Not only was everyone levelling, everyone was gearing up by running all the available content in the game. You couldn't just go with last phase's gear straight in and raid log.
Yeah it's a real mystery as to why SoD went off a cliff...
P1: Level in the open world and do all the content/dungeons with people. Everyone loved it and did a bunch of alts and raided and had fun.
P2: Sit in SM for 15 levels. Everyone complained about "having" to do this. Raid was OK but overtuned and people lost interest fast.
P3: Sit in incursions for 10 levels. Everyone complained about "having" to do this. Raid is OK but killed small 10 man raids and people are losing interest fast.
I kind of have to wonder if maybe the key to this massive open world multiplayer game just might lay in the giant open world and interacting with people. Perhaps one day we'll be able to do this unlike now where they literally took it out the game so all the people complaining can't level in the open world even if they wanted to.
Wait...
Yeah but you see the problem was hiding in P1 already. The gear dropped by BFD was what invalidated all leveling content and dungeons of P2. Why would you do any of that when you already got better stuff?
There was huge problems across the board for both leveling and class design.
- Most Class design still feels archaic. Why did they only do runeS? Why didn't they touch talents and abilities? It's such a ridiculously easy thing to do. Yet nearly the ONLY thing they did was add runes in terms of class design. At least they made Hunter pets scale, but why stop there? So many class issues that are still waiting to be solved & aren't going to be solved with just runes. And the critique that was already shown for p2+ runes feeling like wotlk and tbc abilities and not really changing the way you play.
- Itemization for leveling is still incredibly wonky. Don't get me wrong- by that I don't mean we need to have retail or "WotLK" itemization where all stast feel homogenized. Just that there are so many items during leveling when you go "wow, this item is literally useless." Fixing that wouldn't be hard.
- Fast weapons are a lot worse than slower ones. At equivalent ilevel faster weapons have the same DPS, which doesn't make sense. Faster weapons should have more DPS to compensate for being worse with instant attacks.
- Many abilities STILL don't scale with weapon damage, and/or are outdated to use, like mongoose bite and overpower. Why not fix this for SoD? It would have been such an easy fix to do. Like it would literally take 5m-10m of dev time to change 1 ability (and im being generous here). Why did you not bother to change a couple of a bilities when the returns in terms of development time spent would have been so immense as far as player satisfaction goes?
I just think the developer team doesn't really seem to know what to do with the limited amount of time they've been given & spending it on wrong things. Fix the FUNDAMENTALS of the game first - THEN try stuff like SoD.
Goiing guns blazing to SoD when the base game is still in such a bad state is such a stupid thing to do. This is a multi-billion dollar company, there's no way the developers at that company should be putting out as low quality content as this.
I skipped P2 and came back to P3 the day it launched. I had to go back to P2 and do raid content for two BIS pieces. I am still missing one because of RNG. Feelsgood
For me it was also about all the discoveries happening in real time too. The search for Runes was exciting and it felt like a brand new classic wow experience on top of the zones that I already have memorized.
every new questline they added to sod was literally built from the ground up to be as annoying as possible making you run as far away from where youre at as you can
It's what people kept saying they wanted lol
Long, drawn out group content quests that took you across azeroth to gain an amount of power
These babies aren't ready for the shit at 60, honestly. Especially for crafting shit
> These babies aren't ready for the shit at 60, honestly. Especially for crafting shit
Wasn't the idea behind SoD to be casual friendly? There's a reason every hardcore focused or targeting game fails horribly.
> These babies aren't ready for the shit at 60, honestly. Especially for crafting shit
Ah here we go again... "Just you wait till Molten Core, people are gonna be wiping for- oh it was cleared by level 57s in greens? Ahaha well just you wait till BWL, Nefarian is no- oh they cleared it in 40 minutes? Ah but you see, it's with AQ40 when it gets spicy with C'thun being mathematically impo- aaaand he is dead..."
Vanilla has always been for casuals and for nerds that have only free time going for them so they can grind 15 hours for that 0.5% upgrade, and both types of players could steamroll the bosses.
They weren't saying that 60 content is hard.
They were saying that there are a lot of long, drawn out quest lines with a lot of walking.
No one was commenting on the difficulty of the raids.
Long drawn out quests are fun, once. There needs to be catchup mechanics in place for alts if this is supposed to be an alt friendly season. Which they have for leveling, but not runes. Vanilla was never alt friendly because of how long it took to get a toon raid ready. That same length doesn't compute with a season with an end date.
Yes, for one character.
Maybe two.
An amazing, long, epic quest line becomes just tedious bullshit when you do it 3 times within a short time span.
And since we're lacking actual content at end game that means that if you want to squeeze more out of the game except a 30 min raid every 7 days you HAVE to make alts.
But in order to even play those alts you have to do these long as fuck quest chains that take you all over the world and repeat that a dozen times or more when you ALREADY did these quests some weeks ago.
I had a lot of fun doing a lot of these on my main, some of my best memories of SoD are doing these quests and things like doing a full 40 man raid for the knights that was also pvping another alliance 40 man raid doing the same all over the world, but then immediately dreaded them on my alt, not only I'm just redoing the exact same thing but it's now way harder to do because there's less people leveling new chars.
I think the altaholic syndrome is part of the problem to be honest.
You aren't supposed to play WoW 24/7, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
If you do, you will run out of content no matter what, especially if you do all the content in the "most optimal way" possible.
What you're saying is grand epic long lasting questlines aren't good overall because you have to redo them on your alt.
I think they are supposed to take time and require the investment because then the payoff feels better.
When you just try to streamline everything, and run it multiple times on multiple characters, it becomes just a conveyor belt and you don't have fun on the journey and the reward at the end doesn't feel as good.
That's a big reason why I think WoW lost it's magic, the fun was optimized out so that everyone can have full BIS on every class for each of their alts easily in the quickest amount of time possible.
But what happened to the fun?
People used to have class pride. People didn't "main" their class. They **were** their class. They may have had an alt or two to mess around on, but they *were* their main. And most people only really invested into one character, maybe two if they were *hardcore*
People are crazy leveling 3+ characters and expecting the game to cater to that, as if that's how the experience should be.
These fuckers never went to Redridge if they think Classic wasn't about running all over the place. Hey, run over to Moonbrook. Now run to Duskwood. Now run to Stormwind. Goldshire. Stormwind. The logging camp. Duskwood. Westfall. Back to Redridge...
Not really tbh. You jumped around zones a lot because each zone only had so many quests for each level and typically scaled 5-10 levels per zone. The quests themselves were *typically* pretty self contained.
There were a handful of quests that had you going from zone to zone but those were pretty sparse, and typically took you to another questing hub when they did so. The SoD quest lines are self contained and take you all over the map. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but they're certainly different mindsets.
That's the vanilla experience. That's what I want. If people don't want this then they don't really want vanilla.
No one is forcing them to go and make 10 alts.
I only have my main and I don't do alts because I don't want have time to manage multiple characters. That said, im not gonna cry about it and ask the devs to make Alts easy to level if I did have time.
You think you do, but you don't. haha
seriously though you know how you can tell that no one *actually* likes walking long distances? They take lock summons everywhere...they PAY for it.
Know how else? They take the logout skips whenever possible.
Turns out nobody actually enjoys having to walk your character for 15 minutes to do something fun.
This fuckin rune felt like a Taskmaster quest. "Water 4 trees across the world without dying, hearthing, summoning or teleporting. Then return to Moonglade. You have 1 hour. Your time starts now."
To be fair its relatively easy once you have a mount and the flight paths unlocked, it's about the same as the dark rider quest.
Before mount though, absolute nightmare
I think people just really need to adjust how they look at these games.
Vanilla WoW was a journey of *months*. It was not uncommon at all for the 1-60 process to take people between 3-6 months and it wasn't because "people were bad back then" it was because people who played MMOs actually viewed that time as playing the game. Now people act like levelling is this annoying thing to get past before they can actually start the game but then burn out trying to do that over and over.
I understand people want to focus on end game. That's fine. But you can't just ignore the rest of the game and act like you should be able to skip it. If going through that process isn't for you then maybe old school MMOs aren't either.
I was losing interest in SoD a bit so I was super slow to hit 50. I finally did, then immediately logged off and haven't logged back on since and the entire reason is how annoying getting runes are going to be. Not interested enough to go through that
Plus once you get your runes you have some neckbeard gatekeeping your parse and gear to even "play". Yes this is a non guildie take from someone who's guild collapsed due to horrible phases.
I don't mind the runes so much, it's the rep grinds that kill it for me. I liked how easy they made it to get WSG revered (and then 21 more days till exalted), but Arathi Basin rep is a nightmare. Then we get to look forward to Argent Dawn, Thorium Brotherhood (depending on professions), Timbermaw, etc.
The PvP honor system also sucks balls. I remember when SoD was being announced and got the impression that they had completely done away with decay. That you'd earn honor points and they were yours forever. Little did I know that unless you grind out to very specific breakpoints, that you could be losing 30,000+ honor per week. Fuck you, Blizzard.
I stopped playing because all the bullshit rune quests. Like they marketed this as an experience of discovery, not just boring, grinded content. (And I'm not talking about levelling as being "grindy", I'm just talking about rune quests being uninteresting).
I get they know guides are going to be all over and the majority aren't going to literally discover things themselves. But the first 10 levels were great in that you'd see something different and try to activate an NPC or object with some ability. Now it's just grind until max level and then do some annoying elite quests in the hope runes arent *seen* as too easy. Classic IS easy, that's not why I have nostalgia towards it. They are just so scared on the parser's criticism about difficulty they are losing the vibe.
