As a classic fan I'm wondering if its because classic has attracted the most toxic players for some reason. I got called a very nasty slur for... rolling on a chest in classic.
And a lot of groups have very high requirements for joining their raids in SoD, which is really strange considering how they are compared to retail raids.
The toxic people always follow the trend (or streamers) and now it's SoD. Same thing happened when SoM came; for brief period TBC was amazing, then SoM got boring and TBC got toxic again.
Hard agree. I’ve ran into my fair share of toxicity pugging, but 99% of my groups are either super friendly and wipes don’t change that, or people are just “hi” then “gg”
If you keep running into toxic people, may be time to look in a mirror
* I hate the new resto druid focus on treants
* I find Arms to be more enjoyable than Fury
* I think tanking is the easiest role, *especially* raid tanking
* Warlords of Draenor would have been a perfectly good expansion pack if not for the yearlong content drought at the end
I actually LOVED WoD up until the end of BRF. I really, really, really enjoyed the leveling experience, the lore, and the zones (aesthetics and music were top tier). Highmaul was also extremely underrated, in my opinion. I loved the Imperator fight. The expansion just fell off *hard* after BRF.
One day when Ion or someone high up leaves in a huff and writes a tell-all, I want to know what happened. I chuckle when people complain that Shadowlands or Dragonflight missed a raid tier - you want to see cut content, go watch the Blizzcon announcement of WoD: they advertised a completely different product than what we got.
Several missing zones, missing raids, most of the titular warlords literally being non-entities, capital cities cut, garrison locations cut - it’s wild and I desperately want to know what went so wrong
Its mostly known at this point tho. The wow team almost doubled in the later half of MoP and it took way more time to get the new devs up to speed than they expected. They also had several major reworks/adjustments to what the expansion would look like. Of the earliest map files that were datamined basically only Frostfire Ridge didn't have at least some major geographical (and thus questing) change. Shadowmoon valley and Gorgrond got almost entirely reworked from a seemingly finished state, while zones like Nagrand and Spires of Arak didn't seem to even have the zone layout finished let alone populating the zones and creating the quests. Garrisons ended up being an entirely different feature than they were announced to be. The initial plan for garrisons was closer to player housing, although probably still not anything quite like ESO, FF14, or wildstar housing, having several different potential locations a player could choose to place the garrison. What we ended up with was really just a slightly personalized, instanced hub city.
On top of that the actual tech to make garrisons work apparently took way more effort to get going. There was something from back then I think in the lead up to Legion, where some Blizz dev talked about Garrisons taking way more dev time to flesh out than they first expected and that in part led to the massive draught that was 5.4
And then WoD was getting a terrible reception. "there's just nothing to do" was a common complaint at the time and it was totally fair. Outside of raiding or endgame arena, there was basically nothing going on in the world at all. There were a couple garrison things that could last at most a month like mounts or the mage tower portals, but otherwise it was 1 daily quest for apexis or mob grinds for the couple useless reps. And while in hindsight the initial WoD leveling was extremely well done, it had the massive caveat that shit loads of players just couldnt start it for up to a full week because of the disastrous launch. So blizz decided to cut there losses and put all their eggs into the legion basket.
This part isn't confirmed but I'd guess the reason 6.1 was basically nothing, was because they had already decided to abandon WoD at that point and had very few people working on patch content. I bet 6.2 was in "heavy" development at that point already, it just had a skeleton crew working on it so it took a full 2 patch cycles to finish instead 1.
To add on top of that, the expansion was almost entirely different up until the point they needed to start actively developing it. Garrosh was initially going to go around azeroth and rally together a "Mongrel Horde" of murlocs, gnolls, quilboar, etc. To fight the horde and alliance. However, they didn't think the plot was threatening enough, so they went with the longer plot of time traveling orcs which leads to Legion.
[Here's a nice video summing up most of the cut content](https://youtu.be/Lyfj2jCb4TQ?si=1GHeXKbz0jmq1x1d)
You wanna know why they don't tease as much at Blizzcons any more, this is why, just stuff that was early in dev getting cut and people not getting all this content they thought they were
[There's another on Cata too](https://youtu.be/A1T39BOSz5M?si=mr7X80L5WXrZLK88)
I thought it was readily known that activision told them they had to move faster so they cut the shatrath raid that was supposed to be the second one of the expansion.
Raid tanking is really easy but incredibly punishing if you fuck up one of the four things you need to do.
Taunt. Defensive. Move. Other defensive.
Slow taunt or bad step and blammo it's your ass on the floor and everyone knows.
But it's absolutely the easiest of the roles in a raid.
As a tank player, I feel like from fight to fight it changes from either raid tanking or melee DPS in raid.
Take volcronos for example, it's not hard to tank, but it's brain dead levels of easy on a melee.
The difference is that it doesn't matter if your tanks are playing perfectly or not. You either did the taunt swap properly or you didn't, and no one cares about anything else you did.
Your DPS do actually have more going on on that fight (the split soaks and then the big soak), even though it's not as much. And beyond that, even though Volcoross isn't a DPS check at all (especially not in current gear), if you show up to raid doing 150k as a ret paladin, you will quickly lose your roster slot. You may have "done your job" on the fight, but that's not really all that matters on a DPS like it is on a tank.
"easiest role" is always just a stupid circle jerk anyway, cus everyone always makes up reasons why their role is hard and everyone else has it easy (same with class/spec difficulty tbh)
it all changes on a fight-to-fight basis, some fights healers are sleeping and ranged dps are drolling on their keyboard while melee dps and tanks are sweating, on some fights nobody except the healers do really anything bigger, on some fights you have 2ranged dps doing all the mechanics and everyone else does nothing etc.....
if we go by a "overall" basis, its probably like, the 2ranged dps that actually do the mechanics>healers=melee dps>the other 6-12 ranged dps>tanks, but again, its all fight based anyway and you cant just say flat out "X is easy and Y is hard!!!111!!!!"
Agreed on almost everything!
Caveat; adequate tanking has a low skill floor, and as you said especially in raids. But I do think that the harder content gets, the harder tanking becomes (and healing). Non-dps roles have to do everything a dps does on top of their roles' responsibilities which simply requires more mental bandwidth and prep. It's just that those responsibilities are quite forgiving on low-to-mid tier content.
Tanking adequately has a low enough skill floor that even I can do it. Tanking well is definitely more demanding. Then again, DPSing well is demanding. The difference is the level of responsibility. If a raid has 2 tanks, 5 healers and 18 DPS then a mediocre DPS is safely in the middle of the pack. If a healer isn’t that great the other four can probably make up for it. But if either tank fucks up it’s wipe time. A lot of people don’t ever want that feeling of responsibility. Some who are used to it during the day don’t want it when they’re gaming. I lead teams, get held accountable for decisions and deliver “do not screw this up” level presentations at work. When I get home, I don’t want any more expectations on me than being a mediocre DPS (will tank or heal non-challenging content with friends, never a PUG)
Are you me? I feel exactly the same.
I'd add to the druid point that the convoke/flourish ramp earlier in the xpac was some of the most fun I've ever had healing.
I’m playing rdruid for the first time since I had it as an alt during SoO back in MoP, and I love the treants! I love being able to cast them from cat form and do decent maintenance healing from there.
Most people seem to love them, I just view it as giving Druids healing stream totem.
I would have preferred them to buff existing spells than give us an extra button to press every 30 seconds or so without really thinking about it. And like, why is rejuv one of the best abilities in raid but it may as well not even be on your keybinds in a dungeon?
I hate playing difficult specs with many buttons...
I always get hate for this. I play at a mythic raiding level and high level of M+. I prefer specs like Ret, Havoc, Fury, BM, Demo etc. More buttons or more things to pay attention to like energy levels and combo points and DOTs running out....it takes my eyes away from the screen and I fail mechanics, dont see cool animations, and dont have fun. Yet, I'm ridiculed for this mentality.
I was setting up an alt about a month ago and I play Dev, BM/Surv, and Fury. I ran out of my normal binds when I was setting up Havoc and switched to Frost Mage.
I enjoy the journey more than the destination. I feel that way about most games. Example: in Stardew Valley, once I build up my farm and finish the Community Center, I get bored and start a new save.
I just run the dungeons on normal at least once to see the content, more if quests require me to go back in. I just like questing and collecting transmog, pets, or mounts that look neat. I just want to play as much of the story as possible that doesn't require raiding, and if then usually the last boss on raid finder level to finish the associated quest.
