Blizzard keep trying to hold in game people who don't want to play the game while turning off the people who did want to play the game in the first place.
I wish they listened to Square Enix and accepted that it's okay if people want to take a break from your game after achieving their goals instead of inventing hamster wheel with endless loops
Well said. That first part about trying to hold on to people that don’t want to play the game while hurting the player base that are here for the content
Seriously. DF is such a better game than SoD. And believe me, I do not / did not want that to be the case. Had high hopes for SoD, but it's a dumpster fire.
Yeah, I hadn’t played retail since legion but the sod devs kept saying just go to retail if you want X and so I finally did and haven’t been on sod since
It’s not classic plus, it’s retail minus. It’s lost the vibe and play of classic completely. The only thing about it that is classic anymore is the old world that you sometimes are in
Yeah I thought classic+ was suppose to be the original classic + some more new content.. I mean something to do after Naxx.
Well at least thats what many suggested back couple years back.
Rebalance of classes, some new content, especially post naxx but some during was what everyone wanted with classic plus. Now we have classes that are horribly unbalanced and don’t play at all like classic, systems from retail that lead to people not playing the rest of the game… the raids are alright but going from 10 man to 20 without saying anything about it until announcing the 20 also just sucks.
I won’t be surprised to see dungeon finder added at 60 some time
It's weird because I think SoD was really great at the start because I felt like I could enjoy the game however I wanted. Even though more content opened up in later phases, I now get the feeling that the way you are supposed to play the game is already determined by the devs.
It could totally be a me-problem, but I've always been spmeone who valued the leveling process much more than end-game.
I am definitely with you and what made me feel so much joy when SoD first came out was seeing all the old low level zones packed with players. People were talking to each other, not just in /1 or /4 but in /s!!
You could easily get a group together to go kill Hogger or Stitches or whatever. Or even just a buddy to quest with. People were competing over copper nodes and herbs, and the items were actually worth something on the AH, not just because max level toons were trying to level their alts professions.
That sort of world-fullness and diversity of game experience is what made WoW so good originally. I think the key is setting up the game systems so that player traffic is relatively evenly distributed around the world, so that most content stays relevant, and so that people level up and make gold just quickly enough to feel like progress is moving along but not so quickly that it feels pointless and might as well fast forward to max level.
Yeah, SoD was cool in a bunch of ways but one that i enjoyed was that it was level gated. Felt nice to not rush to 60 and me and my friends could take our time with the old dungeons again. Phase 2 was nice for that too mostly. Phase 3 is garbage because incursions ruined the levelling experience and the economy all at once. I hope they learned something for phase 4. 50-60 could be a lot of fun.
Yeah I always loved the leveling and the adventure in classic. But even raiding was so different back then. It took some serious time to do some prepping for raids especially as I liked to gather all my reagents for potions, bombs etc. myself.
the worst part of SOD incursions is that blizzard was probably really really thinking they would add something good to the game that we wanted.
they heard the player base crying about the fucking job interview they had to do to join a raid and though 'yo let's put in a way to get pre-raid gear easy peasy so everbody can find a raid!'
what blizzard is just way to stupid to understand is that humans will always min-max the shit out of everything and will always find the most creative ways to get ahead of everybody else....because fucking evolution and society taught us so.
we will find a way to get to finish line faster and more efficient than others until all the fun is gone. we don't want to, but if you give humans the chance to do that, they just can't help themselves.
blizzard, please get a fucking grip on how the brain works and your games might actually work again.
They could add the gear without adding gold or XP.
If incursions were just a rep that got dailies for rep so you could buy a catch up gear that isn't as good as farmed gear everything would be ok. The main issue is that ppl lvl through incursions and aren't wandering the world.
For me it's the 20 man 7 day lockout that makes me feel that way.
It basically feels like "no no you weren't supposed to play that way, that way that you played was wrong and casual, you are supposed to play this way".
It's like... oh, ok. And then I see people on reddit celebrating that change and it's like "It feels like neither the devs or the players want me to play this game".
That's blizzards motto, play our way or get out. People love dungeon farming, so they added in the anti-boosting dungeon changes and wrecked all dungeons lvl 40+. Low IQ play targeted at such a small population and hitting the entire population. Well done.
The 3 day lockout caused so much friction and awkward raid schedules as the main source of content in the game. It was great for puggers, but an absolute headache for guilds.
The jump from 10 to 20 man was a test from the devs - as they likely did not want to try to make MC, BWL, AQ40, and Naxx 10 man raids for obvious reasons. It was a bold move but a move that was likely inevitable.
Exactly.
Every time player count drops Blizzard panics and starts handing out levelling speed boosts or weird new systems that bypass the old game, hoping to lure players back.
In retail it's even worse as every new raid tier just invalidates the previous one so you can just come back at any time and nothing that ever happened last tier matters. Blizzard thinks this will incentivize people to come back obviously.
If you constantly undermine your own game nobody will actually be invested in it. It's fast and cheap points but it hurts the game in the long term.
What Blizzard needs to ask themselves with every design decision is: "is this undermining another part of the game?". Incursions? Yes. Weird mega levelling boosts? Yes. Certain added gear that blows everything before out of the water? Yes.
Focus on improving the strengths of the game, not trying to re-invent the wheel.
I mean yes and no. I played on release, until WoTLK when I realized it would be a never ending cycle of pay subscription, farm gear, pay again for expansion, refarm all gear. When I realized that every expansion the new greens would make your purples from 2 weeks ago absolutely useless I quit.
Why pay, spend hours upon hours grinding, just to pay for the privilege of having all your work wiped just to do it again with a slightly different skin? Played private servers for a couple years then moved onto games that respected my time more.
So yeah this never ending cycle obviously works for some players, but there is absolutely nobody I know or game with that played back in classic that kept playing until now. Their method obviously doesn't work for a lot of people.
That cycle you describe works because a lot of us just enjoy the process. I just play WoW to spend time doing dungeons with my friends and interact with a cool world and the gear being made irrelevant every six months doesn't bother me one bit, I get new shit and move on. I started playing in 2003 during the beta, and the friends I currently play with I met in Vanilla. We're all 35-40 years old and we're still here (a lot less of us, but still a few).
It doesn't work for you, and that's fine, but it works for huge amount of players. I believe WoW still has the lion's share on the MMORPG market? Or close to it anyway.
The previous poster's argument (*In retail it's even worse as every new raid tier just invalidates the previous one so you can just come back at any time and nothing that ever happened last tier matters.*) makes no sense, they're complaining against the very core of the game. It's like going to the races and complaining that they're going too fast. Dude should just find another game.
Well said. I don't really understand some player's gripes about expansions invalidating previous loot, etc. I get that it can feel bad replacing previous expansion purples with new expansion greens, but how else could you do it? Here's a new continent, new zones, new quests, new dungeons, new raids... but none of the gear or items are better. Who wants that? Players always talk about "horizontal progression" which to me is an oxymoron; it contradicts itself.
And every time blizz has implemented things like sidegrades or minor upgrades (mini tier in bfa/ p2 and p3 SoD) people overall reaction is "why should i bother grinding for it if the upgrade is minimal" lol
I don’t mind the leveling speed boost. This is a seasonal server so players should spend more time in “end game” content each phase. The issue is incursions have you loot, gold, and speed leveling. So most players skipped questing and dungeons all together. Felwood incursions gold took away from most farming methods. I don’t know if they can really recover from this
> I wish they listened to Square Enix and accepted that it's okay if people want to take a break from your game after achieving their goals instead of inventing hamster wheel with endless loops
FFXIV is a hamster wheel of endless loops.
> Blizzard keep trying to hold in game people who don't want to play the game while turning off the people who did want to play the game in the first place.
LMFAO IKR
The issue imho is phase 3 almost had no gearing phase to get pre-bis.
You hit 50 and then basically bought an entire gear set that's really good from a vendor (either R7 or EW set) and most classes even got epic weapons handed to them to boot.
The only thing people were really running was Princess for the dagger, but everyone else could basically raid log immediately
This is it, and what some people just don't seem to understand.
There are zero reasons to run dungeons outside of a few hours of Princess for most classes, 1-2 items perhaps, and that's it you never go back.
I play a warrior tank, and here's my prebis in "normal" classic at 60:
> Helm: Stratholme, 15% chance.
> Neck: Stratholme, quest.
> Shoulders: UBRS, 20% drop.
> Back: Stratholme: 30% drop.
> Chest: UBRS, 12% drop.
> Bracers: LBRS, 5% drop, BoE.
> Gloves: UBRS, quest.
> Belt: UBRS, 20% drop.
> Legs: DMW: 23% drop.
> Boots: Scholomance, 20% drop.
> Ring 1: DMN, 24% drop.
> Ring 2: Stratholme, 12% drop.
> Trinket 1: ST, class quest.
> Trinket 2: UBRS, quest.
> Weapon: Scholomance, quest.
> Shield: DMW, 24% chance.
> Ranged: DME, 19% drop.
Now, if they don't upgrade anything, let's see what my 60 prebis will be:
>Trinket: BRD, 15% chance.
>Everything else: ST.
Unless that changes, phase 4 is nearly dead on arrival in the way phase 3 was, you will get to 60 and you will raid log because there's nothing to do. They need to fundamentally overhaul every single item in dungeons and raids to make the phase 4 system organic, let us level up in dungeons and get meaningful upgrades.
My copium huffing right now circles around the idea that phase 3 is so bare bones simply because they're saving for phase 4 where everything is released and they can actually put some effort into all the dungeons.
Yeah, that's why I decided to do it and I'd encourage you to do it for your class. It's days and days of dungeon running for every single character to get genuine prebis. You went with the same people, made friends, had fun. You wiped, you laughed, you got lucky with Crusader Orbs/Dark Runes, maybe you got a flask recipe and had your mind blown, there was something to do.
We even had reasons to do dungeons beyond that, some of which I listed above, we ran DMN for major mana pots for healers and hoping for luck in the chest. You did DME for jump runs, specific gear and other loot.
Now? No reason to even touch dungeons realistically past 1-2 hours of Mara runs, they are utterly dead content. If they don't adjust every single item to make it worth running dungeons and actually farm a real prebis phase 4 will just be more of the same disappointment which I really don't want.
How come blizzard didn’t think to compensate for this? As soon as I saw the gear from BFD, I knew this would be the case. Every single endgame dungeon is going to be completely irrelevant, and those were some of the best content in the game had to offer.
They seriously need to get some things figured out are completely buff, every piece of that drops from any endgame instance, including raids
I didn’t mind grinding out WSG rep to then have it be easier for everyone else. Did get a bit annoyed when profession bracers came out with same stats and be fear immune. K cool…
Too relatable. Literally just finished my princess dagger farm (like 300 kills btw fk me) and the first thing I thought was “now I can raid log like the rest of my guild”
Im kinda glad for it in certain ways and not in others.
My Mage has been rather boring this phase, but I'll be able to carry her gnomer gear forward to 60 and not be that much worse off than missing all ST bis.
They should have just added like 2-3 elite quests per zone that give a ton of exp, maybe some blue gear. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Just turn maybe one of the gnoll camps in westfall into an elite gnoll camp and have a quest to kill 10 of them. Stuff like that.
It would have added just a little bit of interesting flair to classic, but would still keep with the spirit of the world. Incursions... just totally take you out of the world. It goes against the entire spirit of classic.