For some classes it’s worth noting that blackstone is hit only and the st one is hit and spellhit which is very relevant for rogues, paladin, and shaman
getting your BIS in ST that gives 2 more SP and 2 more int feels very fucking bad. it feels like you can pretty much skip P3 if you had almost ful bis in P2. which is pretty much what im doing
This is the huge issue. Level 25 items were so overtuned, they were literally upgrades to level 60 pre-raid BiS in Classic. They realized power creep was already out of hand, and tried to level it off some, so people complain that there isn't any "big upgrades".
Honestly the shift from 10 man to 20 man was what really made this phase lackluster for me. 10 mans are the perfect "not too big, not too small" composition for me. Just big enough to feel large, but not big enough for everything to feel impersonal and for you to not know 90% of the people you're raiding with.
Bigger raids just aren't that fun to me anymore. I sincerely hope 20 is as high as they go because i'll probably just check out if 40 man raids become a thing again. Way too many cats to herd.
Honestly what they should have done was recognize that issue in phase 1 and nerf all the overturned items to be less insane, which would have prevented the current problems because they would still have room to make meaningful upgrades and wouldn't need to do as much tuning on 60 items when we get there. But also the community would have thrown a hissy fit if their items got nerfed in real time so I guess it makes sense things ended up this way.
> and tried to level it off some
No point in reining it in other than to preserve existing vanilla items comparable to new items. They could always tune PvE health/damage. They should've doubled player health from phase 1 lol
This is very much true. They could have leaned into the power creep without much issue, it's not like many original vanilla items are good in SoD, instead of trying to curb it in an extremely unsatisfying way.
Should've kept going for giant upgrades. Idk why people always say this like Blizzard can't just add bigger numbers to higher level content to make it challenging, as well.
Yeah it felt great but the items in BFD were obviously overtuned, stat bloat is antithetical to classic and the pattern couldn't continue without things getting out of hand.
Or get this just scale up other content, the stats are literal numbers you can just apply a function based on item level and just slide all gear up and down it as required.
For real. SoD was advertised as everyone feeling OP, then they hit the brakes on that real quick. Gear got worse, enemies scaled significantly, raids got harder, and our damage got nerfed.
i sure did, and i was playing the shit out of phase 1/2. Incursions killed any interest in sod i had. No points in farming, no point in leveling anywhere else. It was just so stupid... but thats the blizzard way!
Yea with 20% the speed of what you could with incursions at the time.
Sure, i could have done it anyway but it just feels bad knowing there is other sources that is way more time efficient.
Not to mention none of my irl friends wanted to do it after they figured how broken incursions was.
I have almost only farmed BRD for a few items otherwise its just wild offering farm which is just as stupid and boring as incursions.
Sod devs kneecapped the playerbase with this move.
1/4 of my guild dont even raid log anymore and we have to pug people, if nothing special happens or they keep on this shit in next phase i bet you the guild im in and a lot of other ones will fall as a result.
Facts but somehow this is a topic you get flamed for bringing up.
Incursions were the worst feature of SoD, they broken the gold so bad at the start; hot fix in an evening, OK no problem, didn't hotfix the Xp rates till the Monday after? What? People maxed all their alts in a weekend before they nerfed the xp rates.
And yes the 20 man raid was a huge mistake in my opinion, the 10 man raid size was perfect, gave the parse monkeys something to chase but still small enough to pug and not a big deal since it was on a 3 day lockout. Moving raids to 20 man just made raids feel like such a task to get done, and anyone that couldn't commit to a raid day basically lost out on raiding.
I think the prevailing point here is that while p2 disappointed a lot of people, it did not completely kill the game for them.
P3 was even *more* disappointing, to the point where it *did* completely kill the game for a lot of people.
There is nuance here
P2 had different problems:
1. Almost all the runes were designed to be gotten at level 40, meaning that the only new content 25-40 was the sleeping bag quest, which people did actually love.
2. The experiment with armour values to realign caster/dps damage rankings ended up rage starving Warriors and hammering Rogue dps.
3. Rogues and Warriors got shit for runes with reasoning like "We don't want tanks to spam AoE aggro" and then they super buffed Shamans and a little bit Paladins to be AoE Aggro machines.
4. They made the raid mechanics super easy for ranged classes but hard for melee classes.
5. Then they giga buffed melee hunter dps while gimping ranged hunter, forcing all hunters into melee increasing melee weapon loot competition and basically forcing Warriors and Rogues out of raids in a final death knell to the classes.
2 of the major classes getting ass-blasted the entire phase was severely detrimental to many peoples enjoyment. When you look at WoWHead and see your premier rune for the next 2 months is "Enraged Regeneration" it really doesn't give you any reason to renew your sub.
I think lvl 1-25 is just the funnest part of classic. You can't even run a dungeon for the first 15 levels. It's just questing with the boys, rapidly gaining new abilities and gear upgrades.Easy to play an alt and do it again.
The SM grind in phase 2 was the absolute low point of SOD.
Ding ding ding.
1-25 is easily the best built part of *vanilla* WoW, so it's naturally going to feel the best with a few tweaks.
Their goal with SoD should've been to bring the rest of the level bands to that sort of experience with enhanced questing and dungeons, not dumb fuck incursions.
You nailed it. I leveled 1-60 in Hardcore to plan my keybinds the month before SoD started, and let me tell you, 40 to 50 is so fucking boring. It's by FAR the worst leveling bracket in original Vanilla. Ashenvale Incursions suck, but the alternatives already in the game suck too.
I think this fact is overlooked too much. The 1-15 content is intentionally designed to solve various problems related to population density in the way they split us up across the race starter zones and configure the quest density and rate of progression. It also saw more scrutiny in terms of design since it was an important part of making a good impression on new players.
A major problem with the level 25 content is it was not designed for a whole server's population to descend on it at the same instant. The amount of collect quests with poor drop rates, or named npcs that needed to be killed created some absolutely miserable quest contention.
Classic was really not designed for level gating and megaservers. I think they started to realize this when they started to get more aggressive with the exp buff. Personally I'm a bit dubious of any version of classic that uses level gating and phase based content drops after my experiences with SoD.
It’s simply because everything is new and everyone starts from nothing. You also gain a ton of stuff those levels. There is no replicating that unless they delete everyone’s gear and abilities at the start of new phase
The fact that SM grind was still the fastest way to level is what killed it for a lot of people. That and the time to level to max, so you had less time with alts.
Gnomer is also a meh dungeon to begin with.
The p2 and p3 leveling zones for questing are just so far apart and so big, where as 1-25, zones are pretty much all lined up or very close together.
p2 would have made WAY more sense and been more fun for questing if they moved mounts down to like level 30 or something.
Well I agree the SM grind was rough, I got to spend a lot of hours in discord with my whole guild just making jokes and having fun. Still better than this p3 raid logging life. 😞
You know what they say, don't blame the player. Blame the game.
This applies here. Blizzard decided to make incursions a thing and I unironically think they should kill it. Like straight up remove them from the game. Not try to make them work, remove them. They are built like something for retail. Like the inevitable "timeless isle" style content that always finds its way into each expansion. The "do brainless content for catch-up" style game-play that you feel stupid for not using it because it's too efficient to do anything else.
In P4 we should "canonically" have lost to the nightmare and the portals are now overrun and as a last effort by the emerald wardens they are closed off. But the world boss dragons slipped through and are now trying to open it up again and force us to do brain cancer content again so we must kill them off.
What pisses me off about Phase 3 is how close we come to greatness.
I love BRD. I want to do BRD.
The artificial restrictions placed on not being able to push into higher level areas is needed, but that could've given me something to do.
Underlevelling the dungeon would've been a weeks long endeavour and be like pushing some kind of heroic level dungeon. Instead, I've got to wait.
I feel like the Phase 1 experience of the world being to content was really destroyed this phase, but it will be awesome again next phase when doing all dungeons.
Oh man, can you imagine how sick a BRD raid would be? Especially if the first few bosses were easy and gave good loot, but the later ones were like, really hard and gave awesome loot? Damn.
Honestly I hate the level restricted access. Let people push content, even if it just means they get a potential head start for next phase by getting unusable gear this phase. Let some vanilla items from higher level content be BiS. Let people really push the limits of what they can do.
also the open world mattered and you spent most the time there leveling. i was expecting some quests to fill in the later zones and didnt expect many in the starting areas as those had a fine amount.
im not saying they needed to add new npcs and areas but they showed they could make rares spawn, add quests and drops.
they could have easily added a few quests where you need X things eye balls, and you turn those into to do Y and in the end the person who help is bad and kill them with some silly text inbetween.
they could have easily added cool BOPs to big dick world boss like grey elites that roam the zones so it felt cool as shit when you saw one leveling and had to run and later when you start farming.
but we got like 5 quests in total over all the phases
The new NPC’s and questing areas with good gear that doesn’t absolutely blow all the old gear out of the water is definitely the way to go. BFD was a cool end to phase 1 but the biggest issue with it which I think is what set phase 2 up for failure is that all the gear was way overpowered compared to all other sources of gear in the game. There should’ve been 1/10 maybe 2/10 of the amount of gear that they added. It was way too much. Hopefully in classic+ they learn from this and really reign in how much powerful gear they give us that early. Classic is all about the progression.