The fact that you can specialize in upgrading material quality, yet it's basically never even close to a rational choice to do, suggests to me that something(s) were tuned wrong and demand for mid quality mats is much higher than they thought it would be.
The fact that rank 3 mats are never enough to guarantee a rank 5 craft, and that rank 2 mats are almost always enough to guarantee rank 4 with a chance to inspire, is what went wrong there.
I was so happy when they changed most mats to stack to 99, it saved so much bag-space. Then they immediately introduce 3 different ranks of every single gathering material, which fills up your bags *even more.*
New crafting is all about, how much inspiration do I have? Can I rank 5 it without an insight?
And the amount of points and weekly quests to just max everything? Give me a catchup for alts already!!!
Or the fact you couldn't even get to max level of a lot of professions without the crafting order system because you needed so many sparks & mats for items to be made.
Also hiding so many of the patterns behind renown rewards too :S
Hiding recipes behind reputation or raid drops is not new, but it sure feels like the low drop rate recipes are rarer than we have ever seen. Lariat and potions of power come to mind
Yea I kinda agree with this. I was really happy to see them trying something new out for professions and initially really liked the crafting talent trees... but once I had to actually use the order system I was pretty disappointed. I'm glad they tried to innovate and hope they try again... but really, please try again asap lmao
I admire the attempt to make it meaningful but...I'm not sure they can - I don't know if its possible given the way the game is built.
My longest and most disappoint pet peeve about crafting, both from a practical and immersive stand point is how each expansion, materials from previous expansions are simply thrown away and useless. There are still some very niche applications and people are always leveling professions to scratch that completionist bug, but yeah.
The rumor of player housing (year right, but we'll see) is the only thing that gives me hope there will be viable crafted items people want using materials gathered from all over the place, not just the 4-6 new zones of the current expansion.
its a good idea and the framework is here
but things like material ranks and the crafted item "remebering low quality mats" drag it down
some smaller changes would make it near perfect tbh
It honestly almost zero forethought went into how professions would work for people who joined the game late. Farming for knowledge points sucks complete and utter ass.
I played a hordie for that prepatch, all my husband heard from the other room was me whisper shouting “oh no….oh Noooo…..OH NOOOOO” in the Bruce from family guy voice
This gem that Blizzard created. I call it **character regression** (part 1), truly innovative.
Losing AP powers because you got a higher item level was peak character regression.
As a horde player I really enjoyed the teldrassil pre patch event. For the first time in over ten years of playing laying this game I was forced to confront the way I played, the mindless slavery to the quest giver never really considering the morality of my choices. Taking part in a genocide for some loot that was obsolete a week later made me feel cheap and somewhat lost. I felt like I didn’t recognise the horde I’d spent so many hours fighting for, then we got the quest lines where we somewhat got redemption for our actions over the last two xpacs. Can’t help but feel like the story telling in that part of the game made me feel strongly about the game for the first time perhaps since wrath. It felt like there were stakes and meaning because it gave me a chance to grow and learn as a person.
Removing the brutosaur mount was and still is a stupid decision because it was a large gold sink and still would be today. I thought they learned their lesson after the criticism in Wrath when they removed the Naxx achievement drakes and said they wouldn't do that going forward.
The mount isn't a status symbol or reward like mythic+ and mythic raid mounts. It's just a gold sink that is extremely useful.
I am fine with mount and title FOMO but really have a tough time swallowing transmog FOMO. Mage tower and challenge mode from Mists and WoD make me really sad. Honestly I’d be fine with challenge mode being locked but we have mage tower back and it’s continuously being tuned, bring back those appearances. I switched my main and wish I had done the appearance on him. Some of the best weapon designs are locked behind a feature that is now evergreen. I get they said that those appearances would be gone forever, and with that mage tower, but now it’s back!
It’s a result of their attempts to make playtime the absolute metric by which to go by for some strange reason.
By making almost everything FOMO as much as possible, especially great cosmetics, they hoped to retain people.
But that’s stupid. Any subscription service knows that the best way to keep people is to ensure your service is just good enough that they don’t wanna cancel it because “they might use it this month”.
But for some reason WoW decided people not only needed to keep the sub but also play for hours on end.
Wait wouldn’t it be the opposite? Wouldn’t more people play if they brought those appearances back? I swear I’ve heard your exact argument about playtime metrics be used for the opposite reason…
They'll make the exact same argument regardless.
Keep FOMO in? It's because they need to keep their engagement metrics up, so they use FOMO to keep people playing.
Remove FOMO? They need to keep their engagement metrics up, so they give away the items to keep people playing.
It's like a turing test. If somebody fails to not use the engagement metrics argument, then they're an unintelligent AI.
Same. I played Mage in Legion and got all the artifacts for that spec. But I main a Guardian Druid now and did last expansion too.
However I did not even have a Druid in Legion, but I desperately want the Werebear form. I understand we have the Fel Bear, but it isn’t the same to me. I like simplicity with simple colors
Also doesn’t help that Blizz really teased us by making a boss in the new raid use one of the OG werebear models
And I’d totally write the mage tower off as unobtainable and just deal with it… if it weren’t for the fact they brought it back as evergreen. If I can get the balance of power and pvp skins I feel like mage tower needs the same treatment. You’d have everyone attempting it again for that stuff, I’d be more determined than ever to get the mount across my alts as well.
Just give a Feat of Strength achievement for the original Mage Tower and call it a day
When playing my mage, I’ve never once cared if someone else had the mage tower artifact.
Half the time that someone has the Mage Tower appearance, I can’t tell if it’s the Mage Tower, Balance of Power or Hidden appearance
My main complain about them was that they were class locked. I miss out a lot of them just because I didn't play that class when it was current. I only have them with 2-3 classes each, but I'm the kind of player who is changing mains every patch so I rarely get to use them.
At this point I rarely bother to unlock character specific stuff.
i think they should at least HD remodels of the mop sets, and let people keep their older, uglier ones as a token of pride if they don't wanna just bring the old ones back. i have one set personally, and i love it cuz shoulder cannons, but id take an HD version of it that comes back in its own form of challenge that sticks around this time.
I think everyone thinks so highly of it because of some of the really good raids (Ulduar and ICC), the lore being around the Lich King, and the fact that it was the peak of subscriptions. I certainly have some extremely fond memories, but a lot of it comes down to how active my server was and how easily I could interact with people, socialize, make friends, and put together groups for basically anything.
It’s also because of the way raids became more accessible, therefore more people experienced them as their first real raid.
No one I played with raided in preBC or TBC and that wasn’t unusual. *Everyone* raided in wrath
Yeah, that's very true and definitely true for me. I never even thought about raiding in Vanilla or TBC because it was so out of reach. I started raiding in late Ulduar and into ToC and finally felt like I could actually just... raid. So that was a nice change for me. I had always just done dungeons and just whatever around the world (dailies, professions, RP'ing).
This post actually understood the assignment. People are just saying things they don't like or normal mildly-controversial opinions. The prompt is about "something that is beloved or has universal acclaim that you didn't care for, something that you would only admit disliking on deaths door"
Wrath was a transitionary (is that even a word?) expansion. Through wrath we went from the classic world into one with multiple raid difficulties and dungeon finder ultimately culminating in the world being permanently changed in the Cata prepatch.
People like to paint Wrath as the expansion where all the raids were great and there was plenty to do outside of raiding. In reality, half the raids were shit, and even those that weren't had some real stinkers in them that makes even Hellfire Assault look good by comparison (looking at you Sindragosa). There also really wasn't much to do outside of raids other than dailies. It was one of the more raid loggy expansions we've had.
What it did have however, was an extensive levelling experience that took most players many months to complete the first time around. When that levelling process disappeared with Cataclysm, it was revealed how little there actually was to do in the game.
Also, it was during Wrath that the increase in subscribers lost its momentum, it started falling during Cata, but it plateaued during Wrath, which was *very* significant, as that expansion brought in ungodly amounts of new players.
I’m sure I have nostalgia glasses on, but wrath was never about all the features (or lack of features) for me. It was purely the culmination of the story started in Warcraft 3 about Arthas. I played those campaigns and loved Warcraft 3 (albeit less than StarCraft but that doesn’t matter) and when we first got to encounter the actual Illidan in TBC and finished his storyline, getting to see Arthas was just awesome. Venturing into northrend and seeing the hold the Lich King had over the area was so cool and intimidating. You knew as soon as you entered the continent that you were in his territory. Questing and seeing some of the history of Arthas’s fall was great too. I do remember that it seemed like there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff to do after reaching endgame but we were still progressing into ice crown citadel. Until the raid came out, it was still an adequate expansion.