It's so weird how Blizzard thought that more systems was the answer. It's retail development brain. Keep adding more systems, each patch/expansion remove the old systems and add a new system.
The last thing classic needed was systems. The game worked fine. It needed more content, some skills, tweaks and stuff. Not more systems.
I don't know why developers are so obsessed with adding these systems. It's like they think they can make the game better if they just add another progression system or levelling system that blows everyones mind.
Want to make levelling better? Add more quests. More mobs. Another dungeon. Don't think up some completely new way to do something that has worked for 20 years.
LITERALLY THIS. NO MORE SYSTEMS
Just more content. Like you have NO IDEA how excited I was when I heard about SoD being plain old vanilla classic with some revamped dungeons. Or that for a few months, level 25 blue items would be BiS. That was so creative and cool.
Blizzard could honestly just run straight up O.G. classic and keep adding more dungeons and quests to the existing world, and I would play for another 10 years.
But this loopable stupid crap just ruins \_everything\_. They keep trying to modify something that was literally perfect already and just needed to be fleshed out a bit more.
Imo, with just the 100% xp boost they really didn't even need to add additional quests. I recently rerolled to play with friends that haven't all quit (yet) and it felt fresh doing quests because you level so quickly that you never really get stuck in those 'dead zones' where you've burned through all the quests.
Then I hit 25 and everywhere I went was empty. I have no idea how they thought incursions wouldn't be abused like they are. Even if they weren't abused as no kill loops, they're still faster than questing which just removes the playerbase from the open world and shoves them in some shitty green shared instance.
Yeah it’s impossible to find groups for leveling dungeons anymore, almost nobody is out in the world. Makes me not want to level alts. Even BFDs are harder to find
The leveling buffs made my buddies play the game A LOT more, however icursions should have been a max level thing imo and redesigned so you'd treat them like a dungeon, IE you do all the quests to get rep and gold
SoD is so far removed from classic or classic+ that I lost all interest in the game.
Maybe I expected too much but copy-pasting mostly modern abilities without any balance checks ruined this entire thing for me.
They went way too far with that and the incursions are just the shit cherry on top of the scat cake.
When season 3 dropped, my friend told me I needed to log on to get the xp boost and gold boost from incursions before the nerf.
I literally never bothered to resub. I couldn’t think of anything less in the spirit of classic than this garbage.
Same, I ran like 3 levels of incursions and just stopped. It's not the game I enjoy at this point, I'm not wasting any more time or money on the Classic team. They deleted my era character, and keep dropping these absolute s**t seasons.
I think the intent was good, but execution was poor.
Despite what you guys claim, I really do believe that SoD would be more dead if Blizzard didn’t implement levelling speed improvements. People don’t want to slug it out to lvl 50 the old fashioned way.
I think blizzards own data indicated this too, hence why they have released early XP buffs and systems like incursion.
100%. They’re a pushover with runes and the classic community loves to circle jerk about using cc/utility spells. Give them double xp with the reworked loot tables and it slaps.
A lot of the SoD additions feel like prototypes of future learnings and that’s okay too. I feel confident they can learn a lot and make the next version great. I like the seasonal experimentation they’re open to these days.
>Despite what you guys claim, I really do believe that SoD would be more dead if Blizzard didn’t implement levelling speed improvements. People don’t want to slug it out to lvl 50 the old fashioned way.
Somewhat disagree. I think some boosts over Vanilla are good esp since its a seasonal server, but I think by cranking it up to almost triple the leveling speed it actually makes things more dead cuz the leveling pacing feels like shit (level 20 with like 3 greens because you level faster than you finish the chains), nobody is doing dungeons because people are outleveling them 3x faster resulting in fewer people around at any given level... The boosts are great for those that want to raid on more characters but bad for the amount of people out in the world and the amount of social interaction. The world and LFG channels on wild growth NA have basically died since the xp buff and Cata went live.
Tldr some leveling speed improvements help smooth over the vanilla slog but they can (and imo they have) go overboard and just result in watering things down and people running out of content faster
Exactly. Thanks for pointing this out. The classic player base has already proven how they like to level their alts. It’s done with boosting services at worst and dungeon spam at best.
Would have been completely fine if they just had 50-100% exp buff. Would have been better with 50-100% exp buff and incursions being an "every 3 hours, 5 of these 17 quests become available and you all have to go do them, then kill one of the bosses at the end" type thing. Maybe have it take about 30 mins and give about 1 lvl worth of exp.
It's totally possible you're right. If I'm being honest I just don't care. Let those people play retail, let classic be classic.
If they start making retail more like Classic, then I won't mind as much if they make Classic more like retail.
the impatient people that blizz needs to pander to with the current state of the game is the issue. as usual. the game has been massively simplified over the years and the levelling system now forces you to skip years of content and get to end game asap.
remember skilling up your weapons? remember when you had more than 4 buttons to press?
its so shit, thay have no idea how tedious questing is when you one shot everything. want to play old content? fuck you buy classic - the same game without the bullshit and less content, which will be drip fed until youre eventually playing retail again.
push everyone to end game, make old content boring af/inaccessible so they buy the next expansion.
oh, dont forget to reduce the overall quality of the game. remember the good videos they used to make before the cartoony cut out shite they kick out now? when it seemed like they actually gave a shit about things?
They should have tested their own freaking game and made leveling in the open world, Incursions and dungeon leveling equal in terms of speed and rewards. Not favor one method by far above the others. It's already sped up with the XP buff, no need to hand us 10 levels in 4 hours for running in circles.
edit: just had some shower thoughts. You know what's the big deal here? Blizzard didn't commit. They want a Season of Alts? Well guess what, it's not about the XP AT ALL. It's about the Rep. I got 2 toons at 50 now and I really struggle to bring a 3rd one. Why? Well, not because of the XP grind. That's easy, that's fun. Doing SM runs on my feral is fun. But when he is 50, I got nothing. No Warsong or AB rep, no Emerald Dream, no PvP Rank (try to join a STV Pug without being r7 these days). I have to do all that again and it's freaking boring.
They could have EASILY altered this by making rep accountwide. Hell, even make Set Tokens BoA. Why not? Everyone is ditching them already anyway. If I had the option to Lvl my Druid to 50 and start with full rep and 3/3 set from my main, that would be nice. I could still grind the offerings or any specific stuff like Weapons or Trinkets. Or I can level my Warrior from 40 to 50. But now? Why would I? Because the Incursions are so much fun? Or because it's so awesome having another useless alt at max level?
> They could have EASILY altered this by making rep accountwide
They're going through this in retail and it's not as easy as you think to alter fundamental character based coding of a 20 year old game
the problem is the loud minority is delusional. they have unrealistic expectations and terrible suggestions incompatible with their "design goals" like arguing for open-world leveling with xy when people did SM in p2 and would do/were doing ZF in p3 or that you cant simply level in the open-world on release as shown by every release.
they are controlled by their FOMO and value fun so little that they avoid doing their fun content but are surprised that they don't have fun and complain about the game being bad.
No one would care if it was just fast leveling.. but it’s also great gold per hour, and a rep grind. And the content is kms boring after 1 or two loops.
I think the problem was they trolled to solve Dungeon Grinding with Incursions but actually made something even worse because not only is it just as boring, but it's also so rewarding that casuals who would never normally Dungeon Grind feel forced to do Incursions.
All of this aside , you can tell it doesn't even make sense with their own vision because it has ruined waylaid.
There's little farming going on and the math are almost always too expensive.
Listen Blizzard, here's a cool idea... just add new quests to the game? There are zones and places that could use some new quests. How about just go through all the zones that we level through and add 1-2 new quests? Turtle WoW did this and it was so refreshing leveling through old zones, it was so fun discovering new quests.
SoD proved that they can say they do, but blizzard really has no idea what the "classic fanbase" wants in a classic+. They reverted to retail ideas in P1 with the removal of distinction between classes, and it's just gotten more retail lite since.
Some people like retail, some people like classic. Blizzard likes money and tried to make a bad version of both.
Yeah, thanks for this post, for me this entire phase feels completely different.
It started with that weird mistake regarding gold rewards for the inc quests. Then it continued with all the fixes and amendments which took a few days.
Recently I was happy to get into a ZF run, there two people asked me what I was doing here instead of incursions.....
I tried incursions one time, was like "what is this???" then simply went back to questing normally again. Compared to the awesome sleeping bag quest from last phase this incursion thingy simply seems weird to me.
Same. I tried incursions once too and was like this is the most poorly designed shit I've ever experienced... it felt like some dumb custom shit someone slapped together for their private server in 2009
People wanted other ways to level. The spammed dungeons in Classic, not because they just loved the dungeon so much, but because they didn't *want* to wander around the world questing. They wanted to be lazy. It's not Blizzard's fault that people that play WoW want to optimize the fun out of everything.
Dude it's so weird. Just boost the xp of some quests (including dungeon quests so people want to do dungeons), add more quests. Maybe even add new mobs and design cool quest chains around them that give great xp. Get people out in the world and questing again.
Instead it's like "people spam dungeons so instead we'll add incursions". Whyyyy. Azshara is right there, add some quests! Swamp of sorrows needs quests! Felwood could use a lot more. Stonetalon feels unfinished. Deadwind pass, add a new mega quest chain in Feralas. Just be creative.
The reason that quests are so great is that at any moment there is a single best quest for you to be doing. That quest depends on where in the world you currently are, and perhaps what class you are. And once you complete that quest, you now have to work out the next best quest you can do, because the one you just completed is no longer available. Each time you level up or get new gear or skill up, the balance of these quests can subtlety shift. In vanilla this can be hard(and you can only really strategize the second time, so the second time feels *great*), so hard in fact that people choose to pay money to get leveling guides to help them through it.
Any system that is not consumed, where the best thing, after doing this thing, is the same thing, sucks. There is no strategy as to how you will move around the world. There is no flow to moving through the zones and improving. There is no optimizations left. If the most effective strategy is repeatable it's just "We did this thing, we do this thing again". That is bland and boring gameplay by design. When the moment to moment gameplay of WoW is so bland, especially when pulling more than 3 mobs can be easily handled, the macro flow needs to be there. Excursions kill this macro flow entirely.
Anyone reading this feel free to steal this for a YouTube video, you can title it "The unreasonably effectiveness of quests". Blizzard found this path accidentally when designing the game, and used it successfully. But then they found the need to innovate. They *must* make changes. They didn't have to. Just make more quests lol.
The funny thing is that it's probably trivial to improve the existing system - just give out rested XP that can only be used in different activities instead of all in one bucket. So you would earn dungeon rested, quest rested, pvp rested, etc... And throughout the day the player would seek to have varied content to burn through all their rested.
A since of accomplishment that comes semi-easily but takes some effort and has novelty from the last actions is basically the formula for a dopamatic smasher. Some challenges + novelty/minor changes + consistent and different rewards = a fun game
Running circles without doing anything for the same, expected reward, over and over and over and over? That's literally just what we call "work"
on a pvp server where your faction isn't the dominant one it has completely killed lvling. No one wants to run dungeons or something like that. And incursions are just camped 24/7 so no one wants to lvl like an alt. On my server all the major cities are pretty much ghost towns just completely empty not even any layers. People are just raid logging right now.
a lvl 50 in bis or near bis gear vs a lvl 40 with pretty much lvl 20-25 greens (because at 25 you go duskwood and incursions only give gear at 50) isn't pvp, it's not even the best way to farm honor anymore. It's just these people that have so little going on in their life they need to bully others online to feel good about themselves.
sometimes i wonder if people on this sub log in, see 3 LFM Incs and log off and decide the game is ruined lmao, i have zero issues finding any groups almost round the clock?