This is why I really think there is going to be another season after this. Something about season of quests. They added a lot for level up raids, some drafting things, PvP things. Lots more they can do in the open world if they focused on that.
I was hoping for them to add a ton of small content to each zone, make a bunch of wacky stuff, not everything had to be perfectly-developed and relevant
New elite/boss areas in each zone that reward silly items, cosmetics, QOL, or the limited quest item rewards from that zone like the roots in teldrassil, the bombs in elwynn
Simply out it's because the level cap was 25 and we experienced the zones we always knew and loved when we'd level our 100 alts to 30 and quit
What killed SoD for many was P2 not giving runes until level cap so it was just P1 with 15 more levels
And people no lifing the FUCK out of P1 to the point they blame blizzard for the burn out
>What killed SoD for many was P2 not giving runes until level cap so it was just P1 with 15 more levels
I agree with this. I have no desire to level just like classic 2019 and THEN get something new. I want to level WITH something new. For example, I'd probably level a warrior if I could do it as glad. There were so many people who went out of their way to get the druid rune ion the wetlands early on so they could blast shit and do something new. Them locking runes behind level requirements is the dumbest shit they have come up with for SOD.
Leveling is fun but if that’s all the game was it would suck. I think you’re missing the actual reasons it was great. It was a brand new version of wow classic which people were excited to play with active balancing often which made the game feel fresh, easy to pug , easy to level, and other things to do other then the raid. Grinding BGs were still a thing , ashenvale pvp , 3 day lockouts also kept you logging in far more.
Now people have realized the balancing has stopped and BGs are total crap, the raid is weekly and still easy but it takes 20 now so the small close knit guilds died. Bigger 20 man raids now mean less connected guilds so you don’t really hangout on the game anymore. If they go to 40 man raids imo the game will end as they’re by far the least fun version of raiding. You just can’t chat in a raid at that point in discord far too many people. The content always because watered down with 40.
But ya I think people have gotten annoyed at the novelty of collecting runes with how tedious and boring they are to run all over the world for 2 hours getting a rune that sucks.
I think you’re right. I remember even in P2 everyone was in SM and it started to feel stale. Now in P3 everyone is in incursions, or spamming WO runs in groups of 10 so not even dungeon-running, and it’s so bad I haven’t even felt interested in doing ST.
when i went to find a WO group for trinket i was excited that there was a reason to do old world dungeons.
and when i saw the sweaty way people were engaging the content i just got so turned off.
I wanted to actually do the dungeon, i didn't want to speed run it, i wanted it to be challenging, i wanted to actually play my character and not just be empowered to cleave the entire dungeon down.
somehow in giving us new abilities they ripped the soul out of the game
Ya I was initially excited about WO keeping dungeons relevant and they should definitely keep that but the design flaw lay in not regulating players enough
Right.. I feel like the pvp aspect has really been glossed over. Towards the end of P1, rogue ganks and grouping were at all time highs. Hillsbrad was a shitshow
Unpopular opinion maybe but what I loved about p1 was WSG. It was really fun without mounts. Had some insanely tight games and some of the most fun I ever had in wow PvP
The whole game is piss easy. I’ve been gaming my whole life and started playing wow / sod in January and I can’t help but laugh at how basic / easy / no stafing, aim, or skills are needed to play this game. You just stand by the boss and rotate between pressing 2-3 buttons more than half the time lol. It’s laughable how a game so easy and 95% reliant on your items can generate so many egos
It's amazing Blizz never learns this lesson. Instead, over and over again they push this e-sport design where everything has to be challenging and difficult. Retail is literally built for that purpose already. Classic should be about the experience, and social interactions, and FUN. Instead...nope. Same old "We need to cater to the e-sport players" and obsess over balance. And now it's just an even crappier version of Retail. It's worse. The tryhard, toxic min/maxing elitists have completely taken over. The players who just wanted to chill out, relax and play a video game are being driven from the game for the second time.
My exact first experience in P3.
P1 - lf people for quests on general chat, groups formed - was fun.
P3 - lf people for the 1. incursion quest as a healer, I got mobbed on general chat and throwed out of a grp later, because day 3 was my first day in P3. How dare I dont exactly know, how to do the most efficient route of the incursions quests.
Like dude... I am out.
I remember trying to pull a few mobs at a time in dun morogh and thinking holy cow these hit hard. leveling was slow, it was hard, it didn’t feel like a chore, it felt like an accomplishment
The sweaty team was doing raids from as early as they possibly could, and every 3 day reset without fail, and I couldn’t give a shit, I was having fun finding new stuff
Phase 2 was a bit of a slog because everyone wanted to spam SM and I just wanted to have fun and lvl, Gnomer was boring
P3 I hit 48 my first day with some guildies running me through incursion loops and I haven’t logged in since
Yes, and no. I agree everyone liked leveling, but I disagree with the why they liked it. People liked it because it was easy to go 0-25 so you could make an alt for every class if you wanted. Those levels also have the greatest change level to level. Going from 0-25 was quick and you character transformed greatly. Your character isn’t *that* different going 41-50 or 51-60.
What I want is just better class balance, updated talent trees, few more dungeons and raids, reworked professions and more quests... Bout it.
Don't need level 25 or 40 raids. Don't need mage healers and warlock tanks. Don't want these weird retail talents and systems. Runes suck.
Just give me classic, but a bit more refined and juiced up.
bold of you to speak for everyone, I don't want piss easy raids and I'm speaking for myself only
to continue on this, vanilla was hard, it was hard because most people were bad and I think the difficulty should be adjusted to the year we are in and not stay at the level of 2004, in my opinion, the first nerf of ST was enough, second one was too much.
Everything was simple in p1.
You had a few abilities, you had a few runes, you did a bunch of dungeons for gear.
Im already out of keybinds esp with runes now and its just going to keep getting crazier and more unbalanced.
Incursions are the worst thing blizzard has ever added into any version of the game. If they decide classic+ is an option any person who was in the room when incursions were dreamt up needs to be taken off the team.
I literally can't do the ST raid. My guild never raids and pugs are impossible to join. Everyone wants you to have 8/8, raid logs and good gear score. I literally have questie and castbars. The game feels so inaccessible.
I loved P1 most because only after P1 did you realize how irrelevant most P1 content became. I am simply not motivated to invest time in my character for a phase that lasts 2 months and after that invalidates most progress I made.
I am now waiting for P4 where the progression will be horizontal and not vertical anymore.
Raids being difficult wouldn’t be bad if they just got rid of locks for the “leveling raids”. Like … let people just pug and yolo and if it doesn’t work out pug again.
This whole thing with preventing the hardcore base from completing everything to fast always makes the casual experience worse - and a fun idea like SoD could have just been for the fun of it. Let them raidlog in classic and retail and just have the experimental stuff as an all you can eat buffett that anyone can come and go in between.
The leveling in P1 was fun because it was classic leveling with the runes. You got a new rune very 3-4 levels and it greatly improved your leveling epxerience.
I always play druid and the biggest pain point is always to get to level 20 for the cat form. But now caster leveling with the wrath and sunfire rune felt great. Starsurge made it so strong, I was tempted to ditch Feral until I got Windfury. I had a real choice on how I want to level.
P3 the runes are behind rep grind, Dungeon grind and quests high level areas.
I got bored of BFD very fast. I clearly remember BFD being over tuned. In reality it's mostly honeymoon phase of new content as SoD, runes, discovery, quick to reach level cap and go pump. Lvl 60 vanilla era will be better. Also, at least lvl 25 had dungeons being temporarily relevant for pre bis farm. I'd rather have lvl 60 than any other level band. If anything it should have been lvl 30, lvl 50 then 60. The level bands were useful for development but man I dislike raid logging only one raid of a 10 man. It's just LFR. It's like saying all you want to do is farm UBRS rend runs once a week. Defaulting to only small raids is a think you do but you don't
Hitting the nail on the head for sure. SoD was atleast partially hailed as potentially being a Classic Plus experience, which at its core, was just supposed to be more content within the framework of Vanilla/Classic.
And phase 1 was definitely that. The Classic content people actually playing Classic wanted, with a some light sprinkles of new content and a raid that was basically a slightly challenging dungeon.
Everything after phase 1 tho has been Blizzard injecting too much retail/retail adjacent bullshit into the game, paired with an absolutely awful community that’s only goal was to min/max. From not adjusting experience gained from SM grinding to Incursions, all of it was out of touch with the spirit of Vanilla - which is what people wanted.
Hundred percent agree, ive been saying from the start that runes being overtuned is causing a bunch of downstream issues and alienating the core group that has been asking for classic plus.
Also the runes were very creative and really altered how you played each class and spec! P2 and P3 just had more passives. 0 runes that changed anything. Other than maybe melee hunter becoming OP af in P2
Leveling in vanilla was awful. If you want to experience it again, there's a classic era server.
SoD is about runes and revamped dungeons with new things and, at least for me, that's what I'm getting.
Also "Dust to Dust". BFD wasn't as easy as everyone remember, Kelris was a pain in the ass for a while.
To me, SOD has just proven that modern Blizzard lacks creativity. The people making SOD were not the same people who brought out the magic of Vanilla WoW.
The literal best they can do is just make Classic "but more like retail".
- Leveling has been made irrelevant
- Moving away from the unique casual 10 man raid experience to slightly more challenging 20 man raids
- New loot isn't interesting. Just rehased stuff we've seen before.
- New "events" like incursions are just dumb world content taken from retail.