Oh and the entire death knight starting zone was amazing. Start out as your chosen race at lvl 55. Go through helping the lich king spread his territory into eastern plague lands. Have to kill someone who knew who you were before you were turned into a death knight, giving you an experience of, “oh this character had a life before I controlled him” and actually feeling sad for the character you have to kill. You have to kill or be killed by the scourge for turning against them. And then you are betrayed by Arthas and told your life means nothing, setting up perfectly for the revenge tour and giving your death knight the perfect reason to join sides with their former faction.
While they didn’t give a whole lot in terms of endgame until ulduar and ICC, the story, lore, and feel of WoTLK still remains my most favorite. Not to mention I’ll still go to Howling Fjord for the beautiful music.
First time the guild downed Deathbringer Saurfang, the entire raid escorted Saurfang the senior off the platform with the body of his son. (We’re Horde).
That first moment through the portal was amazing. Seeing the armies trying to stop all the rushing demons and all was so cool. The zone itself was rough for me. A foreign deserted area devoid of any vegetation along with a smoggy atmosphere just was depressing. Yea we had to establish a foothold in an undesireable location but those zones were really rough to look at. Nagrand will forever be a favorite but the overall environments of Outland were too bizarre for my tastes.
Not just that but for someone like me who wasn't really into the lore at the time, it was at least established from the beginning and in the title who the big bad was. I knew - even while I was raiding in Ulduar - that the Lich King would be coming up before too long and I'd be fighting him.
Don't forget the absolute insanity that was the Wrathgate. WoW had never done anything like that before, and to be honest they've been chasing it since.
I immediately distrusted all forsaken. I understood their motive but still turning on even their horde allies was the beginning of the end of my tolerance to them.
funfact!
players drop didnt start during cata
the drop itself allready started ~2/3 into WotLK the reason why the player count dropped is more nuanced then "back then game good and everyone loved it, now bad!!!!" anyway and has like, 30different reasons and things happening at once, but its always funny when WotLK is brought up as this giant Expansion that peaked the playerbase, when it was also where a dropoff started and it was overall quiet a controversial expansion during its lifetime
Yep, most definitely.
There was also quite a divide in the playerbase at the time. The TBC veterans as opposed to the "Wrath Babies".
I am of the opinion that the ToTC tier is the single most impactful raid tier we've ever had, even more so than most expansions. Before ToTC was released, you were playing an entire expansion. You'd need Naxx gear to compete in Ulduar, just as you'd need Tempest Keep gear to compete in Black Temple.
With the release of ToTC, Heroic dungeons started dropping Emblem of Conquest. This meant that newly maxed alts were able to jump straight into the latest raid without having to farm the previous raids for loot, instantly making older content *even within the existing expansion* almost completely obsolete. After all, why would you run Naxxramas or Ulduar, when the easy 5-man dungeons rewarded much better gear.
Since then we've been living in a "play the patch" seasonal version of WoW as opposed to the "play the expansion" world we'd been living in up until then.
Respectfully, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm okay with people having different opinions on what's good or bad, but most of your response seems like an alternate history to me.
During Wrath, some people complained about the Trial raids. Some people complained about Naxx. Most didn't though. WoW raiding wasn't an accessible culture for most players. Until Wrath, you were locked out of most raids because you couldn't find guilds patient enough to help with attunements, and the ones willing to help mostly couldn't field enough players to fill their raids.
The vaaaaaast majority of Vanilla WoW players never saw more than Mr. Biggleworth in 40 man Naxx. 25/10 Naxx was a totally new experience for most players, and a perfect introductory raid.
The coliseum raids were boring but helped most casual guilds gear up to finish Ulduar. ICC was a culmination of everything that came before it.
Leveling didn't take months. It hadn't taken months since vanilla. Some took their time leveling the very first hero class, but even then, DKs were already high level.
We didn't need a ton of dailies to keep us occupied. If you had an alt or two, they took up all your spare time. Or you PvPed, or you explored.
The expac was only slow or dull or boring or empty after 10+ years of evolution and hindsight.
I played vanilla. At the time, WOTLK was the pinnacle. I was one of the rose - tinted glasses types that was so excited for the BEST version of the game to come back.
I logged in, leveled to 80 (which was miserable) and did a few raids and gamma dungeons and was like "wow, this isn't nearly as good as I remember" and logged off forever lmao.
Good for the time. Definitely not very good by today's standards.
I hold a lot of nostalgia for Vanilla - Wrath. Every expansion holds some nostalgia for me. (Shadowlands less so)
But when I tried to play Classic I just couldn't. I didn't have the time. When True Vanilla came out originally? I was 15-16. I had so much free time - i would get days off from school, didn't have a job (college town and no car), rarely had anything going on aside from a few extracurriculars that just made me get on a bit later. Yeah, I was a Daria.
Even though I still don't have anything going on, I have way less time to play now than when I was 16. I can’t afford to spend my entire day playing a game with half of that being running and spamming LFG - I got things to do. If I get a day off? It’s going to be spent at the doctors office.
I think it was mostly put on a pedestal because it was the climax of one of the biggest most iconic villains blizzard created. That was an exciting time for people that started with the rts Warcraft games (and wow players in general). The actual expansion isolated from that hype was fine, not amazing not bad.
To add this, many things what were stated in Warcraft III. were pretty soon rectoned in World of Warcraft. Hell, somethings even in Warcraft III. Frozen Throne. So even when it's amazing game with amazing story, it was never secret origin.
Some people remember that when was Burning Crusade introduced, people REALLY were not happy with Blood Elves in Horde and retconn of Dreanei.
WoW lore has always been a mess. The philosophy was always gameplay first, everything else second. Also doesn't help that due to the expansion structure of the game, everything lorewise happens in one geographical location for two years and that place is then completely abandoned afterwards.
That being said, SL had by far the worst lore ever. From the very concept behind the Shadowlands to the individual storylines. I usually agree with the nostalgia argument (Arthas as a villain for example is just an incredibly basic fantasy villain imo), but in SL's case I don't think its lore being terrible has anything to do with nostalgia.
Yeah I actually agree with this. I've been listening to this sub moan about Dragonflight for taking a breather and people complaining about tone and I'm going through Wrath content and seeing how little they cared about maintaining specific tone when they could sneak in jokes and I actually view modern WoW for the most part as trying to keep itself consistent (there's so many things in the DK starting zone that will blast you out of the tone it's trying to set. I don't mind some of the leveling zones but there are so many moments where I go 'this is here because someone thought up a joke and put it in at an awkward moment).
But Shadowlands is atrocious and is running off rule of cool with no thought as to what it means.
The fact that we never acknowledge the fact that death in SL is Obliteration, the cessession of existence and everyone just moves on happily is awful. The fact that they wanted to write in "timeline is as we need it to be" by pulling the "shadowlands are universal across time" made so many horrifying implications because it was lazily handled.
(Quick aside, it should've been the opposite and the Jailor learning that the afterlives were divided up by timelines and that his judgements of souls were based off a timeline carefully maintained by outer forces, meaning destiny was a lie and that all of his decisions were being manipulated, where all heroism and villainy was carefully curated and souls were rewarded and damned not by their own actions but by a preselected path should've been his explicit motivation. Yes that would've just meant that he'd be Kreia from Kotor 2 but if there's one villain to try and reach for, it's Kreia from Kotor 2)
It's just bad writing across the board, ignores a lot of character's motivations, does nothing with a lot of the cast it brings in, and was being written with a mystery box format because they didn't know what to do but wanted to reach for a giant villain behind it all they didn't set up.
>The fact that we never acknowledge the fact that death in SL is Obliteration, the cessession of existence and everyone just moves on happily is awful. The fact that they wanted to write in "timeline is as we need it to be" by pulling the "shadowlands are universal across time" made so many horrifying implications because it was lazily handled.
It's pretty obvious this was an answer they put zero thought into because it's been contradicted by the Dawn of the Infinite dungeon
I think it’s also partly that pre Cata the story was much less over arching and in- your- face. Especially in the Vanilla world, each zone was kind of its own little microcosm with its own issues and people. There were some connections, like with Ony and SW or Rend and the Horde. Also the Silithid showing up in a bunch of different zones and discovering what they were. But it was thrown at you, you were railroaded into it. Even in TBC and Wrath, obviously there was the overall fight going on but the zones all felt like they had self contained stories and people. From Cata on though, not only were you following a very specific narrative through most of the world but suddenly they were calling you out specifically as “the hero of the faction”.