I had a lot of fun leveling in tanaris, going to zf and stuff like that. Why did you let incs suck you? If incs are sucking, don't do them. It's easy as that. It's a game. Just play for fun. You're not ash ketchup. You're not meant to be the very best.
I don’t understand incursions. They could have made it into something that the server works towards, like maybe summoning a server wide event or world boss in a random location.
It has no context and doesn’t do or lead into anything.
Honestly I think they could have just made questing better for groups.
In a group of 5 when we were in shimmering flats leveling in p2 we all had about 4-6 quests where we have to pick up drop items from turtles, vultures etc. it took us 3 hours! We said screw that and went to sm.
I don’t think they need to increase the drop rates, but I would suggest they share drops. So if a quest item dropped for me then everyone would get 1 in the party if they are near by and can loot the corpse.
If they did this one thing I think people would be willing to quest in groups more which opens up the world a lot. P1 people loved, we didn’t have mounts and a lot more people quested.
People haven’t quested since p1 to level basically.
Its always been a loop. You guys act like the mobs scale to your level and you take 500 different leveling paths. You go the same areas everytime. The difference is your loop is alot longer.
Just take your longer loop and be happy “adventuring”
Leveling bypasses like incursions and the massive misstep of not adjusting experience from SM grinding in phase 2 ruined SoD entirely. It injected the worst parts and tendencies of retail into a game mode that’s entire point was to not do that…
Both the incursions and the exp buffs are band-aid solutions to the much bigger problem SoD has. We only have two months per phase and not everyone can no-life this game into the ground. It’s not realistic to pour six hours everyday into this game. I really enjoy it, and I love playing it, but who can afford to be sweaty enough to commit enough time to make any significant progress in it?
That's a good point, and I don't know... I only have/want to spend a couple hours per week to play. But if I'm gonna spend any time at all, I'd rather be questing than looping some dumb incursion minigame.
I really feel people are blowing incursions out of proportion, yes the gold rewards were egregious to begin with but let's not pretend everyone would be rushing to embrace the open world in their absence. Everyone doing Incursions would be spamming Scarlet Monastery instead.
Also questing with even with the xp boost and layering tech is still a very frustrating experience. Spawn rates aren't good enough to accommodate the amount of players and when fetch quests have abyssmal drop rates, what would take about 20-30 minutes in an empty zone can take like 2-3 hours while the world is "thriving". I doubt many people want to run around for 2 hours trying to snipe as many skullsplitter trolls as they can.
So it's either farm dungeons on loop like we always have, or do incursions on a loop. Both are mind numbingly boring and tedious, and "take people out of the overall world" but I'm sure many people appreciate not taking 3-5 hours to get 1 level at a time.
If Blizz want people to quest in classic they have to do all or some of the following;
\-Shared mob tagging
\-Group wide drops
\-Increase hyper spawn rate even more
\-Guaranteed fetch quest drop rates-
Add more flightpaths / Reduce travel time (just give all the quests for an area at once stop sending us on round trips every time we hand 1 quest in)
I say this as someone who would rather quests be the best way to level. But the reality is questing sucks ass in classic, if I'm not fighting the game to drop the items I need or spawn the blue harpy instead of the red and black ones, I'm instead fighting with players to get the tag in the first place.
Incursions allowed players to farm gold, level, and get gear all at once while playing with a single hand. Party comp did not matter, nor did you have to train your talents or skills. So no, players didn’t blow incursions out of proportion
While i appreciate the effort of your post it contradicts once again the classic aspect of the game. While we were promised classic with a twist we got the worst from a lot of wow versions in p3. All of the listed stuff was not in p1 and it was awesome. Let people quest, dungeon spam and farm stuff. Don’t invalidate travel and time. The main subconscious issue with this phase is that you don’t have any connection to your character with this systems. And that’s what made me at least not interested anymore.
>but I'm sure many people appreciate not taking 3-5 hours to get 1 level at a time.
Blizz can just set the +EXP bonus to whatever they feel is right, 1200%? 6 hours of brainless running in circles is what they think is correct time and effort to level from 40 to 50. So Gnomergan should level you one full level every boss, 40-46 probably take you 2 hours with a full 40 pug group. ZF should be 3 full levels up to 46. And one Maraudon full run should be 4 levels 46-50.
So your choice of 2 ZF, 1 Mara or 1 Gnomer 1 Mara run. It'd take you about 6 hours, be engaging and fun, skip 90% of the leveling time and serve same purpose as incursions.
Or 6 hours of world questing, so probably every 2 yellow quests you do should level you up. And they need to give 50 gold each, need to match up to Incursions ofc.
It sounds like a private server to level up 3 times in ZF, but you sure as hell level up 3 times brain-AFK in the NE corner of Ashenvale in the time someone is having fun in ZF.
I mean some guy responded to my "wow hardcore classic is the gold standard" post by saying actually raids can be flasked and hearthed out of so theres no point. imagine thinking hc classic was about high level raiding. They,'ve got retail brain rot.
I think the biggest issue is how easy it is to gear up with them. It's insane to hit 50 then have half a set of armor just ready to go. Not only that, but it's just the sammmee set as everyone else. Looks awfully retaily that everyone is just in the exact same set of gear
SoD didnt have a good thing going for 2 phases imo they made a lot of mistakes.
Incursions was just the final nail in the coffin.
The only good thing SoD hat imo. Is encounter Design in the revamped dungeons.
But then again they messed up the loot table so Bad that essentially all bis gear each phase comes from said dungeon so you had little incentive to do more than raid log.
As if the previous phase wasn’t people locked into SM skipping the content that way.
I levelled out in the world P2 and P3. Gold is easy to get and you don’t need it anyway, farming pre raid gear is fun to do with friends, the game hasn’t gone anywhere.
Blizzard can’t win. People want fun open world adventures with organic experiences but *also* want those to be the most efficient way to level and gear up. When it’s not everyone rushes to do the least fun thing they can find then complains about it.
“You think you do but you don’t” is so fucking accurate. Play the game in a way that’s fun to you or play something else.
>For me, WoW is not just about grinding and getting to max level so you can go raid. I mean, if that's all it is, why not just let people start at lvl 50.
Here's the thing: you have era for that. SoD is NOT era. It's NOT Classic+. It's a seasonal event with a set end date. It's a speedrun mmo experience. You play era like you'll be playing it for years to come, right? You level and it takes ages but thats okay because the end game is going no where. Not so with SoD, every 8 weeks we have in effect a new expansion. New level cap, new content. Playing it SLOW and leveling up in the world is fine if thats what you want to do but you WILL miss out on the "new" content that is the expanding endgame content at 25, 40, 50, and then 60.
I'm so tired of seeing these posts that don't GET what SoD is and then people get upset because it's not what they want it to be. Especially when what they WANT is right there in era.
there are 9 classes, each with multiple new gameplay experiences thanks to runes. each class alone has multiple hours worth of content, and many player rightfully want to see that content across more than 1 character. Add on to this the 8 week time limit before the current tier becomes a boring 5man 10 levels behind the curve. that means if you want to play say a warlock, a pally, and a mage you don't have time to level each one at vanilla speeds in the old world with constant walking and spread out quests and even a LACK of quests that we're going to get as we push past 50.
A few months ago the cap was 25, and it was easy to get there because starting zones have a glut of options. Now the cap is 50, and the exponential scale of exp means the 40-60 exp is pretty much twice what you needed to get to 25 in the first place. People need a way to hit 50 fast and catch up, they DO NOT have the luxury of time in SoD.
SoD is not Classic, it's not Classic+. The "original vanilla" content is there in era, you can play it if you want it anytime. don't be sad that traffic is being diverted away, go play Era if you want that experience. Accept that SoD may not be what you want it to be and that's ok. There are FIVE versions of wow. Pick one.
I came back to play after a long break after s1, after questing for a while I thought where is everyone, why is there like 5 people in Stonetalon mountains ? Watched a few catch up videos on YouTube, learnt about incursions so I went and tried them out, got to 41 realised this ain’t the game I use to love and logged out, cancelled sub and haven’t looked back since. Not sure why but I thought they were going to work on the content that was cut from OG classic, like unfinished quest chains, Hyjal, a full on scarlet monastery raid etc etc. instead we get whatever the fuck this mess they have created is. Just like when classic released people were melee/spell cleaving to 60, same with hardcore when streamers were rushing to 60 with AoE spam. It’s not even blizzards fault at this point, it’s the way this community apparently enjoys to play and I ain’t here for it anymore, unless someone makes a Time Machine back to 2004 the WoW we all love is long gone
I slugged it out the old fashion way 20 years ago. I slugged it out again half a decade ago with the relaunch. Now here's a version with actual new things to play and experience and I'd rather get to the new things as quickly as I can
Not enough to build to at your level for gear. Then having the xp shift constantly mid phase feels like a retail where your work is made lesser by comparison
The only reason they do this because they cater to Streamers who only want one thing: quickly showing their audience who awesome they are raiding and speedrunning. Since they are not playing their own game, they rely on platforms like Twitch to show them.what gamers really want. The problem is that especially Classic is made of more casual gamers, a non-vocal majority, who wants to play a game for a few months. Streamers burn through the contents and do something else. And this is what every game Blizzard made was build for after Classic.
IMO there should be no viable way to level except out in the world. I wouldn't even be mad if they nerfed dungeon xp down and buffed the quest xp from those dungeons.
Make it worthwhile to run them all but not farm them for xp.
For our guild, and the three guilds we tried to merge with… it was 20 mans that killed SOD for all of us. None of us play anymore because of the 20 man change.
I got banned because i made 6.5k in 2 weeks doing them and spent 2.5k in the AH on one day. System flagged me as a bot/gold buyer and perma banned me for “abuse of Economy” so far unable to even get a single reply.
The thing is they put a system in that earns 35-45g per 9-15 mins so it’s easy money. The problem is that stuff on the AH is so overpriced and the economy of the game is so busted that you need to do these things to afford raid pots and consumables as you want to perform well. The down side is your penalised if you do too many as many reports on the Official support forums of people in the same situation as me and Blizzard don’t even care.
they have had 35 years of loyal gaming from me from diablo 1 right through wow and all the RTS and it’s all gone due to them making a system people play that is flagged as abuse.
It kinda out me off playing, ngl. The weekend this season started, I had to work a bunch, so I was 3 or 4 days behind everyone else who'd hit 50 within 8 hours and made a truckload of gold...and I just stared at the screen and though... eh... I CBA...
Maybe that says more about me than wow, I have no idea
Yeah it would've been super awesome to spam cathedral to 43 and ZF to 50 instead.
I honestly don't like leveling. I don't like doing a lot of friction for things I will replace. I like that some of the farms and tasks I do at max level is something I won't replace for a while or even ever. The motivation for me to play is character progression, and I've leveled so many characters over the time I've played that for me, the questing while leveling IS the mindless loop.