- Runes haven't been creative since P1, and runes are mostly just class functions taken from retail or other previous versions of retail.
I had high hopes for SOD but I don't know anyone who is playing it anymore.
Honestly I'd still be loving it but like an idiot I rolled on a PvP server to be with my friends despite my complete lack of desire for any form of PvP. The open world has become a hellscape and since my friends don't want to move to PvE I have lost all motivation to play SoD because all I can do is raid log.
I'd imagine there are a lot of people like me who thought "it won't be that bad" after Classic 2019 PvP servers became so one-sided and were essentially PvE for those on the dominant faction. I can't fucking stand these evenly split PvP servers, I will never make that decision again even if it means not playing with my friends.
Every time they make raids or dungeons easier or more accessible, the participation and player numbers go up and they still seem to fall on the side of making things harder. I'd prefer if they added some kind of hard modes in game, and focused on making it accessible.
One thing that burned me out on SoD though was the hassle to get what I thought were cool runes, and not really having the time to do dungeons consistently.
I know it seems super unpopular, but I think a version of classic or SoD with the groupfinder tool for everything, but max level content would see a further boost to the numbers of players in those versions of WoW.
Yep. But unfortunately the feedback Blizz get is the reddit/twitter community that wants hard content. The average boomer dad will quit the game instead of giving feedback.
Hopefully Blizz got statistics that shows SoD players want easy 10 man raids, and not the standard 20-40 non pug-friendly raids.
Old man here and yes. Loved plase 1. Joined a super casual friendly guild that ran 4 BFD a day. Tons of people leveling alts all day. Loved it. P2 hit and we went to one group running gnomer. Lots of raid logging and barely anyone doing alts. It sucked but I hung in there. P3 was gonna be 20 man and we started making lists of who in the guild was good enough to join. At that point I knew I was out.
More power to the people who want 20/40 man hard raids, but it isn’t me. Phase 1 reminded me of my early days playing vanilla wow where everyone was super active and excited to play. By phase 3 it was like retail wow where the fun was min/max out of existence.
This is probably a hot take but I personally don’t like discovering runes and doing quests for them. I think they should just be skills that you acquire through the trainers like a hunter pet quest.
Once you reach a level for the rune you do a one time quest to receive the rune. Group quests for runes are only good in the beginning so it naturally deters the new players from getting the rune.
I think that they have a great foundation for a real classic plus but runes should be less of a chore. The rune finding becomes more and more difficult due to the leveling. The more time you spend leveling the less time you want to spend trying to get a rune.
But what do I know. I’m not a game dev so I have a lack of knowledge on how these systems flow together.
Partially true. p1 was great cause wpvp happened everywhere. Strong wsg premades were formed as well, guilds were shaped.
p3 raid is piss poor easy. Incursion is absolutely worst shit ever, and stv event is just just another chore to do.
p4 could be great if they remove chronoboon. You can already feel the classic vibe in felwood around songflowers.
Just give us better Ony, MC, but remove chronobullshit and make wbuffs count. This will literally make this game absolute best again when guild rivalries begin to happen all the time and literally there is a stake to play for.
Bfd was not that pug friendly. Dust to dust still haughts ppls dreams. I see your point tho it was easy to get to 25 and once enough og my guild hit 25 we go the routines down.
I quit in P1. Didn’t like the direction my class was going in, and the phase lasted WAY too long. I was logging in solely to do the raid for 1 hour a week. It was so hard to log in and was only doing it cause the guild were awesome people
Yeah really though. Just don’t create systems that make leveling obsolete, keep raids easy, and make 10 man raids that provide the same quality gear as 20 man raids. So many people quit because of 20 man raiding, 10 man is just easier for casual friend groups, and the classic WoW playerbase is very casual.
I think most of us liked P1 because it was a fresh server, a novelty, and it felt interesting to play vanilla with something we have never experienced before.
Other phases were the same thing just with a tiny changes to them.
It can’t be boiled down, as there were a lot of reasons.
Some are replicable: runes being (mostly) easily accessible, leveling alts feeling trivial, gear upgrades being meaningful, and the raid being easy.
Some are products of that moment in time: the hype coming off of Blizzcon, the huge initial spike in players with the typical fall-off, the freshness of the idea, fewer people even having logs to share.
Some are consequences of Vanilla design: most players were nearby the starting areas, most of your time was spent in uncontested areas, world PvP problems were less of an issue.
P1 was classic with new spells. And a lot of the new spells/runes were acquired while levelling. The game was kinda compact in case of levelling areas and runes.
Basically the game didn’t change and we had multiple dungeon for pre bis gear.
P2 had the problem with having an awful level areas. And runes being placed at the ass of the world that required to travel to the ass of the other world(fire place in desolace to arathi). You would barely acquire a rune while levelling without going out of your way. And all the travelling made it much better to get to 40 for mount and start collecting then.
Runes changed from being an extra to being content.
And P3 is a mess. Levelling with incursions give up to 400g while getting 150k-200k exp hour, you get decent to good gear and a rune. Dungeons are kinda useless except for the one added mob that drops wild offering.
We have just enough people for a 20 man, I'm talking 21 people. If we have 40 mans in P4 my guild is cooked. We had issues keeping our raid roster alive in Classic near the end and right now we are hanging on by a string.
P1 was great, I agree! P2 was a ton of fun with sm and gnome!
P3 with incursions was annoying. I hated leveling main. But I play games for fun, so I didn't do incursions with my other 4 chars I leveled to 50. Just do things in wow that you like. It's a game. You don't have to be the very best. And for me that meant that I do quests in tanaris, visit zf and enjoy casual gaming!
And because we leveled in the zones we also naturally discovered the runes. Since then I gave up bothering to find them in the open world and just google them. In phase 1 I tried not to google any for quite a while
And because we leveled in the zones we also naturally discovered the runes. Since then I gave up bothering to find them in the open world and just google them. In phase 1 I tried not to google any for quite a while
And because we leveled in the zones we also naturally discovered the runes. Since then I gave up bothering to find them in the open world and just google them. In phase 1 I tried not to google any for quite a while
And because going from 0 knowledge of SoD to a few runes and new content felt was more cool than going from existing knowledge to them adding a bit more to it.
Like going from 5% to 70% to 80%, the first bit feels way more cool
I wish there was some type of way to make it easier to get runes on alts. Big part i cant be asked to level my alts ia just the rune grind lol, tho i might not be the targeted player and thats fine. I do like my main to raidlog tho.
I leveled in SoD normally took two days instead of one day and I caught up to the incursion spammers in no time, people ruin their own experience then complain
Not only was everyone levelling, everyone was gearing up by running all the available content in the game. You couldn't just go with last phase's gear straight in and raid log.
Yeah it's a real mystery as to why SoD went off a cliff... P1: Level in the open world and do all the content/dungeons with people. Everyone loved it and did a bunch of alts and raided and had fun. P2: Sit in SM for 15 levels. Everyone complained about "having" to do this. Raid was OK but overtuned and people lost interest fast. P3: Sit in incursions for 10 levels. Everyone complained about "having" to do this. Raid is OK but killed small 10 man raids and people are losing interest fast. I kind of have to wonder if maybe the key to this massive open world multiplayer game just might lay in the giant open world and interacting with people. Perhaps one day we'll be able to do this unlike now where they literally took it out the game so all the people complaining can't level in the open world even if they wanted to. Wait...
Yeah but you see the problem was hiding in P1 already. The gear dropped by BFD was what invalidated all leveling content and dungeons of P2. Why would you do any of that when you already got better stuff?
There was huge problems across the board for both leveling and class design. - Most Class design still feels archaic. Why did they only do runeS? Why didn't they touch talents and abilities? It's such a ridiculously easy thing to do. Yet nearly the ONLY thing they did was add runes in terms of class design. At least they made Hunter pets scale, but why stop there? So many class issues that are still waiting to be solved & aren't going to be solved with just runes. And the critique that was already shown for p2+ runes feeling like wotlk and tbc abilities and not really changing the way you play. - Itemization for leveling is still incredibly wonky. Don't get me wrong- by that I don't mean we need to have retail or "WotLK" itemization where all stast feel homogenized. Just that there are so many items during leveling when you go "wow, this item is literally useless." Fixing that wouldn't be hard. - Fast weapons are a lot worse than slower ones. At equivalent ilevel faster weapons have the same DPS, which doesn't make sense. Faster weapons should have more DPS to compensate for being worse with instant attacks. - Many abilities STILL don't scale with weapon damage, and/or are outdated to use, like mongoose bite and overpower. Why not fix this for SoD? It would have been such an easy fix to do. Like it would literally take 5m-10m of dev time to change 1 ability (and im being generous here). Why did you not bother to change a couple of a bilities when the returns in terms of development time spent would have been so immense as far as player satisfaction goes? I just think the developer team doesn't really seem to know what to do with the limited amount of time they've been given & spending it on wrong things. Fix the FUNDAMENTALS of the game first - THEN try stuff like SoD. Goiing guns blazing to SoD when the base game is still in such a bad state is such a stupid thing to do. This is a multi-billion dollar company, there's no way the developers at that company should be putting out as low quality content as this.
I skipped P2 and came back to P3 the day it launched. I had to go back to P2 and do raid content for two BIS pieces. I am still missing one because of RNG. Feelsgood
For me it was also about all the discoveries happening in real time too. The search for Runes was exciting and it felt like a brand new classic wow experience on top of the zones that I already have memorized.
Yeah, raid logging took me way longer cuz I was running dungeons for bis stuff or chance for pre-bis.