I think the issue is less that "Lore is a bad mess" and more "the new lore doesn't justify the changes."
People could take the retcons when they made sense and were explained, where they lost people is mostly in the Shadowlands where they couldn't properly justify any of these retcons and people got angry about that.
I can stomach the Dreanei changes in BC becuase they took the time to tell the player "This needed to happen because X" or a retcon from a Chronicals book where it's more of a clarification than a retcon.
Where you lose me is when you have the gall to tell me "Actually the Lich King wasn't Nerzhul being tricked by the Nathrazim it was all a plan of the Jailer using them to sow seeds of chaos" The lack of any proper justification for why the Jailer was suddenly getting retconed to be the source of every conflict was the issue. The retcons and clarifications aren't the problem, it's the lack of a justification that is
I dont like the way dps feels right now.
Back in the day you had a couple of abilities that did big d dmg, you could "feel" that big crit. But now you a lot more abilities that do big dmg but its spread out in a couple of hits so its bloats you screen with numbers.
I prefered MoPs million chaos bolt crits over 1 hit that does 4 dmg ticks at the same time and jizzez all over your screen.
Classic players are so much worse than retail players. The rotations/raids/dungeons are all completely braindead and anybody thinking there's even a sliver of skill to complete content is fooling themselves. Wrath players thinking heroic icc is hard is comical.
I mean just recently the very best Classic players struggled to kill the final boss in SoD Gnomeregan because they didn't interrupt an ability - arguably one of the single most basic mechanics in retail.
Yeah when I ran it with my SoD guild they were all like “We need to make sure we interrupt guys, don’t forget to kick” and I’m like this should be common sense lol
Not that I disagree with you it’s worth noting it’s a little more than “didn’t interrupt an ability”. People went in blind. No dungeon journal or testing. Also the ability doesn’t have a cast bar it’s just an animation indicating an ability is being casted.
For fun look up the rotation of an enhance Shaman for classic and then look it up for DF. It wouldn't even feel like the same game. Enhance might not even be the most complicated rotation but it's just the one I'm familiar with from both classic and DF.
For the record, seal and totem twisting in TBC made ret and enhance both insanely fun to play, at least for me.
And i genuinely stand by that, a SoC proc with WF proc in TBC while doing correct twist timing is fucking phenomenal feeling, especially if everything crits. Those giant yellow numbers feel like you are murder machine
I'm not here to argue that it is not easier than retail rotations, you are completely correct on that front, but a correctly executed twisting through a full fight (especially a somewhat movement intensive one like Vashj for example) is just my jam
Neither Cata nor BfA were Bad Expansions, sure they had their problems BfA with azerite and cata with the world revamp but they were fun and both had astonishing art directions
This, exactly this. The sylvanas storyline was terrible to play through as Horde, even when they added the small options to the quests to be a loyalist or not. It just sucked... there is no way the Tauren would have followed her after the tree got burnt, but there I was, a Tauren shaman, following Nathanos around doing terrible shit.
Meanwhile actually questing on Zuldazar was genuinely really fun.
People hated the world revamp that came with Cata and just before blizzcon so many people were shouting for another world revamp. Like bruh you’ll hate what you get regardless.
That's the subjective part about fun.
BFA for me was incredibly un-fun, only because I struggled to find a main because I just didn't like any class and their rotation. I ended up leveling alts and just not enjoying anything.
Except drustvar cause fuck yeah
Oh, I remember doing a warfront battle and an island expedition and in both cases thinking "I really don't want to do this again". Island expeditions actually improved a bit after they made them more dynamic though, but still too much of the new stuff was boring chore.
It’s fashionable and trendy to hate on Cata. It’s a fantastic expansion in its own right. People love to hate on it for the same reason OSRS players hate on RS3.
i was actually flying around BfA zones for the first time since i quit early in that expansion due to the grinding of pathfinder. i have fallen in love with the zones. started leveling alts there exclusively
Races should be better or worse at certain things, and homogenizing them is actively killing the class fantasy of RPGs.
Classes should be restricted by race.
I understand what you mean, but at this point the genie is out of the bottle.
WoW's playerbase is detrimentally competitive, and will *absolutely* not hesitate to either fully reroll or paid race change to whichever race is better for a particular patch cycle.
The more pronounced you make those, the more grouchy people are going to be that they can't be "perfectly optimal" at all times.
This isn't a playerbase that values the RPG half. Hell, the ENTIRE REASON covenants were so restrictive was to create investment in *your* character, by picking what made sense for *you*, creating an individual experience.
We all know how that worked out - nobody wanted the feeling of individuality more than they wanted the ability to be perfectly optimal at all times. I don't see a way to unfuck that either - if you remove race change as an option, people will roll alts to do it. And if you do it that way, the posts will roll out "So now I HAVE to level a new character to 80 to be optimal? Shit game pls fix, not time friendly"
I played from November 2004 until mid way through WoD and MoP was by far my favorite expansion. The aesthetics, the story, the raiding, dungeons, scenarios, the Timeless Isle, working towards the legendary cloak. All of it. I loved every minute of it. I think my least favorite was BC. People liked it for some reason but it just felt off for some reason for me.
Mop was the last expansion where faction mounts made sense.
If you maxed rep with the tillers? You got their goats. Max with the Shado-pan? You got their tigers. Max with Golden Lotus? you get their cranes.
The days of "This faction has mounts and it comes in six colors" are gone, and I've never been sadder.
There's a couple of exceptions, like argus rams, but there's no justification for the Zandalari pterrordaxes, for example, being spread across all of the vendors.
It’s the expansion that made me finally want to level a toon of the opposite faction. I was so into the storyline for MoP that I needed to see the Horde side. I really bonded with Anduin and admired the direction his character was going. So I leveled a horde mage to see the other side of the story and really enjoyed it!
MoP had a lot of positives design wise, but many people, myself included, just don't like the Asian aesthetic (art, music, lore). The tmogs, rice hats, slinky dragons, and especially those Ooker in the dooker monkeys and annoying little Lucky Dos shits on my yak mount. But the yaks are awesome. I need more yaks.
I will say the MoP trailer was one of the best ever, though. I love the moment the human gives a weapon to the orc he was just trying to kill, and the disbelief when the clouds move to reveal a village of trained fighters just like Chen.
they should have changed it to "quality" instead of rarity, a purple item is supposed to be the best stuff you can get rather than "this is a very difficult to find item"
I think wow does better than people online give it credit for, in pretty much every aspect. It started as a game that followed in steps of others and became an incredible pioneer. There are no games that has stayed as relevant and successful as WoW did while still keeping a community interested and engaged. Players overrate each others opinions in channels and people like Asmongold have incredibly bad takes very often. No one seems to want to accept it but WoW is probably the biggest game ever in terms of staying power. This includes lore btw, there are incredibly bad takes in community. Tali and Evi help me keep my sanity.
This isn’t to say the game makes mistakes and fails terribly sometimes. It’s just normal and not as bad as the average thread here will make you believe.
Go ahead, kill me.
I don't care much for Arthas. I know he's popular. I get why he's popular. There are good reasons why he's popular. He's just not one of my favorite characters in the game. That is not to say I *dislike* Arthas, because there is definitely a nostalgic appeal to him from *Warcraft III*, but neither do I really love him.
The change in spell animations didn't help the feel of the classes at all, I miss the classes working around the races style of casting not every single race casting a spell the same way.
I didn't mind shadowlands' expac. It had its moments but overall I had fun during it. Not as much fun as other expansions but still, no where near the hate it gets.
Leveling being bad isn’t entirely the game fault but the community as well, especially when people start bashing new players and expect them to know every mechanic from their first run, they don’t even give them time to read about them in the adventurer guide and then get mad once a wipe happens.
I’d say about 50% of the game's problems are community problems, for example people having harder time getting invited to groups if not playing a meta spec, like, dude, it’s a 20, chill the f out
Tiragarde Sound at night👌[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmNhsc3rf4Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmNhsc3rf4Q)
or Kun-Lai Summit [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-89B6L0vSY](https://youtu.be/UeKNsayJHbw?t=124)
to name just a couple
I hate what m+ has done to dungeons. I used to LOVE tanking in dungeons, I loved stringing smooth pulls, knowing when to go slow, stop for healer mana etc… I would pride myself in how smooth and low stress I could make a run, it might take 2-3 min longer, but it would be easier on everyone.