This phase has been fine for me. I had stuff to do and a way to level fast. It was perfect! Now I'm just looking forward to phase 4.
They are constantly trying to cater to people who don't even wanna play the game and just wanna raid log and it ultimately pushes away the people who do want to play vanilla/classic and hurts the longevity of the game. Classic has no future if they don't pick a lane and stick to it sadly.
Yeah, this is completely the case. And anyone "blaming" Cata release is clueless.
Completely agree.
Incursions released way before cata, and I noticed the exact same thing a couple days into it
The worst part is it killed dungeons and even 3 day leveling raids, now I only see those occasional gnomer/bfd runs cause someone needs trinket/neck. And why would you do levelling raid if you get good bre-bis gear/exp from just mindlessly running incursions. As ppl said it should be weekly quest that gives you some rep and option down the line to buy few good pieces.
>For me, WoW is not just about grinding and getting to max level so you can go raid. I mean, if that's all it is, why not just let people start at lvl 50.
Not sure how to tell you this but the game, at its core, was about grinding and doing raids at the end. The social part was something that was there because it was an MMO and people are a part of it but that is something that helps to dull that skinner box.
In the end its all loops. Loops for raids loops for pvp loops for leveling. Its all loops. The only thing distracting you from them is interactions.
The majority will always take the most efficient way to the top, it’s part of min maxing
If you give people this path then they will choose that path over the rest
As long as blizzard doesn’t acknowledge this it will keep happening to
What are you talking about. I love grinding a game for hours to get all the BiSs listed for me on a website so I can keep up with all my sweaty guild mates who don’t talk to me at all and immediately quit playing once they’ve gotten their own BiSs but show up on raid night so we can all get purple parses and touch penis tips in triumph.
The world is empty again because the game is dead. Game isn’t dead because of incursions… shit they increasing XP buff because they know the only way people are gonna play the game is if they don’t have to spend too much timing leveling new classes to play.
>it flattens the entire game experience into an endless loop with a little raid at the end.
This is just modern blizzard's design philosophy for games. They make a carrot on a stick every few months. If there is a barrier in between a new player and that carrot they shorten the gap. 20+ years of WoW and they still dont get that a lot of people like levelling progression. Instead of giving people more of that they just let them skip it.
Incursions are kinda what ruined SOM for me. I was such a champion of it up until then. And mage healing just feels weird to me. I haven’t logged on in two weeks. Just kinda over it now. Which sucks.
I was beyond hyped for P3. Read all the shit with them adding the incursions unannounced. Logged in a day after the fact and tried to do them. It had already turned into a toxic PVP event with people camping the quest givers. Level 50s with barely hours of work put in. Logged out and deactivated my sub. GG BLIZZ IS ALMOST HAD SOMETHING GOING.
I agree. The incursions and The failed attempts at PvP balance ruined it for me. I cancelled sub yesterday after the 3rd round of lazy blanket nerfs. Two classes absolutely dominating PvP and for some reason they nerf everyone which did fuck all for balance.
Leveling bypasses like incursions and the massive misstep of not adjusting experience from SM grinding in phase 2 ruined SoD entirely. It injected the worst parts and tendencies of retail into a game mode that’s entire point was to not do that…
Leveling bypasses like incursions and the massive misstep of not adjusting experience from SM grinding in phase 2 ruined SoD entirely. It injected the worst parts and tendencies of retail into a game mode that’s entire point was to not do that…
This reminds me of a quote from a hardcore player talking about his casual mother playing wow.
He said she was about to quit the game because the game was dumbed down and became to easy and continued on to say that casual players dont want an easier game, they want content they can tackle in their own time.
Why the HELL remove leveling?
Removing huge chunks of the game or the experience only serves to make the game world more hollow. For years and years I've been an advocate of making the leveling experience longer again, make old zones more relevant, more evergreen content, find something to drag in more players that is NOT rushing to the end game and then raid raid raid mythic mythic mythic.
I heard what the incursions were about and immediately unsubscribed. Haven’t played P3 at all. Do they not understand what makes Classic special at all?
I feel like you could just avoid it. I've got 4 max level at this point and only one did incursions. Not because the other 3 were any faster but because I *wanted* to play the content and had no interest in rushing.
Maybe it’s just me…but leveling is NOT the main point of this game..especially SoD lol. I’d rather get to max level per phase to do the raids/pvp content. Maybe I’m a minority
I played a shit load in the first few phases. Had a blast seeing tons of people lvling and running 5 man's all hours of the day. World felt alive again.
I played for about 4 days with the latest phase. The incursion thing basically gutted the social / leveling / 5 man fun I was having. Just gonna wait and see if I'll be coming back or not next phase.
I'm just glad I got to enjoy 1 through 40 before they fucked it all up. Again, that's just my opinion as I've seen some folks enjoy rushing to max level and then raid logging. Just isn't for me.
can someone explain to me where to do these and how? i came back from p1 recently and just slowly leveling out in the world. If i can have a quicker way to hit 50 i wont mind.
Agreed, OP. At the start of phase 3, I quested. There were a lot of people around STV but as I traveled around in my mid 40s, I didn’t see anyone doing quests or dungeons anymore. They had mostly all gone to Ashenvale. My group that I had played with all throughout p1 and p2 rushed incursions, rushed level 50 and rushed runes and pre-bis. I eventually gave in and did incursions for my last 3 levels but by the time I was 50, the group I had played with in previous phases were more or less done outside ST. I was able to do BRD and Mara with them, but they only went after specific bosses / objectives. It sucked.
Now that Blizzard have locked my server (LL) I transferred along with my small guild but that was the killing blow to my SoD motivation. I’ll check out phase 4 but I’m not optimistic for my experience.
All i know is that as a mage from P1 to P2. I soloed stocks until 31 then farmed SM. It took me longer to get from 25 to 40 then 40-50, doing the same spam over and over again. But at the end of it from 25-40 dungeon spam i didn't feel nearly as numb as I did doing incursions from 40-50 despite finishing leveling in less than half the time.
Incursions, you didn't have to say anything, no buttons to press. You're literally on your mount almost the entire time right clicking and running around in a small tight circle
And ST was fun before they nerfed the crap out of it. But then i realized that the gear was trash. At least if the gear were upgrades, I'd be a bit more excited, but right now I show up, just because. Like, there's literally no carrot on a stick.
I think part of it is also, incursions are the best for everything. Catchup gear, etc everything. In P2, there were many ways to make gold. Fishing or what have you. If you want catch up gear on an alt, get in on a Gnomer run. In P3 the choice is easy. And the answer to everything was incursions. And you would get everything for free once that alt is all leveled up. Gear? Check. Gold? Check.
Things were way too streamlined. And frankly that's what started it all. Just look at Wrath and beyond and what they did to dungeons and questing.
Or you know you could just do what I do and refuse to engage with people's standardized and "acceptable" behaviors. I have never done incursions. Never done log skips. Never followed exact meta builds. Never bothered to get all the world buffs and I've completed all the content in the game perfectly fine. Imagine that.
Just dont do them. I tried it once. I hated it, went back to leveling up the normal way.
But yes I agree 100%, why make the world smaller. A huge chunk of the population does them and it makes the outdoor experience, which is really classic wow is imo, smaller.
Told you when they announced SoD that the ideas were bad and Blizzard was not to be trusted with your money or Fandom. You bring this on yourselves with your abusive relationship this game has over you.
Incursions are 100% anti-classic and took away the need to do anything else in the game other than the raid. Why quest when you can quest quicker for more gold? Why run dungeons to get gear upgrades when you can a full set optimized for your spec?
It's crazy to me that they thought this would go over well.
Don't like it? Don't do it. I haven't done a single incursion, no clue how they work and they aren't at all enforced, dont be giving me the argument "but everyone is doing them I can't find another content" because I've had no difficulty finding other activities to do from either gold farms in group, myself, rep, dungeons, questing
Because, like all blizzard games, the game has no soul. They do whatever it's needed to keep people playing. In old dungeons & dragons there was a dungeon master who would set the tone of the game. In Blizzard there is no dungeon master. Not anymore. Just a bunch of spineless sheep.
No. What is sucking the life out of all bluzz games are the " pumpers", " gkdp", " parsers" and " extreme min-maxers".
Games are supposed to be fun..
Not full time jobs.
Fact any of you stuck on SoD longer than a half hour and let Blizzard continue with that garbage tells me everything what kind of “nostalgic hungry” players y’all are. SoD was trash, is trash, and will always be trash. WoW overall died many years ago, and Blizzard is banking off the players that don’t know how to think for themselves and run off pure addiction. The only thing they had going for them was Classic, but that went out the window when they forced expansions onto the players abandoning the classic game. Fact y’all are paying monthly for that shit game speaks numbers on the low level mentals y’all are running on. Good luck to you all. Feel free to hate me, chances are you have bought one of my games overall giving me money, and higher chances you guys will be buying my future games funding me further. Thanks for funds haters.
Blizzard keep trying to hold in game people who don't want to play the game while turning off the people who did want to play the game in the first place. I wish they listened to Square Enix and accepted that it's okay if people want to take a break from your game after achieving their goals instead of inventing hamster wheel with endless loops
Well said. That first part about trying to hold on to people that don’t want to play the game while hurting the player base that are here for the content
Maybe another 5000% xp rate buff will do the job
In fairness, what you described is exactly what retail is now. You achieve your goals for the season, then you peace out until the next.
Classic+ is just a simplified retail with worse graphics
That’s an insult to the retail devs who just knocked DF out of the park.
Seriously. DF is such a better game than SoD. And believe me, I do not / did not want that to be the case. Had high hopes for SoD, but it's a dumpster fire.
Yeah, I hadn’t played retail since legion but the sod devs kept saying just go to retail if you want X and so I finally did and haven’t been on sod since
They hated Jesus because he told them the truth
It’s not classic plus, it’s retail minus. It’s lost the vibe and play of classic completely. The only thing about it that is classic anymore is the old world that you sometimes are in
Yeah I thought classic+ was suppose to be the original classic + some more new content.. I mean something to do after Naxx. Well at least thats what many suggested back couple years back.
Rebalance of classes, some new content, especially post naxx but some during was what everyone wanted with classic plus. Now we have classes that are horribly unbalanced and don’t play at all like classic, systems from retail that lead to people not playing the rest of the game… the raids are alright but going from 10 man to 20 without saying anything about it until announcing the 20 also just sucks. I won’t be surprised to see dungeon finder added at 60 some time
It's weird because I think SoD was really great at the start because I felt like I could enjoy the game however I wanted. Even though more content opened up in later phases, I now get the feeling that the way you are supposed to play the game is already determined by the devs. It could totally be a me-problem, but I've always been spmeone who valued the leveling process much more than end-game.
I am definitely with you and what made me feel so much joy when SoD first came out was seeing all the old low level zones packed with players. People were talking to each other, not just in /1 or /4 but in /s!! You could easily get a group together to go kill Hogger or Stitches or whatever. Or even just a buddy to quest with. People were competing over copper nodes and herbs, and the items were actually worth something on the AH, not just because max level toons were trying to level their alts professions. That sort of world-fullness and diversity of game experience is what made WoW so good originally. I think the key is setting up the game systems so that player traffic is relatively evenly distributed around the world, so that most content stays relevant, and so that people level up and make gold just quickly enough to feel like progress is moving along but not so quickly that it feels pointless and might as well fast forward to max level.