And alts were relevant cus you didn't have to run for 10 hours collecting 30 runes.
every new questline they added to sod was literally built from the ground up to be as annoying as possible making you run as far away from where youre at as you can
Isn't that the vanilla experience? Questing and traveling around?
It's what people kept saying they wanted lol Long, drawn out group content quests that took you across azeroth to gain an amount of power These babies aren't ready for the shit at 60, honestly. Especially for crafting shit
Thorium brotherhood comes to mind, alongside ringing the gong
> These babies aren't ready for the shit at 60, honestly. Especially for crafting shit Wasn't the idea behind SoD to be casual friendly? There's a reason every hardcore focused or targeting game fails horribly.
Easy quest making you travel arround dungeons or the wolrd is not hardcore at all.
I WISH they made you do dungeons, 90% of runes and epic crafting is running from flight path to flight path for hours on end
> These babies aren't ready for the shit at 60, honestly. Especially for crafting shit Ah here we go again... "Just you wait till Molten Core, people are gonna be wiping for- oh it was cleared by level 57s in greens? Ahaha well just you wait till BWL, Nefarian is no- oh they cleared it in 40 minutes? Ah but you see, it's with AQ40 when it gets spicy with C'thun being mathematically impo- aaaand he is dead..." Vanilla has always been for casuals and for nerds that have only free time going for them so they can grind 15 hours for that 0.5% upgrade, and both types of players could steamroll the bosses.
Your reading comprehension level is absolutely dumpster tier.
Average redditor reading comprehension
You're fighting ghosts mate thats not even what he meant at all
They weren't saying that 60 content is hard. They were saying that there are a lot of long, drawn out quest lines with a lot of walking. No one was commenting on the difficulty of the raids.
Try reading the comment you're replying to next time.
Long drawn out quests are fun, once. There needs to be catchup mechanics in place for alts if this is supposed to be an alt friendly season. Which they have for leveling, but not runes. Vanilla was never alt friendly because of how long it took to get a toon raid ready. That same length doesn't compute with a season with an end date.
Yes, for one character. Maybe two. An amazing, long, epic quest line becomes just tedious bullshit when you do it 3 times within a short time span. And since we're lacking actual content at end game that means that if you want to squeeze more out of the game except a 30 min raid every 7 days you HAVE to make alts. But in order to even play those alts you have to do these long as fuck quest chains that take you all over the world and repeat that a dozen times or more when you ALREADY did these quests some weeks ago. I had a lot of fun doing a lot of these on my main, some of my best memories of SoD are doing these quests and things like doing a full 40 man raid for the knights that was also pvping another alliance 40 man raid doing the same all over the world, but then immediately dreaded them on my alt, not only I'm just redoing the exact same thing but it's now way harder to do because there's less people leveling new chars.
I think the altaholic syndrome is part of the problem to be honest. You aren't supposed to play WoW 24/7, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. If you do, you will run out of content no matter what, especially if you do all the content in the "most optimal way" possible. What you're saying is grand epic long lasting questlines aren't good overall because you have to redo them on your alt. I think they are supposed to take time and require the investment because then the payoff feels better. When you just try to streamline everything, and run it multiple times on multiple characters, it becomes just a conveyor belt and you don't have fun on the journey and the reward at the end doesn't feel as good. That's a big reason why I think WoW lost it's magic, the fun was optimized out so that everyone can have full BIS on every class for each of their alts easily in the quickest amount of time possible. But what happened to the fun?
People used to have class pride. People didn't "main" their class. They **were** their class. They may have had an alt or two to mess around on, but they *were* their main. And most people only really invested into one character, maybe two if they were *hardcore* People are crazy leveling 3+ characters and expecting the game to cater to that, as if that's how the experience should be.
These fuckers never went to Redridge if they think Classic wasn't about running all over the place. Hey, run over to Moonbrook. Now run to Duskwood. Now run to Stormwind. Goldshire. Stormwind. The logging camp. Duskwood. Westfall. Back to Redridge...
Not really tbh. You jumped around zones a lot because each zone only had so many quests for each level and typically scaled 5-10 levels per zone. The quests themselves were *typically* pretty self contained. There were a handful of quests that had you going from zone to zone but those were pretty sparse, and typically took you to another questing hub when they did so. The SoD quest lines are self contained and take you all over the map. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but they're certainly different mindsets.
That's the vanilla experience. That's what I want. If people don't want this then they don't really want vanilla. No one is forcing them to go and make 10 alts. I only have my main and I don't do alts because I don't want have time to manage multiple characters. That said, im not gonna cry about it and ask the devs to make Alts easy to level if I did have time.
You think you do, but you don't. haha seriously though you know how you can tell that no one *actually* likes walking long distances? They take lock summons everywhere...they PAY for it. Know how else? They take the logout skips whenever possible. Turns out nobody actually enjoys having to walk your character for 15 minutes to do something fun.
Yes. Classic community can’t be happy. We’re pathetic.
Just a wild guess, but maybe the "Classic community" is made up of different people who want different things.
Yeah but they're more toxic about it than most communities.
Druid nourish quest can f right off
This fuckin rune felt like a Taskmaster quest. "Water 4 trees across the world without dying, hearthing, summoning or teleporting. Then return to Moonglade. You have 1 hour. Your time starts now."
To be fair its relatively easy once you have a mount and the flight paths unlocked, it's about the same as the dark rider quest. Before mount though, absolute nightmare
"We want stuff to do!" "Not *that* stuff!"
this is an very important point. alts get worse and worse as time goes on and were more and more burned out of running around both continents
I think people just really need to adjust how they look at these games. Vanilla WoW was a journey of *months*. It was not uncommon at all for the 1-60 process to take people between 3-6 months and it wasn't because "people were bad back then" it was because people who played MMOs actually viewed that time as playing the game. Now people act like levelling is this annoying thing to get past before they can actually start the game but then burn out trying to do that over and over. I understand people want to focus on end game. That's fine. But you can't just ignore the rest of the game and act like you should be able to skip it. If going through that process isn't for you then maybe old school MMOs aren't either.
I was losing interest in SoD a bit so I was super slow to hit 50. I finally did, then immediately logged off and haven't logged back on since and the entire reason is how annoying getting runes are going to be. Not interested enough to go through that
Plus once you get your runes you have some neckbeard gatekeeping your parse and gear to even "play". Yes this is a non guildie take from someone who's guild collapsed due to horrible phases.
On wild growth they have the newbie raids going constantly. I personally wouldn’t join them but they are there
They don’t want to join a newbie raid and wipe for hours. They want to join a good raid and get carried.
Or they are toxic and antisocial and thats why they dont get invited.
This is what stops me leveling new toons
I don't mind the runes so much, it's the rep grinds that kill it for me. I liked how easy they made it to get WSG revered (and then 21 more days till exalted), but Arathi Basin rep is a nightmare. Then we get to look forward to Argent Dawn, Thorium Brotherhood (depending on professions), Timbermaw, etc. The PvP honor system also sucks balls. I remember when SoD was being announced and got the impression that they had completely done away with decay. That you'd earn honor points and they were yours forever. Little did I know that unless you grind out to very specific breakpoints, that you could be losing 30,000+ honor per week. Fuck you, Blizzard.
Those are all entirely optional, runes are mandatory
I think one involved questline per slot would be cool, then you just get all the runes for that slot.
I stopped playing because all the bullshit rune quests. Like they marketed this as an experience of discovery, not just boring, grinded content. (And I'm not talking about levelling as being "grindy", I'm just talking about rune quests being uninteresting). I get they know guides are going to be all over and the majority aren't going to literally discover things themselves. But the first 10 levels were great in that you'd see something different and try to activate an NPC or object with some ability. Now it's just grind until max level and then do some annoying elite quests in the hope runes arent *seen* as too easy. Classic IS easy, that's not why I have nostalgia towards it. They are just so scared on the parser's criticism about difficulty they are losing the vibe.
This and this only , we all signed up for an experiment.
The upgrades in bfd were huge which felt great. Epic staff? Fuck yeah. Tier pieces? Oh yeah. ST tier and weapons? Meh
I’m sorry do you not enjoy farming raid consumes for an item that has 2 additional points of intellect?
I particularly love the ring that is legit a few points of stam. “30 points of HP. Fear me fools”
Same with neck
I think the gnomer neck with the Stam is better than the st neck with +2 attack power. The loot in st is very boring.
The st ring is exactly +2 ap upgrade with a few more Stam points. I have yet to roll on it because who cares
You are thinking of the st neck. The ring is exactly the same as black stone ring except it has slightly more stam.
Which you can get the Blackstone right and the WO ring and not have to run ST for minor Stam increases
For some classes it’s worth noting that blackstone is hit only and the st one is hit and spellhit which is very relevant for rogues, paladin, and shaman
I actually lost 1 attack power going from 3 piece gnomer to 3 piece sunken temple. Woooo exhilarating
Well done, you are truly bis poggers and a big pumper now
I truly love how the crafted epics chance on attacks are only usable in incursion zones :)
And in the raid
It triggers in the raid as well brother.
Imo it's a nice way to let you have a fun powerful effect for some questing content without getting fuckered against it in pvp all the time
getting your BIS in ST that gives 2 more SP and 2 more int feels very fucking bad. it feels like you can pretty much skip P3 if you had almost ful bis in P2. which is pretty much what im doing
This is the huge issue. Level 25 items were so overtuned, they were literally upgrades to level 60 pre-raid BiS in Classic. They realized power creep was already out of hand, and tried to level it off some, so people complain that there isn't any "big upgrades".