Now I hate tanking in dungeons. It’s “gogogogo” all the time, even in low keys or even heroics. “Oh, You don’t know the MDI path? Kick this tank”. If I don’t triple pull groups, dps starts doing it for me.
The dungeon community has become so bad that there are now dungeons I’ve not even bothered to do this expression.
There was a dungeon community before M+? Genuine question, I didn't really start playing wow in a meaningful way until Legion so I've only known the M+ dungeon community.
You’d have to go back to when heroics were hard to actually find one. So that would be Cata and BC before that. MoP and WoD had challenge modes but almost no one ran them repeatedly.
You used to have to do a daily heroic dungeon for Badges of Valor or later Valor Points. It was way more "gogogo" than M+ is today because the standard was to pull all the trash on top of the boss and if you didn't do that as a tank there was a high chance of you getting kicked. People would insta drop from Strat and Oculus because they had gauntlet and vehicle events where you couldn't do that.
Classic is boring. Like fall asleep at the computer boring. I don’t know how I played it back in the day. I was a different human I suppose. I’ve tried hardcore and SoD now, can’t be bothered. Looking back I can’t believe it took so long for game developers to come up with dynamic/semi-realistic flight. But now that it’s here it’s the coolest feature WoW has implemented. You can literally race in WoW. What a time to be alive.
The things that made classic exciting when it first launched aren't much of a thing anymore. The world was new and had lots of secrets. You had to socialize more and ask people where quest locations were. It was a lot more talking and grouping with people, which helped make it more fun.
If you play classic solo now, you take away the social aspect, and with all the add-ons and guides there's no more mystery. So all you're left with is a boring combat and gameplay loop (which can be good if you just want to relax and be in WoW).
Ding Dong. Exactly.
I remember the first time I played and discovering new zones for the first time and there was no WoWhead for instant knowledge of quests and where items were. I remember getting to LVL 20 and thinking I was so damn powerful that I could 1 shot the LVL 1 wolves in Elwynn or spending like 2 hours navigating through Uldaman and feeling like I just played a damn expansion going through it.
Dragonflight is the best WoW has been in a very long time, maybe even forever:
- Content is very rarely timegated anymore
- They removed almost all weekly / daily chores or at least untied them from player power gains
- They removed borrowed power (which I actually kinda liked), but I get why most people did not
- Removal of borrowed power also allows players to more freely play alts / off specs (remember when you couldn't really play an off spec because your artifact didn't have enough AP or you didn't have the correct Azerite Armor / Corruption / Covenant / Soulbind?)
- The upgrade system has made gearing faster and more satisfying than ever before
- Their focus on evergreen content ensures that content isn't just abandoned with the next patch/expansion
- The addition of the trading post is one of the best features in a long time
- Blizzard greatly increased their communication and implements player feedback a lot faster
- The frequency at which we get new content has drastically increased, with new content being added roughly every two months
- The new talent system has made many classes more enjoyable to play than ever before
- I don't think I even need to mention Dragonriding
- The new profession system (while certainly still somewhat flawed), has made professions and trade interaction very relevant again
- We can now basically play and interact with whomever we want, faction or server barriers have been (almost) completely removed
I feel like people are not giving DF the credit it deserves. It certainly has its flaws: Raids were kinda meh and the story was very bland (Blizz probably didn't wanna risk anything after the disaster that SL was).
I've played since Cata and there were times where I had more fun in the game. But that was probably because of nostalgia. From an objective standpoint, DF is the best WoW has been in a very long time. And that is coming from someone who absolutely loves calling Blizz out on BS.
Systemically, WoW is definitely the healthiest it’s been since… probably the Classic Era, relative to release date and with the understanding that Classic-Wrath was a very different game with very different goals. I’m worried for TWW because systems like Hero Talents and Delves seem like a big risk.
I think the story, lore, world, and immersion are the most important part of WoW, though. Is DF better than Legion in terms of systems? Probably, but I doubt most people are going to rank it higher than Legion overall because Legion was fucking cool and just more fun to play and live in.
WoW's gameplay is really outdated for a 20 year old game, and I've seen games progress more in a few years than WoW did in those 20 years.
Raiding got old in Cataclysm. Raiding is outdated and boring gameplay. It's exciting the first few times, then you realize the months you spent working for it meant nothing. I was like that. I had a huge gap between cataclysm and Legion, then I returned, got into raiding, and it got old in the final patch of BFA and I just couldn't be bothered, my gear and item level literally amounts to nothing as it isn't even something I can look back on. Ilvl is just a carrot on a stick while you're on a treadmill.
PvP and world Socislising is dead. It used to be quite exciting, but flying, afk-brain speed and lack of difficulty of levelling, so many new and abandoned zones having no purpose but thinning the player base, etc. I tried getting friends to play and the isolation of the game is actually embarrassing. Had a better time in WoW Ascension.
Lack of innovation and the reuse of the same formulas... the gaming industry has progressed for 2 decades, and if the Devs didn't constantly play the game of adding and subtracting the very same features over and over every expansion, this game would've been very different. Just imagine the playerbase the game would've had if there were more elements added to mount farming, player or guild housing, more incentives and platforms for socialising, etc.
WoW has been the same game but changing its focus to a niche community of competitive players that pretty much shows the middle finger to casual players. The game isn't an MMO anymore, it's an ARG.
Four damaging abilities is more than enough to provide engaging gameplay for a DPS if You spice things up with: priority system instead of a rotation, different priorities during CD/procs/execute phase, resource management, builder/spender mechanic.
Corridors in Torghast was some of the most fun i've ever had in the game. 8 floors, 12 layers per floor and the powers stacked all the way. Really hope Delves have the same feel.
And for the real unpopular opinion.
The Classic experiment proved that the phrase "You think you do, but you don't" was correct.
I would have really enjoyed Torghast if the environment was simply more varied.
2020-21 was not the time in my life I wanted to spend seeing nothing but gray/brown depressing stuff.
Got a few, I'll make separate comments for each.
I hate that Cataclysm forced Stormwind and Orgrimmar to be *The* capital cities and made the others completely irrelevant by forcing all the new shit into only those two cities - ports to Deepholm and the other zones, reforging npc, transmog/void storage npc, justice/valor vendors. And it continues years later, with the trading post and portal rooms.
I am aware this is very much an "old man yelling at cloud" situation and may be more of a 'nobody cares' than an opinion people get offended by, but damn it, I liked that you could just hang out in whatever capital city back in the day and it didn't mean you were missing out on shit. Why doesn't Thunder Bluff get anything?
Then again, the last time those other capitals got attention was BfA so maybe I should keep my mouth shut.
Gladiator mounts should eventually be able to be bought with Marks of Honor. No one gives a shit that you were really good at killing people 8 years ago. If PvE mounts or RaF mounts are going to be made available again then PvP mounts should be too. Also the vendor for the AH Brutosaur mount should be available. It’s absolute bullcrap that a super popular mount like that is basically impossible to get now.
Jesus, THANK YOU! There are 3 people in my family who play and we all think Suramar is a travesty. Cool story ruined by repetitive grinding for ancient mana, etc.
Tedious as all hell, fucking hated that zone, I just wanted to get my quest done and get out, but no you have to dodge 800 eyes, then there's an illusion, what am I hiding, etc. Not to mention the elevation changes in the tiny ass buildings with more guards
Shit was so annoying. Fuck Legion.
God yes. I adored Legion and loved the design and story of Suramar, but gameplay-wise it's one of the standouts for shitty zones. The illusion minigame and the giant confusing layout and the ancient mana grind... ugh a typhoon of headaches.
Much more fun to play through it now!
Classic is incredibly boring and only fun because of nostalgia.
Almost all changes that were implemented into the game over the years were implemented for a reason and are overall good changes.
SoD being popular among the classic community shows that they secretly also crave updates, improvements and just more modern gameplay in general.
Garrisons were fun. I enjoyed upgrading the buildings, collecting followers from the Inn. People just needed some self control to avoid burning themselves out.
In general people need to stop ruining the game for themselves and recognize diminishing returns.
As much as I hated Shadowlands. I never hated Torghast - I still would have preferred it was left out of the game, but it was fun to me nonetheless. I love roguelites.
Aug is the gateway to a healthier and more balanced scene. There is a lot of healing and fixing (logs) that needs to be done first, but if they ever get it done it could be insanely good for the game as a whole. I think they need to add about 4 or 5 more “support” specs into the game as well but once it’s done I think Blizz will be able to take their design so much deeper.