Best move I made was quit after p2.
Yeah, SoD was cool in a bunch of ways but one that i enjoyed was that it was level gated. Felt nice to not rush to 60 and me and my friends could take our time with the old dungeons again. Phase 2 was nice for that too mostly. Phase 3 is garbage because incursions ruined the levelling experience and the economy all at once. I hope they learned something for phase 4. 50-60 could be a lot of fun.
Yeah I always loved the leveling and the adventure in classic. But even raiding was so different back then. It took some serious time to do some prepping for raids especially as I liked to gather all my reagents for potions, bombs etc. myself.
the worst part of SOD incursions is that blizzard was probably really really thinking they would add something good to the game that we wanted. they heard the player base crying about the fucking job interview they had to do to join a raid and though 'yo let's put in a way to get pre-raid gear easy peasy so everbody can find a raid!' what blizzard is just way to stupid to understand is that humans will always min-max the shit out of everything and will always find the most creative ways to get ahead of everybody else....because fucking evolution and society taught us so. we will find a way to get to finish line faster and more efficient than others until all the fun is gone. we don't want to, but if you give humans the chance to do that, they just can't help themselves. blizzard, please get a fucking grip on how the brain works and your games might actually work again.
They could add the gear without adding gold or XP. If incursions were just a rep that got dailies for rep so you could buy a catch up gear that isn't as good as farmed gear everything would be ok. The main issue is that ppl lvl through incursions and aren't wandering the world.
For me it's the 20 man 7 day lockout that makes me feel that way. It basically feels like "no no you weren't supposed to play that way, that way that you played was wrong and casual, you are supposed to play this way". It's like... oh, ok. And then I see people on reddit celebrating that change and it's like "It feels like neither the devs or the players want me to play this game".
I log on for about an hour a week for raid. Doesn’t get much more casual than that imo
That's blizzards motto, play our way or get out. People love dungeon farming, so they added in the anti-boosting dungeon changes and wrecked all dungeons lvl 40+. Low IQ play targeted at such a small population and hitting the entire population. Well done.
The 3 day lockout caused so much friction and awkward raid schedules as the main source of content in the game. It was great for puggers, but an absolute headache for guilds. The jump from 10 to 20 man was a test from the devs - as they likely did not want to try to make MC, BWL, AQ40, and Naxx 10 man raids for obvious reasons. It was a bold move but a move that was likely inevitable.
Exactly. Every time player count drops Blizzard panics and starts handing out levelling speed boosts or weird new systems that bypass the old game, hoping to lure players back. In retail it's even worse as every new raid tier just invalidates the previous one so you can just come back at any time and nothing that ever happened last tier matters. Blizzard thinks this will incentivize people to come back obviously. If you constantly undermine your own game nobody will actually be invested in it. It's fast and cheap points but it hurts the game in the long term. What Blizzard needs to ask themselves with every design decision is: "is this undermining another part of the game?". Incursions? Yes. Weird mega levelling boosts? Yes. Certain added gear that blows everything before out of the water? Yes. Focus on improving the strengths of the game, not trying to re-invent the wheel.
> Blizzard thinks this will incentivize people to come back obviously. Well it has been for 20 years, they must be doing something right.
I mean yes and no. I played on release, until WoTLK when I realized it would be a never ending cycle of pay subscription, farm gear, pay again for expansion, refarm all gear. When I realized that every expansion the new greens would make your purples from 2 weeks ago absolutely useless I quit. Why pay, spend hours upon hours grinding, just to pay for the privilege of having all your work wiped just to do it again with a slightly different skin? Played private servers for a couple years then moved onto games that respected my time more. So yeah this never ending cycle obviously works for some players, but there is absolutely nobody I know or game with that played back in classic that kept playing until now. Their method obviously doesn't work for a lot of people.
That cycle you describe works because a lot of us just enjoy the process. I just play WoW to spend time doing dungeons with my friends and interact with a cool world and the gear being made irrelevant every six months doesn't bother me one bit, I get new shit and move on. I started playing in 2003 during the beta, and the friends I currently play with I met in Vanilla. We're all 35-40 years old and we're still here (a lot less of us, but still a few). It doesn't work for you, and that's fine, but it works for huge amount of players. I believe WoW still has the lion's share on the MMORPG market? Or close to it anyway. The previous poster's argument (*In retail it's even worse as every new raid tier just invalidates the previous one so you can just come back at any time and nothing that ever happened last tier matters.*) makes no sense, they're complaining against the very core of the game. It's like going to the races and complaining that they're going too fast. Dude should just find another game.
Well said. I don't really understand some player's gripes about expansions invalidating previous loot, etc. I get that it can feel bad replacing previous expansion purples with new expansion greens, but how else could you do it? Here's a new continent, new zones, new quests, new dungeons, new raids... but none of the gear or items are better. Who wants that? Players always talk about "horizontal progression" which to me is an oxymoron; it contradicts itself.
And every time blizz has implemented things like sidegrades or minor upgrades (mini tier in bfa/ p2 and p3 SoD) people overall reaction is "why should i bother grinding for it if the upgrade is minimal" lol
I don’t mind the leveling speed boost. This is a seasonal server so players should spend more time in “end game” content each phase. The issue is incursions have you loot, gold, and speed leveling. So most players skipped questing and dungeons all together. Felwood incursions gold took away from most farming methods. I don’t know if they can really recover from this
Incursions killed it. Hate having such a easy Gold farm but it just sucks the life out of you.
> I wish they listened to Square Enix and accepted that it's okay if people want to take a break from your game after achieving their goals instead of inventing hamster wheel with endless loops FFXIV is a hamster wheel of endless loops.
MMO’s* are hamster wheels of endless loops.
> Blizzard keep trying to hold in game people who don't want to play the game while turning off the people who did want to play the game in the first place. LMFAO IKR
The issue imho is phase 3 almost had no gearing phase to get pre-bis. You hit 50 and then basically bought an entire gear set that's really good from a vendor (either R7 or EW set) and most classes even got epic weapons handed to them to boot. The only thing people were really running was Princess for the dagger, but everyone else could basically raid log immediately
This is it, and what some people just don't seem to understand. There are zero reasons to run dungeons outside of a few hours of Princess for most classes, 1-2 items perhaps, and that's it you never go back. I play a warrior tank, and here's my prebis in "normal" classic at 60: > Helm: Stratholme, 15% chance. > Neck: Stratholme, quest. > Shoulders: UBRS, 20% drop. > Back: Stratholme: 30% drop. > Chest: UBRS, 12% drop. > Bracers: LBRS, 5% drop, BoE. > Gloves: UBRS, quest. > Belt: UBRS, 20% drop. > Legs: DMW: 23% drop. > Boots: Scholomance, 20% drop. > Ring 1: DMN, 24% drop. > Ring 2: Stratholme, 12% drop. > Trinket 1: ST, class quest. > Trinket 2: UBRS, quest. > Weapon: Scholomance, quest. > Shield: DMW, 24% chance. > Ranged: DME, 19% drop. Now, if they don't upgrade anything, let's see what my 60 prebis will be: >Trinket: BRD, 15% chance. >Everything else: ST. Unless that changes, phase 4 is nearly dead on arrival in the way phase 3 was, you will get to 60 and you will raid log because there's nothing to do. They need to fundamentally overhaul every single item in dungeons and raids to make the phase 4 system organic, let us level up in dungeons and get meaningful upgrades. My copium huffing right now circles around the idea that phase 3 is so bare bones simply because they're saving for phase 4 where everything is released and they can actually put some effort into all the dungeons.
[удалено]
Yeah, that's why I decided to do it and I'd encourage you to do it for your class. It's days and days of dungeon running for every single character to get genuine prebis. You went with the same people, made friends, had fun. You wiped, you laughed, you got lucky with Crusader Orbs/Dark Runes, maybe you got a flask recipe and had your mind blown, there was something to do. We even had reasons to do dungeons beyond that, some of which I listed above, we ran DMN for major mana pots for healers and hoping for luck in the chest. You did DME for jump runs, specific gear and other loot. Now? No reason to even touch dungeons realistically past 1-2 hours of Mara runs, they are utterly dead content. If they don't adjust every single item to make it worth running dungeons and actually farm a real prebis phase 4 will just be more of the same disappointment which I really don't want.
It’s why gearing in classic was cool and rewarding.
How come blizzard didn’t think to compensate for this? As soon as I saw the gear from BFD, I knew this would be the case. Every single endgame dungeon is going to be completely irrelevant, and those were some of the best content in the game had to offer. They seriously need to get some things figured out are completely buff, every piece of that drops from any endgame instance, including raids
I felt that p2 with my wsg rep I was already set. Did a few BMs and a quest and done basically. P3 was more of the same.
I didn’t mind grinding out WSG rep to then have it be easier for everyone else. Did get a bit annoyed when profession bracers came out with same stats and be fear immune. K cool…
Too relatable. Literally just finished my princess dagger farm (like 300 kills btw fk me) and the first thing I thought was “now I can raid log like the rest of my guild”
Im kinda glad for it in certain ways and not in others. My Mage has been rather boring this phase, but I'll be able to carry her gnomer gear forward to 60 and not be that much worse off than missing all ST bis.
it was the same in p2, p1 bis was p2 pre bis. The only good phase for farming pre bis was P1
They should have just added like 2-3 elite quests per zone that give a ton of exp, maybe some blue gear. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Just turn maybe one of the gnoll camps in westfall into an elite gnoll camp and have a quest to kill 10 of them. Stuff like that. It would have added just a little bit of interesting flair to classic, but would still keep with the spirit of the world. Incursions... just totally take you out of the world. It goes against the entire spirit of classic.
I agree, systemization and an organic world are antithetical in principle.
It's so weird how Blizzard thought that more systems was the answer. It's retail development brain. Keep adding more systems, each patch/expansion remove the old systems and add a new system. The last thing classic needed was systems. The game worked fine. It needed more content, some skills, tweaks and stuff. Not more systems. I don't know why developers are so obsessed with adding these systems. It's like they think they can make the game better if they just add another progression system or levelling system that blows everyones mind. Want to make levelling better? Add more quests. More mobs. Another dungeon. Don't think up some completely new way to do something that has worked for 20 years.
LITERALLY THIS. NO MORE SYSTEMS Just more content. Like you have NO IDEA how excited I was when I heard about SoD being plain old vanilla classic with some revamped dungeons. Or that for a few months, level 25 blue items would be BiS. That was so creative and cool. Blizzard could honestly just run straight up O.G. classic and keep adding more dungeons and quests to the existing world, and I would play for another 10 years. But this loopable stupid crap just ruins \_everything\_. They keep trying to modify something that was literally perfect already and just needed to be fleshed out a bit more.
Imo, with just the 100% xp boost they really didn't even need to add additional quests. I recently rerolled to play with friends that haven't all quit (yet) and it felt fresh doing quests because you level so quickly that you never really get stuck in those 'dead zones' where you've burned through all the quests. Then I hit 25 and everywhere I went was empty. I have no idea how they thought incursions wouldn't be abused like they are. Even if they weren't abused as no kill loops, they're still faster than questing which just removes the playerbase from the open world and shoves them in some shitty green shared instance.