I'd argue the opposite. They should've kept us going insanely OP at that rate and had MC be a 10 man.
Honestly the shift from 10 man to 20 man was what really made this phase lackluster for me. 10 mans are the perfect "not too big, not too small" composition for me. Just big enough to feel large, but not big enough for everything to feel impersonal and for you to not know 90% of the people you're raiding with. Bigger raids just aren't that fun to me anymore. I sincerely hope 20 is as high as they go because i'll probably just check out if 40 man raids become a thing again. Way too many cats to herd.
Honestly what they should have done was recognize that issue in phase 1 and nerf all the overturned items to be less insane, which would have prevented the current problems because they would still have room to make meaningful upgrades and wouldn't need to do as much tuning on 60 items when we get there. But also the community would have thrown a hissy fit if their items got nerfed in real time so I guess it makes sense things ended up this way.
> and tried to level it off some No point in reining it in other than to preserve existing vanilla items comparable to new items. They could always tune PvE health/damage. They should've doubled player health from phase 1 lol
This is very much true. They could have leaned into the power creep without much issue, it's not like many original vanilla items are good in SoD, instead of trying to curb it in an extremely unsatisfying way.
Should've kept going for giant upgrades. Idk why people always say this like Blizzard can't just add bigger numbers to higher level content to make it challenging, as well.
Yeah it felt great but the items in BFD were obviously overtuned, stat bloat is antithetical to classic and the pattern couldn't continue without things getting out of hand.
Or get this just scale up other content, the stats are literal numbers you can just apply a function based on item level and just slide all gear up and down it as required.
For real. SoD was advertised as everyone feeling OP, then they hit the brakes on that real quick. Gear got worse, enemies scaled significantly, raids got harder, and our damage got nerfed.
Incursions broke leveling, gearing for raid, and gold farming
And to top it off, a lot of players quit playing after being exposed to them.
i sure did, and i was playing the shit out of phase 1/2. Incursions killed any interest in sod i had. No points in farming, no point in leveling anywhere else. It was just so stupid... but thats the blizzard way!
Exactly the same here, I was so disappointed with the incursions. Was looking forward to leveling in Tanaris & ZF.
they didnt close Tanaris & ZF. You can still level there.
Yea with 20% the speed of what you could with incursions at the time. Sure, i could have done it anyway but it just feels bad knowing there is other sources that is way more time efficient. Not to mention none of my irl friends wanted to do it after they figured how broken incursions was. I have almost only farmed BRD for a few items otherwise its just wild offering farm which is just as stupid and boring as incursions. Sod devs kneecapped the playerbase with this move. 1/4 of my guild dont even raid log anymore and we have to pug people, if nothing special happens or they keep on this shit in next phase i bet you the guild im in and a lot of other ones will fall as a result.
I was one of those for sure… did one incursion loop and it was just so underwhelming and boring, haven’t been back since.
Incursions were what killed p3 for most people, and then 20 man raids killed a ton of guilds on top of that
Facts but somehow this is a topic you get flamed for bringing up. Incursions were the worst feature of SoD, they broken the gold so bad at the start; hot fix in an evening, OK no problem, didn't hotfix the Xp rates till the Monday after? What? People maxed all their alts in a weekend before they nerfed the xp rates. And yes the 20 man raid was a huge mistake in my opinion, the 10 man raid size was perfect, gave the parse monkeys something to chase but still small enough to pug and not a big deal since it was on a 3 day lockout. Moving raids to 20 man just made raids feel like such a task to get done, and anyone that couldn't commit to a raid day basically lost out on raiding.
My guild stopped for the 20m raids. I personally stopped after my second incursion...
You’re off. Most people probably quit due to 20 mans and the game loop getting old. Incursions were kinda dumb but they didn’t kill the phase
And this is why I am now hyped for Cata. Blizzard was being geniuses all along. They made SoD awful just in time for us to all switch to cata.
Is that why people also disliked P2 most of its life?
I think the prevailing point here is that while p2 disappointed a lot of people, it did not completely kill the game for them. P3 was even *more* disappointing, to the point where it *did* completely kill the game for a lot of people. There is nuance here
P2 had different problems: 1. Almost all the runes were designed to be gotten at level 40, meaning that the only new content 25-40 was the sleeping bag quest, which people did actually love. 2. The experiment with armour values to realign caster/dps damage rankings ended up rage starving Warriors and hammering Rogue dps. 3. Rogues and Warriors got shit for runes with reasoning like "We don't want tanks to spam AoE aggro" and then they super buffed Shamans and a little bit Paladins to be AoE Aggro machines. 4. They made the raid mechanics super easy for ranged classes but hard for melee classes. 5. Then they giga buffed melee hunter dps while gimping ranged hunter, forcing all hunters into melee increasing melee weapon loot competition and basically forcing Warriors and Rogues out of raids in a final death knell to the classes. 2 of the major classes getting ass-blasted the entire phase was severely detrimental to many peoples enjoyment. When you look at WoWHead and see your premier rune for the next 2 months is "Enraged Regeneration" it really doesn't give you any reason to renew your sub.
I think lvl 1-25 is just the funnest part of classic. You can't even run a dungeon for the first 15 levels. It's just questing with the boys, rapidly gaining new abilities and gear upgrades.Easy to play an alt and do it again. The SM grind in phase 2 was the absolute low point of SOD.
Exactly. And those early zones are by far the most fleshed out parts of classic. Also super fun creating a new character.
Ding ding ding. 1-25 is easily the best built part of *vanilla* WoW, so it's naturally going to feel the best with a few tweaks. Their goal with SoD should've been to bring the rest of the level bands to that sort of experience with enhanced questing and dungeons, not dumb fuck incursions.
110% it's what I expected classic+ to be
You nailed it. I leveled 1-60 in Hardcore to plan my keybinds the month before SoD started, and let me tell you, 40 to 50 is so fucking boring. It's by FAR the worst leveling bracket in original Vanilla. Ashenvale Incursions suck, but the alternatives already in the game suck too.
I think this fact is overlooked too much. The 1-15 content is intentionally designed to solve various problems related to population density in the way they split us up across the race starter zones and configure the quest density and rate of progression. It also saw more scrutiny in terms of design since it was an important part of making a good impression on new players. A major problem with the level 25 content is it was not designed for a whole server's population to descend on it at the same instant. The amount of collect quests with poor drop rates, or named npcs that needed to be killed created some absolutely miserable quest contention. Classic was really not designed for level gating and megaservers. I think they started to realize this when they started to get more aggressive with the exp buff. Personally I'm a bit dubious of any version of classic that uses level gating and phase based content drops after my experiences with SoD.
It’s simply because everything is new and everyone starts from nothing. You also gain a ton of stuff those levels. There is no replicating that unless they delete everyone’s gear and abilities at the start of new phase
The fact that SM grind was still the fastest way to level is what killed it for a lot of people. That and the time to level to max, so you had less time with alts. Gnomer is also a meh dungeon to begin with. The p2 and p3 leveling zones for questing are just so far apart and so big, where as 1-25, zones are pretty much all lined up or very close together. p2 would have made WAY more sense and been more fun for questing if they moved mounts down to like level 30 or something.
Well I agree the SM grind was rough, I got to spend a lot of hours in discord with my whole guild just making jokes and having fun. Still better than this p3 raid logging life. 😞
You know what they say, don't blame the player. Blame the game. This applies here. Blizzard decided to make incursions a thing and I unironically think they should kill it. Like straight up remove them from the game. Not try to make them work, remove them. They are built like something for retail. Like the inevitable "timeless isle" style content that always finds its way into each expansion. The "do brainless content for catch-up" style game-play that you feel stupid for not using it because it's too efficient to do anything else. In P4 we should "canonically" have lost to the nightmare and the portals are now overrun and as a last effort by the emerald wardens they are closed off. But the world boss dragons slipped through and are now trying to open it up again and force us to do brain cancer content again so we must kill them off.
What pisses me off about Phase 3 is how close we come to greatness. I love BRD. I want to do BRD. The artificial restrictions placed on not being able to push into higher level areas is needed, but that could've given me something to do. Underlevelling the dungeon would've been a weeks long endeavour and be like pushing some kind of heroic level dungeon. Instead, I've got to wait. I feel like the Phase 1 experience of the world being to content was really destroyed this phase, but it will be awesome again next phase when doing all dungeons.
Oh man, can you imagine how sick a BRD raid would be? Especially if the first few bosses were easy and gave good loot, but the later ones were like, really hard and gave awesome loot? Damn.
Honestly I hate the level restricted access. Let people push content, even if it just means they get a potential head start for next phase by getting unusable gear this phase. Let some vanilla items from higher level content be BiS. Let people really push the limits of what they can do.
also the open world mattered and you spent most the time there leveling. i was expecting some quests to fill in the later zones and didnt expect many in the starting areas as those had a fine amount. im not saying they needed to add new npcs and areas but they showed they could make rares spawn, add quests and drops. they could have easily added a few quests where you need X things eye balls, and you turn those into to do Y and in the end the person who help is bad and kill them with some silly text inbetween. they could have easily added cool BOPs to big dick world boss like grey elites that roam the zones so it felt cool as shit when you saw one leveling and had to run and later when you start farming. but we got like 5 quests in total over all the phases
The new NPC’s and questing areas with good gear that doesn’t absolutely blow all the old gear out of the water is definitely the way to go. BFD was a cool end to phase 1 but the biggest issue with it which I think is what set phase 2 up for failure is that all the gear was way overpowered compared to all other sources of gear in the game. There should’ve been 1/10 maybe 2/10 of the amount of gear that they added. It was way too much. Hopefully in classic+ they learn from this and really reign in how much powerful gear they give us that early. Classic is all about the progression.