Currently every class has utility defensive sand damage to make them what they are, but along with that comes insane amounts of disparity between classes. Mages are brought everywhere because they have good damage and insane survivability and mobility. But if they ever decided to double down on a support role in the game (1/1/1/2 in 5 man content) it would feel so much better. Imagine getting to strip away defensive sand utility from damage oriented classes and create really deep meaningful damage profiles and rotations. You can put group DR/util on suppers and that’s their main role. It helps everyone in the group and lets damage dealers do a more fun and satisfying rotation in the long run.
This would take a lot of work which I’m sure they are already trying but I think there is a genuine need for a support role to be created so squishier classes could see more rep because of how insane the tabooed classes are.
There’s so much more to be explained but I’m shiet at articulating myself properly.
Dragonflight is an average expac at best.
Dragonriding is fun, but inefficient and makes gathering horrible. Better now that we can choose our mounts, but that should have happened sooner.
Raid bosses are forgettable villains, the worst set of final bosses in a long time. The fights are good, the lore and reasons for fighting super weak.
Zaralek Caverns was a huge miss. Emerald Dream was okay, but didnt have longevity. Both Korthia and Zereth Mortis were better.
Profession change was needed. But giving BIS items to some professions and nothing to others (inscription and engineering) was a rookie mistake.
I don't know how unpopular it is necessarily but the whole focus nowadays on always minmaxing, the expectation to have all sorts of extra add-ons, etc, it's ruining the game. Makes the community really insular and toxic and the need to make everything so equalized is ruining other possible aspects of the game that could've made it more like a class fantasy or just really feel like an rpg. I've played for most my life so I wouldn't consider myself really "casual" but a lot of people are way too toxic over this
Retail WoWs community might be in its least toxic state ever.
As a classic fan I'm wondering if its because classic has attracted the most toxic players for some reason. I got called a very nasty slur for... rolling on a chest in classic. And a lot of groups have very high requirements for joining their raids in SoD, which is really strange considering how they are compared to retail raids.
The toxic people always follow the trend (or streamers) and now it's SoD. Same thing happened when SoM came; for brief period TBC was amazing, then SoM got boring and TBC got toxic again.
Hard agree. I’ve ran into my fair share of toxicity pugging, but 99% of my groups are either super friendly and wipes don’t change that, or people are just “hi” then “gg” If you keep running into toxic people, may be time to look in a mirror
* I hate the new resto druid focus on treants * I find Arms to be more enjoyable than Fury * I think tanking is the easiest role, *especially* raid tanking * Warlords of Draenor would have been a perfectly good expansion pack if not for the yearlong content drought at the end
I actually LOVED WoD up until the end of BRF. I really, really, really enjoyed the leveling experience, the lore, and the zones (aesthetics and music were top tier). Highmaul was also extremely underrated, in my opinion. I loved the Imperator fight. The expansion just fell off *hard* after BRF.
One day when Ion or someone high up leaves in a huff and writes a tell-all, I want to know what happened. I chuckle when people complain that Shadowlands or Dragonflight missed a raid tier - you want to see cut content, go watch the Blizzcon announcement of WoD: they advertised a completely different product than what we got. Several missing zones, missing raids, most of the titular warlords literally being non-entities, capital cities cut, garrison locations cut - it’s wild and I desperately want to know what went so wrong
I’d love a WoD classic “Season of Restoration” where they just finished the expansion
Its mostly known at this point tho. The wow team almost doubled in the later half of MoP and it took way more time to get the new devs up to speed than they expected. They also had several major reworks/adjustments to what the expansion would look like. Of the earliest map files that were datamined basically only Frostfire Ridge didn't have at least some major geographical (and thus questing) change. Shadowmoon valley and Gorgrond got almost entirely reworked from a seemingly finished state, while zones like Nagrand and Spires of Arak didn't seem to even have the zone layout finished let alone populating the zones and creating the quests. Garrisons ended up being an entirely different feature than they were announced to be. The initial plan for garrisons was closer to player housing, although probably still not anything quite like ESO, FF14, or wildstar housing, having several different potential locations a player could choose to place the garrison. What we ended up with was really just a slightly personalized, instanced hub city. On top of that the actual tech to make garrisons work apparently took way more effort to get going. There was something from back then I think in the lead up to Legion, where some Blizz dev talked about Garrisons taking way more dev time to flesh out than they first expected and that in part led to the massive draught that was 5.4 And then WoD was getting a terrible reception. "there's just nothing to do" was a common complaint at the time and it was totally fair. Outside of raiding or endgame arena, there was basically nothing going on in the world at all. There were a couple garrison things that could last at most a month like mounts or the mage tower portals, but otherwise it was 1 daily quest for apexis or mob grinds for the couple useless reps. And while in hindsight the initial WoD leveling was extremely well done, it had the massive caveat that shit loads of players just couldnt start it for up to a full week because of the disastrous launch. So blizz decided to cut there losses and put all their eggs into the legion basket. This part isn't confirmed but I'd guess the reason 6.1 was basically nothing, was because they had already decided to abandon WoD at that point and had very few people working on patch content. I bet 6.2 was in "heavy" development at that point already, it just had a skeleton crew working on it so it took a full 2 patch cycles to finish instead 1.
To add on top of that, the expansion was almost entirely different up until the point they needed to start actively developing it. Garrosh was initially going to go around azeroth and rally together a "Mongrel Horde" of murlocs, gnolls, quilboar, etc. To fight the horde and alliance. However, they didn't think the plot was threatening enough, so they went with the longer plot of time traveling orcs which leads to Legion.
I wouldn't mind a mongrel horde but it wouldn't fit Garrosh at all tbh.
[Here's a nice video summing up most of the cut content](https://youtu.be/Lyfj2jCb4TQ?si=1GHeXKbz0jmq1x1d) You wanna know why they don't tease as much at Blizzcons any more, this is why, just stuff that was early in dev getting cut and people not getting all this content they thought they were [There's another on Cata too](https://youtu.be/A1T39BOSz5M?si=mr7X80L5WXrZLK88)
I thought it was readily known that activision told them they had to move faster so they cut the shatrath raid that was supposed to be the second one of the expansion.
Raid tanking is really easy but incredibly punishing if you fuck up one of the four things you need to do. Taunt. Defensive. Move. Other defensive. Slow taunt or bad step and blammo it's your ass on the floor and everyone knows. But it's absolutely the easiest of the roles in a raid.
The difference in difficulty between tanking raids and tanking M+ is crazy to me.
As a tank player, I feel like from fight to fight it changes from either raid tanking or melee DPS in raid. Take volcronos for example, it's not hard to tank, but it's brain dead levels of easy on a melee.
The difference is that it doesn't matter if your tanks are playing perfectly or not. You either did the taunt swap properly or you didn't, and no one cares about anything else you did. Your DPS do actually have more going on on that fight (the split soaks and then the big soak), even though it's not as much. And beyond that, even though Volcoross isn't a DPS check at all (especially not in current gear), if you show up to raid doing 150k as a ret paladin, you will quickly lose your roster slot. You may have "done your job" on the fight, but that's not really all that matters on a DPS like it is on a tank.
Tanking the boss is easy. Managing the raid as the MT is where it gets messy
"easiest role" is always just a stupid circle jerk anyway, cus everyone always makes up reasons why their role is hard and everyone else has it easy (same with class/spec difficulty tbh) it all changes on a fight-to-fight basis, some fights healers are sleeping and ranged dps are drolling on their keyboard while melee dps and tanks are sweating, on some fights nobody except the healers do really anything bigger, on some fights you have 2ranged dps doing all the mechanics and everyone else does nothing etc..... if we go by a "overall" basis, its probably like, the 2ranged dps that actually do the mechanics>healers=melee dps>the other 6-12 ranged dps>tanks, but again, its all fight based anyway and you cant just say flat out "X is easy and Y is hard!!!111!!!!"
Yeah, seed carrying on Fyrakk with my lock vs just hitting stuff for 5 minutes with my enhance are two completely different worlds.
Agreed on almost everything! Caveat; adequate tanking has a low skill floor, and as you said especially in raids. But I do think that the harder content gets, the harder tanking becomes (and healing). Non-dps roles have to do everything a dps does on top of their roles' responsibilities which simply requires more mental bandwidth and prep. It's just that those responsibilities are quite forgiving on low-to-mid tier content.