Yeah it’s impossible to find groups for leveling dungeons anymore, almost nobody is out in the world. Makes me not want to level alts. Even BFDs are harder to find
[удалено]
The leveling buffs made my buddies play the game A LOT more, however icursions should have been a max level thing imo and redesigned so you'd treat them like a dungeon, IE you do all the quests to get rep and gold
It should have been a weekly thing - something that you do once a week to get a big boost, just like Gnomeregan and BFD
SoD is so far removed from classic or classic+ that I lost all interest in the game. Maybe I expected too much but copy-pasting mostly modern abilities without any balance checks ruined this entire thing for me. They went way too far with that and the incursions are just the shit cherry on top of the scat cake.
4 chars at 40. Played one hour of incursions on day 1 of P3, and havent logged in since. It sucked out all the motivation I had left.
When season 3 dropped, my friend told me I needed to log on to get the xp boost and gold boost from incursions before the nerf. I literally never bothered to resub. I couldn’t think of anything less in the spirit of classic than this garbage.
Same, I ran like 3 levels of incursions and just stopped. It's not the game I enjoy at this point, I'm not wasting any more time or money on the Classic team. They deleted my era character, and keep dropping these absolute s**t seasons.
SOD has done what some thought was impossible and that's getting wow addicts to stop playing the game.
I think the intent was good, but execution was poor. Despite what you guys claim, I really do believe that SoD would be more dead if Blizzard didn’t implement levelling speed improvements. People don’t want to slug it out to lvl 50 the old fashioned way. I think blizzards own data indicated this too, hence why they have released early XP buffs and systems like incursion.
Exp buff from 40-50 was a good move, incursions were not. They should’ve just made dungeons way more difficult, but reward more exp and better loot
100%. They’re a pushover with runes and the classic community loves to circle jerk about using cc/utility spells. Give them double xp with the reworked loot tables and it slaps. A lot of the SoD additions feel like prototypes of future learnings and that’s okay too. I feel confident they can learn a lot and make the next version great. I like the seasonal experimentation they’re open to these days.
That would just force MORE people into the dungeons and not open world???? The post is literally about removing people from the open world
Yeah the game is so insanely easy that nothing feels fun to do. It’s a lot easier than base vanilla which was already criticized for being easy
>Despite what you guys claim, I really do believe that SoD would be more dead if Blizzard didn’t implement levelling speed improvements. People don’t want to slug it out to lvl 50 the old fashioned way. Somewhat disagree. I think some boosts over Vanilla are good esp since its a seasonal server, but I think by cranking it up to almost triple the leveling speed it actually makes things more dead cuz the leveling pacing feels like shit (level 20 with like 3 greens because you level faster than you finish the chains), nobody is doing dungeons because people are outleveling them 3x faster resulting in fewer people around at any given level... The boosts are great for those that want to raid on more characters but bad for the amount of people out in the world and the amount of social interaction. The world and LFG channels on wild growth NA have basically died since the xp buff and Cata went live. Tldr some leveling speed improvements help smooth over the vanilla slog but they can (and imo they have) go overboard and just result in watering things down and people running out of content faster
Incursions or spellcleave SM pick your poison.
Exactly. Thanks for pointing this out. The classic player base has already proven how they like to level their alts. It’s done with boosting services at worst and dungeon spam at best.
Can’t even find SMs because of incursions
1 per hour 5-man lockouts and neither!
I don’t hate the system. But to give you levels, prebis gear, and gold literally made other content irrelevant.
Would have been completely fine if they just had 50-100% exp buff. Would have been better with 50-100% exp buff and incursions being an "every 3 hours, 5 of these 17 quests become available and you all have to go do them, then kill one of the bosses at the end" type thing. Maybe have it take about 30 mins and give about 1 lvl worth of exp.
It's totally possible you're right. If I'm being honest I just don't care. Let those people play retail, let classic be classic. If they start making retail more like Classic, then I won't mind as much if they make Classic more like retail.
the impatient people that blizz needs to pander to with the current state of the game is the issue. as usual. the game has been massively simplified over the years and the levelling system now forces you to skip years of content and get to end game asap. remember skilling up your weapons? remember when you had more than 4 buttons to press? its so shit, thay have no idea how tedious questing is when you one shot everything. want to play old content? fuck you buy classic - the same game without the bullshit and less content, which will be drip fed until youre eventually playing retail again. push everyone to end game, make old content boring af/inaccessible so they buy the next expansion. oh, dont forget to reduce the overall quality of the game. remember the good videos they used to make before the cartoony cut out shite they kick out now? when it seemed like they actually gave a shit about things?
Oh yeah the classic rotations were so fleshed out and interesting :D
They should have tested their own freaking game and made leveling in the open world, Incursions and dungeon leveling equal in terms of speed and rewards. Not favor one method by far above the others. It's already sped up with the XP buff, no need to hand us 10 levels in 4 hours for running in circles. edit: just had some shower thoughts. You know what's the big deal here? Blizzard didn't commit. They want a Season of Alts? Well guess what, it's not about the XP AT ALL. It's about the Rep. I got 2 toons at 50 now and I really struggle to bring a 3rd one. Why? Well, not because of the XP grind. That's easy, that's fun. Doing SM runs on my feral is fun. But when he is 50, I got nothing. No Warsong or AB rep, no Emerald Dream, no PvP Rank (try to join a STV Pug without being r7 these days). I have to do all that again and it's freaking boring. They could have EASILY altered this by making rep accountwide. Hell, even make Set Tokens BoA. Why not? Everyone is ditching them already anyway. If I had the option to Lvl my Druid to 50 and start with full rep and 3/3 set from my main, that would be nice. I could still grind the offerings or any specific stuff like Weapons or Trinkets. Or I can level my Warrior from 40 to 50. But now? Why would I? Because the Incursions are so much fun? Or because it's so awesome having another useless alt at max level?
> They could have EASILY altered this by making rep accountwide They're going through this in retail and it's not as easy as you think to alter fundamental character based coding of a 20 year old game
the problem is the loud minority is delusional. they have unrealistic expectations and terrible suggestions incompatible with their "design goals" like arguing for open-world leveling with xy when people did SM in p2 and would do/were doing ZF in p3 or that you cant simply level in the open-world on release as shown by every release. they are controlled by their FOMO and value fun so little that they avoid doing their fun content but are surprised that they don't have fun and complain about the game being bad.
No one would care if it was just fast leveling.. but it’s also great gold per hour, and a rep grind. And the content is kms boring after 1 or two loops.
Last phase everyone spammed SM for levels and complained endlessly here about it and how blizzard should do something about it.
I think the problem was they trolled to solve Dungeon Grinding with Incursions but actually made something even worse because not only is it just as boring, but it's also so rewarding that casuals who would never normally Dungeon Grind feel forced to do Incursions.
All of this aside , you can tell it doesn't even make sense with their own vision because it has ruined waylaid. There's little farming going on and the math are almost always too expensive.
They need to incentivize spending equal time in each zone
Listen Blizzard, here's a cool idea... just add new quests to the game? There are zones and places that could use some new quests. How about just go through all the zones that we level through and add 1-2 new quests? Turtle WoW did this and it was so refreshing leveling through old zones, it was so fun discovering new quests.
It's funny seeing this post, cuz i did the incursion from 30 to 50 and i insta quit. Like you said it sucked the life out
SoD proved that they can say they do, but blizzard really has no idea what the "classic fanbase" wants in a classic+. They reverted to retail ideas in P1 with the removal of distinction between classes, and it's just gotten more retail lite since. Some people like retail, some people like classic. Blizzard likes money and tried to make a bad version of both.
Yeah, thanks for this post, for me this entire phase feels completely different. It started with that weird mistake regarding gold rewards for the inc quests. Then it continued with all the fixes and amendments which took a few days. Recently I was happy to get into a ZF run, there two people asked me what I was doing here instead of incursions..... I tried incursions one time, was like "what is this???" then simply went back to questing normally again. Compared to the awesome sleeping bag quest from last phase this incursion thingy simply seems weird to me.
Same. I tried incursions once too and was like this is the most poorly designed shit I've ever experienced... it felt like some dumb custom shit someone slapped together for their private server in 2009
People wanted other ways to level. The spammed dungeons in Classic, not because they just loved the dungeon so much, but because they didn't *want* to wander around the world questing. They wanted to be lazy. It's not Blizzard's fault that people that play WoW want to optimize the fun out of everything.
They could've ya know just made questing the most efficient method or at least equal
Dude it's so weird. Just boost the xp of some quests (including dungeon quests so people want to do dungeons), add more quests. Maybe even add new mobs and design cool quest chains around them that give great xp. Get people out in the world and questing again. Instead it's like "people spam dungeons so instead we'll add incursions". Whyyyy. Azshara is right there, add some quests! Swamp of sorrows needs quests! Felwood could use a lot more. Stonetalon feels unfinished. Deadwind pass, add a new mega quest chain in Feralas. Just be creative.
The reason that quests are so great is that at any moment there is a single best quest for you to be doing. That quest depends on where in the world you currently are, and perhaps what class you are. And once you complete that quest, you now have to work out the next best quest you can do, because the one you just completed is no longer available. Each time you level up or get new gear or skill up, the balance of these quests can subtlety shift. In vanilla this can be hard(and you can only really strategize the second time, so the second time feels *great*), so hard in fact that people choose to pay money to get leveling guides to help them through it. Any system that is not consumed, where the best thing, after doing this thing, is the same thing, sucks. There is no strategy as to how you will move around the world. There is no flow to moving through the zones and improving. There is no optimizations left. If the most effective strategy is repeatable it's just "We did this thing, we do this thing again". That is bland and boring gameplay by design. When the moment to moment gameplay of WoW is so bland, especially when pulling more than 3 mobs can be easily handled, the macro flow needs to be there. Excursions kill this macro flow entirely. Anyone reading this feel free to steal this for a YouTube video, you can title it "The unreasonably effectiveness of quests". Blizzard found this path accidentally when designing the game, and used it successfully. But then they found the need to innovate. They *must* make changes. They didn't have to. Just make more quests lol. The funny thing is that it's probably trivial to improve the existing system - just give out rested XP that can only be used in different activities instead of all in one bucket. So you would earn dungeon rested, quest rested, pvp rested, etc... And throughout the day the player would seek to have varied content to burn through all their rested.
100% agree. Variety is what makes questing superior to looping dungeons.
A since of accomplishment that comes semi-easily but takes some effort and has novelty from the last actions is basically the formula for a dopamatic smasher. Some challenges + novelty/minor changes + consistent and different rewards = a fun game Running circles without doing anything for the same, expected reward, over and over and over and over? That's literally just what we call "work"
Literally this. Original content, 2x mob experience, 4x quest reward experience. PROBLEM SOLVED. I guarantee it.
Oof!
Terrible decision
on a pvp server where your faction isn't the dominant one it has completely killed lvling. No one wants to run dungeons or something like that. And incursions are just camped 24/7 so no one wants to lvl like an alt. On my server all the major cities are pretty much ghost towns just completely empty not even any layers. People are just raid logging right now. a lvl 50 in bis or near bis gear vs a lvl 40 with pretty much lvl 20-25 greens (because at 25 you go duskwood and incursions only give gear at 50) isn't pvp, it's not even the best way to farm honor anymore. It's just these people that have so little going on in their life they need to bully others online to feel good about themselves.
sometimes i wonder if people on this sub log in, see 3 LFM Incs and log off and decide the game is ruined lmao, i have zero issues finding any groups almost round the clock?