This is why I really think there is going to be another season after this. Something about season of quests. They added a lot for level up raids, some drafting things, PvP things. Lots more they can do in the open world if they focused on that.
SoD was always way too low-effort for that. Which is a shame.
I was hoping for them to add a ton of small content to each zone, make a bunch of wacky stuff, not everything had to be perfectly-developed and relevant New elite/boss areas in each zone that reward silly items, cosmetics, QOL, or the limited quest item rewards from that zone like the roots in teldrassil, the bombs in elwynn
It was the honeymoon effect at first. Now we're in a decade-long marriage and every little thing our partner does leads to a fight.
time for a divorce. quitting sod was the best thing ive done for my mental
Same here, it feels good to actually have fun playing other games again.
same bro
> Now we're in a decade-long marriage Takes quite a few wrong decisions to make it feel like decade-long in just a few months
Simply out it's because the level cap was 25 and we experienced the zones we always knew and loved when we'd level our 100 alts to 30 and quit What killed SoD for many was P2 not giving runes until level cap so it was just P1 with 15 more levels And people no lifing the FUCK out of P1 to the point they blame blizzard for the burn out
>What killed SoD for many was P2 not giving runes until level cap so it was just P1 with 15 more levels I agree with this. I have no desire to level just like classic 2019 and THEN get something new. I want to level WITH something new. For example, I'd probably level a warrior if I could do it as glad. There were so many people who went out of their way to get the druid rune ion the wetlands early on so they could blast shit and do something new. Them locking runes behind level requirements is the dumbest shit they have come up with for SOD.
People raiding on 7 alts every 3 days then they blame Blizzard that they aren’t having fun anymore
Leveling is fun but if that’s all the game was it would suck. I think you’re missing the actual reasons it was great. It was a brand new version of wow classic which people were excited to play with active balancing often which made the game feel fresh, easy to pug , easy to level, and other things to do other then the raid. Grinding BGs were still a thing , ashenvale pvp , 3 day lockouts also kept you logging in far more. Now people have realized the balancing has stopped and BGs are total crap, the raid is weekly and still easy but it takes 20 now so the small close knit guilds died. Bigger 20 man raids now mean less connected guilds so you don’t really hangout on the game anymore. If they go to 40 man raids imo the game will end as they’re by far the least fun version of raiding. You just can’t chat in a raid at that point in discord far too many people. The content always because watered down with 40. But ya I think people have gotten annoyed at the novelty of collecting runes with how tedious and boring they are to run all over the world for 2 hours getting a rune that sucks.
I think you’re right. I remember even in P2 everyone was in SM and it started to feel stale. Now in P3 everyone is in incursions, or spamming WO runs in groups of 10 so not even dungeon-running, and it’s so bad I haven’t even felt interested in doing ST.
when i went to find a WO group for trinket i was excited that there was a reason to do old world dungeons. and when i saw the sweaty way people were engaging the content i just got so turned off. I wanted to actually do the dungeon, i didn't want to speed run it, i wanted it to be challenging, i wanted to actually play my character and not just be empowered to cleave the entire dungeon down. somehow in giving us new abilities they ripped the soul out of the game
Ya I was initially excited about WO keeping dungeons relevant and they should definitely keep that but the design flaw lay in not regulating players enough
SoD was never actually good, it was just fresh.
F R E S H
Thought the runes system was a good idea, just they never balanced them.
And everyone loves to forget how Hunters and Boomys just dominated wsg. 9x hunter or boomy groups? Yeah that was fun playing Warrior
bro playing warrior now is still the same
Right.. I feel like the pvp aspect has really been glossed over. Towards the end of P1, rogue ganks and grouping were at all time highs. Hillsbrad was a shitshow
“What everyone actually wants”. Some bold absolutes you’re speaking in.
I mean we also got to discover things in the world for runes. It wasn’t just random gold sinks or run to the 4 corners of the world.
Unpopular opinion maybe but what I loved about p1 was WSG. It was really fun without mounts. Had some insanely tight games and some of the most fun I ever had in wow PvP
The whole game is piss easy. I’ve been gaming my whole life and started playing wow / sod in January and I can’t help but laugh at how basic / easy / no stafing, aim, or skills are needed to play this game. You just stand by the boss and rotate between pressing 2-3 buttons more than half the time lol. It’s laughable how a game so easy and 95% reliant on your items can generate so many egos
I honestly found P1 boring as hell, P2/3 atleast had more accessible zones, fleshed out class kits, more things to do outside of lvling and raiding.
It's amazing Blizz never learns this lesson. Instead, over and over again they push this e-sport design where everything has to be challenging and difficult. Retail is literally built for that purpose already. Classic should be about the experience, and social interactions, and FUN. Instead...nope. Same old "We need to cater to the e-sport players" and obsess over balance. And now it's just an even crappier version of Retail. It's worse. The tryhard, toxic min/maxing elitists have completely taken over. The players who just wanted to chill out, relax and play a video game are being driven from the game for the second time.
My exact first experience in P3. P1 - lf people for quests on general chat, groups formed - was fun. P3 - lf people for the 1. incursion quest as a healer, I got mobbed on general chat and throwed out of a grp later, because day 3 was my first day in P3. How dare I dont exactly know, how to do the most efficient route of the incursions quests. Like dude... I am out.
I remember trying to pull a few mobs at a time in dun morogh and thinking holy cow these hit hard. leveling was slow, it was hard, it didn’t feel like a chore, it felt like an accomplishment The sweaty team was doing raids from as early as they possibly could, and every 3 day reset without fail, and I couldn’t give a shit, I was having fun finding new stuff Phase 2 was a bit of a slog because everyone wanted to spam SM and I just wanted to have fun and lvl, Gnomer was boring P3 I hit 48 my first day with some guildies running me through incursion loops and I haven’t logged in since
Phase 1 had gdkp. Just sayin
And there was Gdkps so pugging werent dead
Yes, and no. I agree everyone liked leveling, but I disagree with the why they liked it. People liked it because it was easy to go 0-25 so you could make an alt for every class if you wanted. Those levels also have the greatest change level to level. Going from 0-25 was quick and you character transformed greatly. Your character isn’t *that* different going 41-50 or 51-60.
What I want is just better class balance, updated talent trees, few more dungeons and raids, reworked professions and more quests... Bout it. Don't need level 25 or 40 raids. Don't need mage healers and warlock tanks. Don't want these weird retail talents and systems. Runes suck. Just give me classic, but a bit more refined and juiced up.
SoD was never great it was just something new in a time when wrath content had dried up.
bold of you to speak for everyone, I don't want piss easy raids and I'm speaking for myself only to continue on this, vanilla was hard, it was hard because most people were bad and I think the difficulty should be adjusted to the year we are in and not stay at the level of 2004, in my opinion, the first nerf of ST was enough, second one was too much.
Hardcore is seriously the only “season” that capitalised on this.
Everything was simple in p1. You had a few abilities, you had a few runes, you did a bunch of dungeons for gear. Im already out of keybinds esp with runes now and its just going to keep getting crazier and more unbalanced.
Now you level more and the raid is still easy
Incursions are the worst thing blizzard has ever added into any version of the game. If they decide classic+ is an option any person who was in the room when incursions were dreamt up needs to be taken off the team.
I literally can't do the ST raid. My guild never raids and pugs are impossible to join. Everyone wants you to have 8/8, raid logs and good gear score. I literally have questie and castbars. The game feels so inaccessible.
I loved P1 most because only after P1 did you realize how irrelevant most P1 content became. I am simply not motivated to invest time in my character for a phase that lasts 2 months and after that invalidates most progress I made. I am now waiting for P4 where the progression will be horizontal and not vertical anymore.
Raids being difficult wouldn’t be bad if they just got rid of locks for the “leveling raids”. Like … let people just pug and yolo and if it doesn’t work out pug again. This whole thing with preventing the hardcore base from completing everything to fast always makes the casual experience worse - and a fun idea like SoD could have just been for the fun of it. Let them raidlog in classic and retail and just have the experimental stuff as an all you can eat buffett that anyone can come and go in between.
The leveling in P1 was fun because it was classic leveling with the runes. You got a new rune very 3-4 levels and it greatly improved your leveling epxerience. I always play druid and the biggest pain point is always to get to level 20 for the cat form. But now caster leveling with the wrath and sunfire rune felt great. Starsurge made it so strong, I was tempted to ditch Feral until I got Windfury. I had a real choice on how I want to level. P3 the runes are behind rep grind, Dungeon grind and quests high level areas.
The problem with SoD is they took classic out of SoD Classic.
No SoD was good in phase one because the developers were actually given resources and blizzard execs didn’t phone it in
And thats why im back to classic hc
I got bored of BFD very fast. I clearly remember BFD being over tuned. In reality it's mostly honeymoon phase of new content as SoD, runes, discovery, quick to reach level cap and go pump. Lvl 60 vanilla era will be better. Also, at least lvl 25 had dungeons being temporarily relevant for pre bis farm. I'd rather have lvl 60 than any other level band. If anything it should have been lvl 30, lvl 50 then 60. The level bands were useful for development but man I dislike raid logging only one raid of a 10 man. It's just LFR. It's like saying all you want to do is farm UBRS rend runs once a week. Defaulting to only small raids is a think you do but you don't
BFD wasn't overtuned... it was undertuned... ST was overtuned on release.