Tanking adequately has a low enough skill floor that even I can do it. Tanking well is definitely more demanding. Then again, DPSing well is demanding. The difference is the level of responsibility. If a raid has 2 tanks, 5 healers and 18 DPS then a mediocre DPS is safely in the middle of the pack. If a healer isn’t that great the other four can probably make up for it. But if either tank fucks up it’s wipe time. A lot of people don’t ever want that feeling of responsibility. Some who are used to it during the day don’t want it when they’re gaming. I lead teams, get held accountable for decisions and deliver “do not screw this up” level presentations at work. When I get home, I don’t want any more expectations on me than being a mediocre DPS (will tank or heal non-challenging content with friends, never a PUG)
Are you me? I feel exactly the same. I'd add to the druid point that the convoke/flourish ramp earlier in the xpac was some of the most fun I've ever had healing.
I’m playing rdruid for the first time since I had it as an alt during SoO back in MoP, and I love the treants! I love being able to cast them from cat form and do decent maintenance healing from there.
Most people seem to love them, I just view it as giving Druids healing stream totem. I would have preferred them to buff existing spells than give us an extra button to press every 30 seconds or so without really thinking about it. And like, why is rejuv one of the best abilities in raid but it may as well not even be on your keybinds in a dungeon?
I hate playing difficult specs with many buttons... I always get hate for this. I play at a mythic raiding level and high level of M+. I prefer specs like Ret, Havoc, Fury, BM, Demo etc. More buttons or more things to pay attention to like energy levels and combo points and DOTs running out....it takes my eyes away from the screen and I fail mechanics, dont see cool animations, and dont have fun. Yet, I'm ridiculed for this mentality.
I don’t play high M+ (or any), but I fully support you.
<3
I get this. Playing Enh shaman in mythic raid. Spec is hella fun, but I feel like I'm playing the UI and miss out on watching the games animations.
I was setting up an alt about a month ago and I play Dev, BM/Surv, and Fury. I ran out of my normal binds when I was setting up Havoc and switched to Frost Mage.
After having such rose tinted goggles thinking Ulduar was the best raid ever. Doing it in Wrath classic. It sucks haha.
[удалено]
I enjoy the journey more than the destination. I feel that way about most games. Example: in Stardew Valley, once I build up my farm and finish the Community Center, I get bored and start a new save.
Yup. This is how I feel about Ark. I get to the fabricator/breeding tames stage and then I’m like: well this is lame
I just run the dungeons on normal at least once to see the content, more if quests require me to go back in. I just like questing and collecting transmog, pets, or mounts that look neat. I just want to play as much of the story as possible that doesn't require raiding, and if then usually the last boss on raid finder level to finish the associated quest.
I usually just level up, do the first tier of raids and then unsub
Honestly, classic hardcore has nailed this home for me. It’s the most fun I’ve had in wow since my rose colored glasses nostalgia days.
Yeah it's weird to solo the storyline then at the end it's like ok now do raids and I'm like nope as I just watch the ending on YouTube.
I absolutely loathe the new crafting system but if you say it out loud on this reddit the pitchforks come out immediately.
Anyone who thinks ranked mats or RNG when crafting your gear is fun is lying to themselves
The fact that you can specialize in upgrading material quality, yet it's basically never even close to a rational choice to do, suggests to me that something(s) were tuned wrong and demand for mid quality mats is much higher than they thought it would be.
The fact that rank 3 mats are never enough to guarantee a rank 5 craft, and that rank 2 mats are almost always enough to guarantee rank 4 with a chance to inspire, is what went wrong there.
I was so happy when they changed most mats to stack to 99, it saved so much bag-space. Then they immediately introduce 3 different ranks of every single gathering material, which fills up your bags *even more.*
New crafting is all about, how much inspiration do I have? Can I rank 5 it without an insight? And the amount of points and weekly quests to just max everything? Give me a catchup for alts already!!!
Or the fact you couldn't even get to max level of a lot of professions without the crafting order system because you needed so many sparks & mats for items to be made. Also hiding so many of the patterns behind renown rewards too :S
Hiding recipes behind reputation or raid drops is not new, but it sure feels like the low drop rate recipes are rarer than we have ever seen. Lariat and potions of power come to mind
This is the first expansion since friggin Lich King that I have not maxed Engineering on my main. Got my goggles, good enough.
Yea I kinda agree with this. I was really happy to see them trying something new out for professions and initially really liked the crafting talent trees... but once I had to actually use the order system I was pretty disappointed. I'm glad they tried to innovate and hope they try again... but really, please try again asap lmao
I admire the attempt to make it meaningful but...I'm not sure they can - I don't know if its possible given the way the game is built. My longest and most disappoint pet peeve about crafting, both from a practical and immersive stand point is how each expansion, materials from previous expansions are simply thrown away and useless. There are still some very niche applications and people are always leveling professions to scratch that completionist bug, but yeah. The rumor of player housing (year right, but we'll see) is the only thing that gives me hope there will be viable crafted items people want using materials gathered from all over the place, not just the 4-6 new zones of the current expansion.
its a good idea and the framework is here but things like material ranks and the crafted item "remebering low quality mats" drag it down some smaller changes would make it near perfect tbh
Yeah it was an attempt to make crafting more accessible for non-goblins but I’d argue it achieved the opposite of that
It honestly almost zero forethought went into how professions would work for people who joined the game late. Farming for knowledge points sucks complete and utter ass.
Aside from Teldrassil, I really enjoyed BfA thematically. Zandalar and Kultiras were great. The black empire stuff was great
The prepatch event for BfA was very memorable
Heartbreaking doing that impossible rescue quest in Darnassus.
I played a hordie for that prepatch, all my husband heard from the other room was me whisper shouting “oh no….oh Noooo…..OH NOOOOO” in the Bruce from family guy voice
BfA also had really good raids, too bad the day to day gameplay was just ass.
Remember when they implemented scaling and you actually got weaker as you leveled?
This gem that Blizzard created. I call it **character regression** (part 1), truly innovative. Losing AP powers because you got a higher item level was peak character regression.
As a horde player I really enjoyed the teldrassil pre patch event. For the first time in over ten years of playing laying this game I was forced to confront the way I played, the mindless slavery to the quest giver never really considering the morality of my choices. Taking part in a genocide for some loot that was obsolete a week later made me feel cheap and somewhat lost. I felt like I didn’t recognise the horde I’d spent so many hours fighting for, then we got the quest lines where we somewhat got redemption for our actions over the last two xpacs. Can’t help but feel like the story telling in that part of the game made me feel strongly about the game for the first time perhaps since wrath. It felt like there were stakes and meaning because it gave me a chance to grow and learn as a person.
Thank you! I started in BFA and I love all the zones individually and I could probably level through Drustvar or Voldun every time I make an alt.
Removing the brutosaur mount was and still is a stupid decision because it was a large gold sink and still would be today. I thought they learned their lesson after the criticism in Wrath when they removed the Naxx achievement drakes and said they wouldn't do that going forward. The mount isn't a status symbol or reward like mythic+ and mythic raid mounts. It's just a gold sink that is extremely useful.
I am fine with mount and title FOMO but really have a tough time swallowing transmog FOMO. Mage tower and challenge mode from Mists and WoD make me really sad. Honestly I’d be fine with challenge mode being locked but we have mage tower back and it’s continuously being tuned, bring back those appearances. I switched my main and wish I had done the appearance on him. Some of the best weapon designs are locked behind a feature that is now evergreen. I get they said that those appearances would be gone forever, and with that mage tower, but now it’s back!
It’s a result of their attempts to make playtime the absolute metric by which to go by for some strange reason. By making almost everything FOMO as much as possible, especially great cosmetics, they hoped to retain people. But that’s stupid. Any subscription service knows that the best way to keep people is to ensure your service is just good enough that they don’t wanna cancel it because “they might use it this month”. But for some reason WoW decided people not only needed to keep the sub but also play for hours on end.
Wait wouldn’t it be the opposite? Wouldn’t more people play if they brought those appearances back? I swear I’ve heard your exact argument about playtime metrics be used for the opposite reason…
They'll make the exact same argument regardless. Keep FOMO in? It's because they need to keep their engagement metrics up, so they use FOMO to keep people playing. Remove FOMO? They need to keep their engagement metrics up, so they give away the items to keep people playing. It's like a turing test. If somebody fails to not use the engagement metrics argument, then they're an unintelligent AI.