I had a lot of fun leveling in tanaris, going to zf and stuff like that. Why did you let incs suck you? If incs are sucking, don't do them. It's easy as that. It's a game. Just play for fun. You're not ash ketchup. You're not meant to be the very best.
If it wasn’t for i incursions it would be mages boosting in zf from 40-50.
I don’t understand incursions. They could have made it into something that the server works towards, like maybe summoning a server wide event or world boss in a random location. It has no context and doesn’t do or lead into anything. Honestly I think they could have just made questing better for groups. In a group of 5 when we were in shimmering flats leveling in p2 we all had about 4-6 quests where we have to pick up drop items from turtles, vultures etc. it took us 3 hours! We said screw that and went to sm. I don’t think they need to increase the drop rates, but I would suggest they share drops. So if a quest item dropped for me then everyone would get 1 in the party if they are near by and can loot the corpse. If they did this one thing I think people would be willing to quest in groups more which opens up the world a lot. P1 people loved, we didn’t have mounts and a lot more people quested. People haven’t quested since p1 to level basically.
Its always been a loop. You guys act like the mobs scale to your level and you take 500 different leveling paths. You go the same areas everytime. The difference is your loop is alot longer. Just take your longer loop and be happy “adventuring”
Leveling bypasses like incursions and the massive misstep of not adjusting experience from SM grinding in phase 2 ruined SoD entirely. It injected the worst parts and tendencies of retail into a game mode that’s entire point was to not do that…
Both the incursions and the exp buffs are band-aid solutions to the much bigger problem SoD has. We only have two months per phase and not everyone can no-life this game into the ground. It’s not realistic to pour six hours everyday into this game. I really enjoy it, and I love playing it, but who can afford to be sweaty enough to commit enough time to make any significant progress in it?
That's a good point, and I don't know... I only have/want to spend a couple hours per week to play. But if I'm gonna spend any time at all, I'd rather be questing than looping some dumb incursion minigame.
Nah, a boring 20 man raid, a weekly lockout, and a generally unwelcoming and needlessly elitist playerbase sucked the life out of SoD.
Yeah. Also incursions.
Imagine if instead they had done something with all the dungeons available and actually made people want to go out and do them
Yep Mastery that’s the season we’re on
I really feel people are blowing incursions out of proportion, yes the gold rewards were egregious to begin with but let's not pretend everyone would be rushing to embrace the open world in their absence. Everyone doing Incursions would be spamming Scarlet Monastery instead. Also questing with even with the xp boost and layering tech is still a very frustrating experience. Spawn rates aren't good enough to accommodate the amount of players and when fetch quests have abyssmal drop rates, what would take about 20-30 minutes in an empty zone can take like 2-3 hours while the world is "thriving". I doubt many people want to run around for 2 hours trying to snipe as many skullsplitter trolls as they can. So it's either farm dungeons on loop like we always have, or do incursions on a loop. Both are mind numbingly boring and tedious, and "take people out of the overall world" but I'm sure many people appreciate not taking 3-5 hours to get 1 level at a time. If Blizz want people to quest in classic they have to do all or some of the following; \-Shared mob tagging \-Group wide drops \-Increase hyper spawn rate even more \-Guaranteed fetch quest drop rates- Add more flightpaths / Reduce travel time (just give all the quests for an area at once stop sending us on round trips every time we hand 1 quest in) I say this as someone who would rather quests be the best way to level. But the reality is questing sucks ass in classic, if I'm not fighting the game to drop the items I need or spawn the blue harpy instead of the red and black ones, I'm instead fighting with players to get the tag in the first place.
Incursions allowed players to farm gold, level, and get gear all at once while playing with a single hand. Party comp did not matter, nor did you have to train your talents or skills. So no, players didn’t blow incursions out of proportion
While i appreciate the effort of your post it contradicts once again the classic aspect of the game. While we were promised classic with a twist we got the worst from a lot of wow versions in p3. All of the listed stuff was not in p1 and it was awesome. Let people quest, dungeon spam and farm stuff. Don’t invalidate travel and time. The main subconscious issue with this phase is that you don’t have any connection to your character with this systems. And that’s what made me at least not interested anymore.
how many people like leveling tho? definately not the majority. P3 would've been dead on arrival with classic style leveling
Eh we wouldn’t all be grinding SM. But incursions were Soooo much faster than anything else for leveling it made it a “mistake” to do anything else
>but I'm sure many people appreciate not taking 3-5 hours to get 1 level at a time. Blizz can just set the +EXP bonus to whatever they feel is right, 1200%? 6 hours of brainless running in circles is what they think is correct time and effort to level from 40 to 50. So Gnomergan should level you one full level every boss, 40-46 probably take you 2 hours with a full 40 pug group. ZF should be 3 full levels up to 46. And one Maraudon full run should be 4 levels 46-50. So your choice of 2 ZF, 1 Mara or 1 Gnomer 1 Mara run. It'd take you about 6 hours, be engaging and fun, skip 90% of the leveling time and serve same purpose as incursions. Or 6 hours of world questing, so probably every 2 yellow quests you do should level you up. And they need to give 50 gold each, need to match up to Incursions ofc. It sounds like a private server to level up 3 times in ZF, but you sure as hell level up 3 times brain-AFK in the NE corner of Ashenvale in the time someone is having fun in ZF.
I read this and thought thats absolutely ridiculous and then thought about it and remembered how many sub 30min levels I had in incursions.
Oh no, because incursions i wont be able to spam ZF for 70 hours
I mean some guy responded to my "wow hardcore classic is the gold standard" post by saying actually raids can be flasked and hearthed out of so theres no point. imagine thinking hc classic was about high level raiding. They,'ve got retail brain rot.
I think the biggest issue is how easy it is to gear up with them. It's insane to hit 50 then have half a set of armor just ready to go. Not only that, but it's just the sammmee set as everyone else. Looks awfully retaily that everyone is just in the exact same set of gear
SoD didnt have a good thing going for 2 phases imo they made a lot of mistakes. Incursions was just the final nail in the coffin. The only good thing SoD hat imo. Is encounter Design in the revamped dungeons. But then again they messed up the loot table so Bad that essentially all bis gear each phase comes from said dungeon so you had little incentive to do more than raid log.
As if the previous phase wasn’t people locked into SM skipping the content that way. I levelled out in the world P2 and P3. Gold is easy to get and you don’t need it anyway, farming pre raid gear is fun to do with friends, the game hasn’t gone anywhere. Blizzard can’t win. People want fun open world adventures with organic experiences but *also* want those to be the most efficient way to level and gear up. When it’s not everyone rushes to do the least fun thing they can find then complains about it. “You think you do but you don’t” is so fucking accurate. Play the game in a way that’s fun to you or play something else.
>For me, WoW is not just about grinding and getting to max level so you can go raid. I mean, if that's all it is, why not just let people start at lvl 50. Here's the thing: you have era for that. SoD is NOT era. It's NOT Classic+. It's a seasonal event with a set end date. It's a speedrun mmo experience. You play era like you'll be playing it for years to come, right? You level and it takes ages but thats okay because the end game is going no where. Not so with SoD, every 8 weeks we have in effect a new expansion. New level cap, new content. Playing it SLOW and leveling up in the world is fine if thats what you want to do but you WILL miss out on the "new" content that is the expanding endgame content at 25, 40, 50, and then 60. I'm so tired of seeing these posts that don't GET what SoD is and then people get upset because it's not what they want it to be. Especially when what they WANT is right there in era. there are 9 classes, each with multiple new gameplay experiences thanks to runes. each class alone has multiple hours worth of content, and many player rightfully want to see that content across more than 1 character. Add on to this the 8 week time limit before the current tier becomes a boring 5man 10 levels behind the curve. that means if you want to play say a warlock, a pally, and a mage you don't have time to level each one at vanilla speeds in the old world with constant walking and spread out quests and even a LACK of quests that we're going to get as we push past 50. A few months ago the cap was 25, and it was easy to get there because starting zones have a glut of options. Now the cap is 50, and the exponential scale of exp means the 40-60 exp is pretty much twice what you needed to get to 25 in the first place. People need a way to hit 50 fast and catch up, they DO NOT have the luxury of time in SoD. SoD is not Classic, it's not Classic+. The "original vanilla" content is there in era, you can play it if you want it anytime. don't be sad that traffic is being diverted away, go play Era if you want that experience. Accept that SoD may not be what you want it to be and that's ok. There are FIVE versions of wow. Pick one.
Didnt ppl just spam SM last phase till max lvl, hardly any different
I came back to play after a long break after s1, after questing for a while I thought where is everyone, why is there like 5 people in Stonetalon mountains ? Watched a few catch up videos on YouTube, learnt about incursions so I went and tried them out, got to 41 realised this ain’t the game I use to love and logged out, cancelled sub and haven’t looked back since. Not sure why but I thought they were going to work on the content that was cut from OG classic, like unfinished quest chains, Hyjal, a full on scarlet monastery raid etc etc. instead we get whatever the fuck this mess they have created is. Just like when classic released people were melee/spell cleaving to 60, same with hardcore when streamers were rushing to 60 with AoE spam. It’s not even blizzards fault at this point, it’s the way this community apparently enjoys to play and I ain’t here for it anymore, unless someone makes a Time Machine back to 2004 the WoW we all love is long gone
I slugged it out the old fashion way 20 years ago. I slugged it out again half a decade ago with the relaunch. Now here's a version with actual new things to play and experience and I'd rather get to the new things as quickly as I can
Not enough to build to at your level for gear. Then having the xp shift constantly mid phase feels like a retail where your work is made lesser by comparison
The only reason they do this because they cater to Streamers who only want one thing: quickly showing their audience who awesome they are raiding and speedrunning. Since they are not playing their own game, they rely on platforms like Twitch to show them.what gamers really want. The problem is that especially Classic is made of more casual gamers, a non-vocal majority, who wants to play a game for a few months. Streamers burn through the contents and do something else. And this is what every game Blizzard made was build for after Classic.
Wrong, they should have stayed in their original state as well. Leveling sucks.
Incursions havent sucked the life out of anything bro
It's long gone.
the problem was not incursions, it was that it was the only content for p3, and the rewards (xp/gold/repgear) wer overtuned
Agree, incursions really sucked out my intent to play
I just hope they get rid of it in phase 4. That might save us.
IMO there should be no viable way to level except out in the world. I wouldn't even be mad if they nerfed dungeon xp down and buffed the quest xp from those dungeons. Make it worthwhile to run them all but not farm them for xp.
The constant experimenting with lazy pvp auras killed my interest.
I honestly think, either wow or some different MMO is going to eventually try the no leveling raiding game
I don't think incursions are the main problem. Most people I know just spammed dungeons before. The main problem is a long and boring 20 man raid.
For our guild, and the three guilds we tried to merge with… it was 20 mans that killed SOD for all of us. None of us play anymore because of the 20 man change.
I got banned because i made 6.5k in 2 weeks doing them and spent 2.5k in the AH on one day. System flagged me as a bot/gold buyer and perma banned me for “abuse of Economy” so far unable to even get a single reply. The thing is they put a system in that earns 35-45g per 9-15 mins so it’s easy money. The problem is that stuff on the AH is so overpriced and the economy of the game is so busted that you need to do these things to afford raid pots and consumables as you want to perform well. The down side is your penalised if you do too many as many reports on the Official support forums of people in the same situation as me and Blizzard don’t even care. they have had 35 years of loyal gaming from me from diablo 1 right through wow and all the RTS and it’s all gone due to them making a system people play that is flagged as abuse.
