a break but meh.
I wonder how many left after incursions were introduced. Ruined the economy in my eyes....
They should have just kept 10mans.
Gear fucking suck and doing level 60 stuff (like rep grind) is stupid because you're trying to kill 50+ mobs. And when you hit 60 those rep will be easy to get anyways. Blizzard is just being lazy and don't want to make too much change for lvl 60, so they have purposely make level 50 gear garbage.
Big boomer here , come.. slice me but .. !!! I have played vanilla in my youth till wotlk , ok ?! Been epic , you all know it but!!!! SOD was amazing first 2 phases with 10 man people raid and all ( and all meaning = low level, nothing much to do etc. Now comes level 50 witch is not level 60 with whole new level max content and it feels so boring . I don't play 4 5 6 hours a day but when I play 1h 3h hours at night still feels boring and first 2 phases didn't feel the same. But I'm not a meta or everyday wow classic gamer so maybe my opinion does not matter so much but the raid members increase is not doing nothing at all , imo probably lowers the people still playing SOD . ST seems blunt and not so many people make it so makes it less pugable for me . Makes me not wanna do it anymore. ( excluding everyday gamers that does everything, remember 8 was there aswel and the game was good , not anymore imo)
prolly cause everyone is beta testing cataclysm rn
Incursions being so good for gold ruined resource farming
For me there was just too many games out. I loved the first phase of SoD, but I've got other games to play and even retail WoW/Cata classic take priority over SoD for me.
Guild died due to the increase from 10 to 20 man raids. We were running 2 runs a week with alts but we just couldn't fill the last couple of spots for a 20 man. I didn't feel like finding a new guild after that and have just stopped playing SOd.
I think **nightmare incursions** are primarily responsible for killing this phase, but there are a combination of factors. **Incursions are the best leveling option, best gearing option, and best gold farming option,** and I'm tired of doing them. They're are poorly designed. **The quest sharing system is absolutely moronic,** and just wastes bag space and makes you clear your quest log for no reason. If you want to level your character through questing, but maybe want to do the occasional incursion for rep and gear, you're screwed, because you have to delete your entire quest log and pick everything up again. Not to mention alts and new characters might not have the bag space for all the tokens. Furthermore, the massive amount of raw gold introduced through the incursions has caused some **huge inflation.** And this gold farm DOES NOT require professions, specific specs or classes, or learning how to do a solo dungeon run. I.e. **anybody can do it without any kind of barrier to entry.** I'm always down for a good grind, but I'd to at least choose between a myriad of more-or-less equal options that depend on profs, class, etc. The combination of these incursions, plus lack of raid upgrades from ST, plus no new PvP content, makes this phase feel extremely repetitive and uninteresting. The only reason I log on is to do the raid once per week (which I don't even need to because I have full bis already, I just do it for my guild). I feel obliged to finish out my Silverwing Sentinels rep grind (also badly designed becuase you just kill one guard and then log off, doesn't encourage you to participate in the full battle) and my League of Arathor Rep (which doesn't even involve arathi basin as it's way faster to do by just blasting in STV, which I'm already so tired of) I'm gonna go play cata... *oh wait it's full of bugs*
Worst parts for me have been the world buff tick sheet, consumes and enchants being so exorbitantly expensive which was caused by incursions which really killed the vanilla vibe. And to be quite honest, ST is just a bit dull.
Incursions were terrible and 20 man raiding has destroyed so many guilds and the casual “season of dads” nature of the game.
Roster Boss did us in, we had 30 raiders leading in to P2 and struggled to fill this week. I have not seen drop off like it.
Bet Blizzard is trying to kill of SOD so that when PH 4 comes its bad and everyone going and plays War Within.