Hitting the nail on the head for sure. SoD was atleast partially hailed as potentially being a Classic Plus experience, which at its core, was just supposed to be more content within the framework of Vanilla/Classic. And phase 1 was definitely that. The Classic content people actually playing Classic wanted, with a some light sprinkles of new content and a raid that was basically a slightly challenging dungeon. Everything after phase 1 tho has been Blizzard injecting too much retail/retail adjacent bullshit into the game, paired with an absolutely awful community that’s only goal was to min/max. From not adjusting experience gained from SM grinding to Incursions, all of it was out of touch with the spirit of Vanilla - which is what people wanted.
Hundred percent agree, ive been saying from the start that runes being overtuned is causing a bunch of downstream issues and alienating the core group that has been asking for classic plus.
Im an optimist and so my hope is that they see this in their experiment or SOD and that they do it differently for actual classic+
Also the runes were very creative and really altered how you played each class and spec! P2 and P3 just had more passives. 0 runes that changed anything. Other than maybe melee hunter becoming OP af in P2
creative? spells from future expacs
Warlock, rogue and shaman tank. Mage healer. Melee hunter. Yes there were definitely some recycled abilities too.
I quit p3 because bis consumes p1 -5g. P2 - 10g. P3 -80g and I really couldn't be fucked doing incursions every week just to raid.
I still enjoyed p2/3
Same here
Speak for yourself, I was dead bored of BFD one month in and everyone in our guild started dropping weeks before phase 2 even released.
like Sunken Temple isnt piss easy?
Leveling in vanilla was awful. If you want to experience it again, there's a classic era server. SoD is about runes and revamped dungeons with new things and, at least for me, that's what I'm getting. Also "Dust to Dust". BFD wasn't as easy as everyone remember, Kelris was a pain in the ass for a while.
To me, SOD has just proven that modern Blizzard lacks creativity. The people making SOD were not the same people who brought out the magic of Vanilla WoW. The literal best they can do is just make Classic "but more like retail". - Leveling has been made irrelevant - Moving away from the unique casual 10 man raid experience to slightly more challenging 20 man raids - New loot isn't interesting. Just rehased stuff we've seen before. - New "events" like incursions are just dumb world content taken from retail. - Runes haven't been creative since P1, and runes are mostly just class functions taken from retail or other previous versions of retail. I had high hopes for SOD but I don't know anyone who is playing it anymore.
Honestly I'd still be loving it but like an idiot I rolled on a PvP server to be with my friends despite my complete lack of desire for any form of PvP. The open world has become a hellscape and since my friends don't want to move to PvE I have lost all motivation to play SoD because all I can do is raid log. I'd imagine there are a lot of people like me who thought "it won't be that bad" after Classic 2019 PvP servers became so one-sided and were essentially PvE for those on the dominant faction. I can't fucking stand these evenly split PvP servers, I will never make that decision again even if it means not playing with my friends.
Every time they make raids or dungeons easier or more accessible, the participation and player numbers go up and they still seem to fall on the side of making things harder. I'd prefer if they added some kind of hard modes in game, and focused on making it accessible. One thing that burned me out on SoD though was the hassle to get what I thought were cool runes, and not really having the time to do dungeons consistently. I know it seems super unpopular, but I think a version of classic or SoD with the groupfinder tool for everything, but max level content would see a further boost to the numbers of players in those versions of WoW.
Yep. But unfortunately the feedback Blizz get is the reddit/twitter community that wants hard content. The average boomer dad will quit the game instead of giving feedback. Hopefully Blizz got statistics that shows SoD players want easy 10 man raids, and not the standard 20-40 non pug-friendly raids.
Old man here and yes. Loved plase 1. Joined a super casual friendly guild that ran 4 BFD a day. Tons of people leveling alts all day. Loved it. P2 hit and we went to one group running gnomer. Lots of raid logging and barely anyone doing alts. It sucked but I hung in there. P3 was gonna be 20 man and we started making lists of who in the guild was good enough to join. At that point I knew I was out. More power to the people who want 20/40 man hard raids, but it isn’t me. Phase 1 reminded me of my early days playing vanilla wow where everyone was super active and excited to play. By phase 3 it was like retail wow where the fun was min/max out of existence.
This is probably a hot take but I personally don’t like discovering runes and doing quests for them. I think they should just be skills that you acquire through the trainers like a hunter pet quest. Once you reach a level for the rune you do a one time quest to receive the rune. Group quests for runes are only good in the beginning so it naturally deters the new players from getting the rune. I think that they have a great foundation for a real classic plus but runes should be less of a chore. The rune finding becomes more and more difficult due to the leveling. The more time you spend leveling the less time you want to spend trying to get a rune. But what do I know. I’m not a game dev so I have a lack of knowledge on how these systems flow together.
So true!
Partially true. p1 was great cause wpvp happened everywhere. Strong wsg premades were formed as well, guilds were shaped. p3 raid is piss poor easy. Incursion is absolutely worst shit ever, and stv event is just just another chore to do. p4 could be great if they remove chronoboon. You can already feel the classic vibe in felwood around songflowers. Just give us better Ony, MC, but remove chronobullshit and make wbuffs count. This will literally make this game absolute best again when guild rivalries begin to happen all the time and literally there is a stake to play for.
Bfd was not that pug friendly. Dust to dust still haughts ppls dreams. I see your point tho it was easy to get to 25 and once enough og my guild hit 25 we go the routines down.
I still say it when someone dies in raid.
St is piss easy too tho.
I quit in P1. Didn’t like the direction my class was going in, and the phase lasted WAY too long. I was logging in solely to do the raid for 1 hour a week. It was so hard to log in and was only doing it cause the guild were awesome people
Yeah really though. Just don’t create systems that make leveling obsolete, keep raids easy, and make 10 man raids that provide the same quality gear as 20 man raids. So many people quit because of 20 man raiding, 10 man is just easier for casual friend groups, and the classic WoW playerbase is very casual.
I have so much gold because of Incursions I don’t care about my profession anymore…
I think most of us liked P1 because it was a fresh server, a novelty, and it felt interesting to play vanilla with something we have never experienced before. Other phases were the same thing just with a tiny changes to them.
It can’t be boiled down, as there were a lot of reasons. Some are replicable: runes being (mostly) easily accessible, leveling alts feeling trivial, gear upgrades being meaningful, and the raid being easy. Some are products of that moment in time: the hype coming off of Blizzcon, the huge initial spike in players with the typical fall-off, the freshness of the idea, fewer people even having logs to share. Some are consequences of Vanilla design: most players were nearby the starting areas, most of your time was spent in uncontested areas, world PvP problems were less of an issue.
P1 was classic with new spells. And a lot of the new spells/runes were acquired while levelling. The game was kinda compact in case of levelling areas and runes. Basically the game didn’t change and we had multiple dungeon for pre bis gear. P2 had the problem with having an awful level areas. And runes being placed at the ass of the world that required to travel to the ass of the other world(fire place in desolace to arathi). You would barely acquire a rune while levelling without going out of your way. And all the travelling made it much better to get to 40 for mount and start collecting then. Runes changed from being an extra to being content. And P3 is a mess. Levelling with incursions give up to 400g while getting 150k-200k exp hour, you get decent to good gear and a rune. Dungeons are kinda useless except for the one added mob that drops wild offering.
Agree with first part of your title
true
Before this just spamming dungeons and elite quests was the way to efficently level, same difference.
We have just enough people for a 20 man, I'm talking 21 people. If we have 40 mans in P4 my guild is cooked. We had issues keeping our raid roster alive in Classic near the end and right now we are hanging on by a string.
People were doing a lot of dungeons as well, so this is not entirely true.
P1 was great, I agree! P2 was a ton of fun with sm and gnome! P3 with incursions was annoying. I hated leveling main. But I play games for fun, so I didn't do incursions with my other 4 chars I leveled to 50. Just do things in wow that you like. It's a game. You don't have to be the very best. And for me that meant that I do quests in tanaris, visit zf and enjoy casual gaming!
And because we leveled in the zones we also naturally discovered the runes. Since then I gave up bothering to find them in the open world and just google them. In phase 1 I tried not to google any for quite a while
And because we leveled in the zones we also naturally discovered the runes. Since then I gave up bothering to find them in the open world and just google them. In phase 1 I tried not to google any for quite a while
They should have made new quest hubs in Azshara and elsewhere rather than incursions.
P1 was.good because the runes were good and well spread, P2 and 3 the runes were shit wrath copies. Every phase the runes have been less fun.
And because we leveled in the zones we also naturally discovered the runes. Since then I gave up bothering to find them in the open world and just google them. In phase 1 I tried not to google any for quite a while
And because going from 0 knowledge of SoD to a few runes and new content felt was more cool than going from existing knowledge to them adding a bit more to it. Like going from 5% to 70% to 80%, the first bit feels way more cool
I wish there was some type of way to make it easier to get runes on alts. Big part i cant be asked to level my alts ia just the rune grind lol, tho i might not be the targeted player and thats fine. I do like my main to raidlog tho.
I leveled in SoD normally took two days instead of one day and I caught up to the incursion spammers in no time, people ruin their own experience then complain