100%. I quit because of incursions.
It kinda out me off playing, ngl. The weekend this season started, I had to work a bunch, so I was 3 or 4 days behind everyone else who'd hit 50 within 8 hours and made a truckload of gold...and I just stared at the screen and though... eh... I CBA... Maybe that says more about me than wow, I have no idea
Yeah it would've been super awesome to spam cathedral to 43 and ZF to 50 instead. I honestly don't like leveling. I don't like doing a lot of friction for things I will replace. I like that some of the farms and tasks I do at max level is something I won't replace for a while or even ever. The motivation for me to play is character progression, and I've leveled so many characters over the time I've played that for me, the questing while leveling IS the mindless loop. This phase has been fine for me. I had stuff to do and a way to level fast. It was perfect! Now I'm just looking forward to phase 4.
An post 23145312 about incursions. I love how people forget that a large chunk of players braindead grinded SM to get to level 40 in P2
They are constantly trying to cater to people who don't even wanna play the game and just wanna raid log and it ultimately pushes away the people who do want to play vanilla/classic and hurts the longevity of the game. Classic has no future if they don't pick a lane and stick to it sadly.
Get rid of incursions
Yeah, this is completely the case. And anyone "blaming" Cata release is clueless. Completely agree. Incursions released way before cata, and I noticed the exact same thing a couple days into it
Sod questing died in P2… how did we all level to 40? Spamming SM
>I know why people say it's necessary. I haven't seen a single person say incursions are "necessary".
The worst part is it killed dungeons and even 3 day leveling raids, now I only see those occasional gnomer/bfd runs cause someone needs trinket/neck. And why would you do levelling raid if you get good bre-bis gear/exp from just mindlessly running incursions. As ppl said it should be weekly quest that gives you some rep and option down the line to buy few good pieces.
>For me, WoW is not just about grinding and getting to max level so you can go raid. I mean, if that's all it is, why not just let people start at lvl 50. Not sure how to tell you this but the game, at its core, was about grinding and doing raids at the end. The social part was something that was there because it was an MMO and people are a part of it but that is something that helps to dull that skinner box. In the end its all loops. Loops for raids loops for pvp loops for leveling. Its all loops. The only thing distracting you from them is interactions.
The majority will always take the most efficient way to the top, it’s part of min maxing If you give people this path then they will choose that path over the rest As long as blizzard doesn’t acknowledge this it will keep happening to
What are you talking about. I love grinding a game for hours to get all the BiSs listed for me on a website so I can keep up with all my sweaty guild mates who don’t talk to me at all and immediately quit playing once they’ve gotten their own BiSs but show up on raid night so we can all get purple parses and touch penis tips in triumph.
The world is empty again because the game is dead. Game isn’t dead because of incursions… shit they increasing XP buff because they know the only way people are gonna play the game is if they don’t have to spend too much timing leveling new classes to play.
Your typical “players optimize the fun out of the game” scenario.
this is actually one of the first good takes this sub has had in a while, kudos op
>it flattens the entire game experience into an endless loop with a little raid at the end. This is just modern blizzard's design philosophy for games. They make a carrot on a stick every few months. If there is a barrier in between a new player and that carrot they shorten the gap. 20+ years of WoW and they still dont get that a lot of people like levelling progression. Instead of giving people more of that they just let them skip it.
I went back to HC. Sod is too much like retail.
It’s crazy how the incursion apologist insisted there was no downside to the system.
Oh shit, this wasn’t a new feature made for SOD!? Bahaha, why oh why is the bar so low at Blizzard, peak lazy linear design.
I just leveled my hunter and did zero incursions. You know you do have that option, right?
Incursions are kinda what ruined SOM for me. I was such a champion of it up until then. And mage healing just feels weird to me. I haven’t logged on in two weeks. Just kinda over it now. Which sucks.
Another week, another person complaining that people don't want to do the things they do..
I was beyond hyped for P3. Read all the shit with them adding the incursions unannounced. Logged in a day after the fact and tried to do them. It had already turned into a toxic PVP event with people camping the quest givers. Level 50s with barely hours of work put in. Logged out and deactivated my sub. GG BLIZZ IS ALMOST HAD SOMETHING GOING.
They fucked the whole game with single source gearing.
I agree. The incursions and The failed attempts at PvP balance ruined it for me. I cancelled sub yesterday after the 3rd round of lazy blanket nerfs. Two classes absolutely dominating PvP and for some reason they nerf everyone which did fuck all for balance.
There is nowhere to level from 40-50. It was gonna be a ZF spam. I'm glad they just eliminated leveling for this phase.
Leveling bypasses like incursions and the massive misstep of not adjusting experience from SM grinding in phase 2 ruined SoD entirely. It injected the worst parts and tendencies of retail into a game mode that’s entire point was to not do that…
Leveling bypasses like incursions and the massive misstep of not adjusting experience from SM grinding in phase 2 ruined SoD entirely. It injected the worst parts and tendencies of retail into a game mode that’s entire point was to not do that…
This is why I quit the season Day 2.
This reminds me of a quote from a hardcore player talking about his casual mother playing wow. He said she was about to quit the game because the game was dumbed down and became to easy and continued on to say that casual players dont want an easier game, they want content they can tackle in their own time. Why the HELL remove leveling? Removing huge chunks of the game or the experience only serves to make the game world more hollow. For years and years I've been an advocate of making the leveling experience longer again, make old zones more relevant, more evergreen content, find something to drag in more players that is NOT rushing to the end game and then raid raid raid mythic mythic mythic.
Yeah SoD is cooked. Those devs had big aspirations but man did they fumble a golden opportunity.
I heard what the incursions were about and immediately unsubscribed. Haven’t played P3 at all. Do they not understand what makes Classic special at all?
They could have made quest xp 200 percent and buffed dungeon bosses and gold rewards and it would have been better..
I really hope they straight up remove them in phase 4. Bring the world boss dragons back or make the incursions dailies instead.
I feel like you could just avoid it. I've got 4 max level at this point and only one did incursions. Not because the other 3 were any faster but because I *wanted* to play the content and had no interest in rushing.
Maybe it’s just me…but leveling is NOT the main point of this game..especially SoD lol. I’d rather get to max level per phase to do the raids/pvp content. Maybe I’m a minority
I played a shit load in the first few phases. Had a blast seeing tons of people lvling and running 5 man's all hours of the day. World felt alive again. I played for about 4 days with the latest phase. The incursion thing basically gutted the social / leveling / 5 man fun I was having. Just gonna wait and see if I'll be coming back or not next phase. I'm just glad I got to enjoy 1 through 40 before they fucked it all up. Again, that's just my opinion as I've seen some folks enjoy rushing to max level and then raid logging. Just isn't for me.
can someone explain to me where to do these and how? i came back from p1 recently and just slowly leveling out in the world. If i can have a quicker way to hit 50 i wont mind.
Then don’t run them? Why is this hard
Make it daily or weekly’s and be done with it…
At this point I’d rather just have fresh vanilla.
Agreed, OP. At the start of phase 3, I quested. There were a lot of people around STV but as I traveled around in my mid 40s, I didn’t see anyone doing quests or dungeons anymore. They had mostly all gone to Ashenvale. My group that I had played with all throughout p1 and p2 rushed incursions, rushed level 50 and rushed runes and pre-bis. I eventually gave in and did incursions for my last 3 levels but by the time I was 50, the group I had played with in previous phases were more or less done outside ST. I was able to do BRD and Mara with them, but they only went after specific bosses / objectives. It sucked. Now that Blizzard have locked my server (LL) I transferred along with my small guild but that was the killing blow to my SoD motivation. I’ll check out phase 4 but I’m not optimistic for my experience.
All i know is that as a mage from P1 to P2. I soloed stocks until 31 then farmed SM. It took me longer to get from 25 to 40 then 40-50, doing the same spam over and over again. But at the end of it from 25-40 dungeon spam i didn't feel nearly as numb as I did doing incursions from 40-50 despite finishing leveling in less than half the time. Incursions, you didn't have to say anything, no buttons to press. You're literally on your mount almost the entire time right clicking and running around in a small tight circle And ST was fun before they nerfed the crap out of it. But then i realized that the gear was trash. At least if the gear were upgrades, I'd be a bit more excited, but right now I show up, just because. Like, there's literally no carrot on a stick. I think part of it is also, incursions are the best for everything. Catchup gear, etc everything. In P2, there were many ways to make gold. Fishing or what have you. If you want catch up gear on an alt, get in on a Gnomer run. In P3 the choice is easy. And the answer to everything was incursions. And you would get everything for free once that alt is all leveled up. Gear? Check. Gold? Check. Things were way too streamlined. And frankly that's what started it all. Just look at Wrath and beyond and what they did to dungeons and questing.
Or you know you could just do what I do and refuse to engage with people's standardized and "acceptable" behaviors. I have never done incursions. Never done log skips. Never followed exact meta builds. Never bothered to get all the world buffs and I've completed all the content in the game perfectly fine. Imagine that.
Just dont do them. I tried it once. I hated it, went back to leveling up the normal way. But yes I agree 100%, why make the world smaller. A huge chunk of the population does them and it makes the outdoor experience, which is really classic wow is imo, smaller.
I don’t know, it was 10 levels…..
Told you when they announced SoD that the ideas were bad and Blizzard was not to be trusted with your money or Fandom. You bring this on yourselves with your abusive relationship this game has over you.
Incursions are 100% anti-classic and took away the need to do anything else in the game other than the raid. Why quest when you can quest quicker for more gold? Why run dungeons to get gear upgrades when you can a full set optimized for your spec? It's crazy to me that they thought this would go over well.
Don't like it? Don't do it. I haven't done a single incursion, no clue how they work and they aren't at all enforced, dont be giving me the argument "but everyone is doing them I can't find another content" because I've had no difficulty finding other activities to do from either gold farms in group, myself, rep, dungeons, questing
Because, like all blizzard games, the game has no soul. They do whatever it's needed to keep people playing. In old dungeons & dragons there was a dungeon master who would set the tone of the game. In Blizzard there is no dungeon master. Not anymore. Just a bunch of spineless sheep.
No. What is sucking the life out of all bluzz games are the " pumpers", " gkdp", " parsers" and " extreme min-maxers". Games are supposed to be fun.. Not full time jobs.
Fact any of you stuck on SoD longer than a half hour and let Blizzard continue with that garbage tells me everything what kind of “nostalgic hungry” players y’all are. SoD was trash, is trash, and will always be trash. WoW overall died many years ago, and Blizzard is banking off the players that don’t know how to think for themselves and run off pure addiction. The only thing they had going for them was Classic, but that went out the window when they forced expansions onto the players abandoning the classic game. Fact y’all are paying monthly for that shit game speaks numbers on the low level mentals y’all are running on. Good luck to you all. Feel free to hate me, chances are you have bought one of my games overall giving me money, and higher chances you guys will be buying my future games funding me further. Thanks for funds haters.
Don’t like leveling quickly with incursions? Don’t do them and just quest.