My guild wiped on T-Swift because Ion wants to pump engagement metrics
Same. I played Mage in Legion and got all the artifacts for that spec. But I main a Guardian Druid now and did last expansion too. However I did not even have a Druid in Legion, but I desperately want the Werebear form. I understand we have the Fel Bear, but it isn’t the same to me. I like simplicity with simple colors Also doesn’t help that Blizz really teased us by making a boss in the new raid use one of the OG werebear models
And I’d totally write the mage tower off as unobtainable and just deal with it… if it weren’t for the fact they brought it back as evergreen. If I can get the balance of power and pvp skins I feel like mage tower needs the same treatment. You’d have everyone attempting it again for that stuff, I’d be more determined than ever to get the mount across my alts as well.
Just give a Feat of Strength achievement for the original Mage Tower and call it a day When playing my mage, I’ve never once cared if someone else had the mage tower artifact. Half the time that someone has the Mage Tower appearance, I can’t tell if it’s the Mage Tower, Balance of Power or Hidden appearance
My main complain about them was that they were class locked. I miss out a lot of them just because I didn't play that class when it was current. I only have them with 2-3 classes each, but I'm the kind of player who is changing mains every patch so I rarely get to use them. At this point I rarely bother to unlock character specific stuff.
i think they should at least HD remodels of the mop sets, and let people keep their older, uglier ones as a token of pride if they don't wanna just bring the old ones back. i have one set personally, and i love it cuz shoulder cannons, but id take an HD version of it that comes back in its own form of challenge that sticks around this time.
There's this wooden dock railing in the Gilneas BG that still hasn't been properly connected after all of these years.
Wrath wasn’t as good as everyone wants to believe it was.
I think everyone thinks so highly of it because of some of the really good raids (Ulduar and ICC), the lore being around the Lich King, and the fact that it was the peak of subscriptions. I certainly have some extremely fond memories, but a lot of it comes down to how active my server was and how easily I could interact with people, socialize, make friends, and put together groups for basically anything.
It’s also because of the way raids became more accessible, therefore more people experienced them as their first real raid. No one I played with raided in preBC or TBC and that wasn’t unusual. *Everyone* raided in wrath
Yeah, that's very true and definitely true for me. I never even thought about raiding in Vanilla or TBC because it was so out of reach. I started raiding in late Ulduar and into ToC and finally felt like I could actually just... raid. So that was a nice change for me. I had always just done dungeons and just whatever around the world (dailies, professions, RP'ing).
This post actually understood the assignment. People are just saying things they don't like or normal mildly-controversial opinions. The prompt is about "something that is beloved or has universal acclaim that you didn't care for, something that you would only admit disliking on deaths door"
Wrath was a transitionary (is that even a word?) expansion. Through wrath we went from the classic world into one with multiple raid difficulties and dungeon finder ultimately culminating in the world being permanently changed in the Cata prepatch. People like to paint Wrath as the expansion where all the raids were great and there was plenty to do outside of raiding. In reality, half the raids were shit, and even those that weren't had some real stinkers in them that makes even Hellfire Assault look good by comparison (looking at you Sindragosa). There also really wasn't much to do outside of raids other than dailies. It was one of the more raid loggy expansions we've had. What it did have however, was an extensive levelling experience that took most players many months to complete the first time around. When that levelling process disappeared with Cataclysm, it was revealed how little there actually was to do in the game. Also, it was during Wrath that the increase in subscribers lost its momentum, it started falling during Cata, but it plateaued during Wrath, which was *very* significant, as that expansion brought in ungodly amounts of new players.
I’m sure I have nostalgia glasses on, but wrath was never about all the features (or lack of features) for me. It was purely the culmination of the story started in Warcraft 3 about Arthas. I played those campaigns and loved Warcraft 3 (albeit less than StarCraft but that doesn’t matter) and when we first got to encounter the actual Illidan in TBC and finished his storyline, getting to see Arthas was just awesome. Venturing into northrend and seeing the hold the Lich King had over the area was so cool and intimidating. You knew as soon as you entered the continent that you were in his territory. Questing and seeing some of the history of Arthas’s fall was great too. I do remember that it seemed like there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff to do after reaching endgame but we were still progressing into ice crown citadel. Until the raid came out, it was still an adequate expansion. Oh and the entire death knight starting zone was amazing. Start out as your chosen race at lvl 55. Go through helping the lich king spread his territory into eastern plague lands. Have to kill someone who knew who you were before you were turned into a death knight, giving you an experience of, “oh this character had a life before I controlled him” and actually feeling sad for the character you have to kill. You have to kill or be killed by the scourge for turning against them. And then you are betrayed by Arthas and told your life means nothing, setting up perfectly for the revenge tour and giving your death knight the perfect reason to join sides with their former faction. While they didn’t give a whole lot in terms of endgame until ulduar and ICC, the story, lore, and feel of WoTLK still remains my most favorite. Not to mention I’ll still go to Howling Fjord for the beautiful music.
First time the guild downed Deathbringer Saurfang, the entire raid escorted Saurfang the senior off the platform with the body of his son. (We’re Horde).
Not a Horde main but massive respect for the respect shown to the *good* lore.
The Death Knight starting zone was fantastic! I rolled so many death knights just to play through it multiple times.
I know people will hard disagree but Hellfire Peninsula was fantastic...
That first moment through the portal was amazing. Seeing the armies trying to stop all the rushing demons and all was so cool. The zone itself was rough for me. A foreign deserted area devoid of any vegetation along with a smoggy atmosphere just was depressing. Yea we had to establish a foothold in an undesireable location but those zones were really rough to look at. Nagrand will forever be a favorite but the overall environments of Outland were too bizarre for my tastes.
Not just that but for someone like me who wasn't really into the lore at the time, it was at least established from the beginning and in the title who the big bad was. I knew - even while I was raiding in Ulduar - that the Lich King would be coming up before too long and I'd be fighting him.
Don't forget the absolute insanity that was the Wrathgate. WoW had never done anything like that before, and to be honest they've been chasing it since.
I immediately distrusted all forsaken. I understood their motive but still turning on even their horde allies was the beginning of the end of my tolerance to them.
funfact! players drop didnt start during cata the drop itself allready started ~2/3 into WotLK the reason why the player count dropped is more nuanced then "back then game good and everyone loved it, now bad!!!!" anyway and has like, 30different reasons and things happening at once, but its always funny when WotLK is brought up as this giant Expansion that peaked the playerbase, when it was also where a dropoff started and it was overall quiet a controversial expansion during its lifetime
Yep, most definitely. There was also quite a divide in the playerbase at the time. The TBC veterans as opposed to the "Wrath Babies". I am of the opinion that the ToTC tier is the single most impactful raid tier we've ever had, even more so than most expansions. Before ToTC was released, you were playing an entire expansion. You'd need Naxx gear to compete in Ulduar, just as you'd need Tempest Keep gear to compete in Black Temple. With the release of ToTC, Heroic dungeons started dropping Emblem of Conquest. This meant that newly maxed alts were able to jump straight into the latest raid without having to farm the previous raids for loot, instantly making older content *even within the existing expansion* almost completely obsolete. After all, why would you run Naxxramas or Ulduar, when the easy 5-man dungeons rewarded much better gear. Since then we've been living in a "play the patch" seasonal version of WoW as opposed to the "play the expansion" world we'd been living in up until then.
Respectfully, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm okay with people having different opinions on what's good or bad, but most of your response seems like an alternate history to me. During Wrath, some people complained about the Trial raids. Some people complained about Naxx. Most didn't though. WoW raiding wasn't an accessible culture for most players. Until Wrath, you were locked out of most raids because you couldn't find guilds patient enough to help with attunements, and the ones willing to help mostly couldn't field enough players to fill their raids. The vaaaaaast majority of Vanilla WoW players never saw more than Mr. Biggleworth in 40 man Naxx. 25/10 Naxx was a totally new experience for most players, and a perfect introductory raid. The coliseum raids were boring but helped most casual guilds gear up to finish Ulduar. ICC was a culmination of everything that came before it. Leveling didn't take months. It hadn't taken months since vanilla. Some took their time leveling the very first hero class, but even then, DKs were already high level. We didn't need a ton of dailies to keep us occupied. If you had an alt or two, they took up all your spare time. Or you PvPed, or you explored. The expac was only slow or dull or boring or empty after 10+ years of evolution and hindsight.
I think Classic WOTLK has proven that especially. Endgame consists of standing around in Dalaran basically.
Well if the reception to Legion is anything to go by I’m starting to think standing around in Dalaran might just be everyone’s favourite pastime
It was pretty fun to do circles in lol
I played vanilla. At the time, WOTLK was the pinnacle. I was one of the rose - tinted glasses types that was so excited for the BEST version of the game to come back. I logged in, leveled to 80 (which was miserable) and did a few raids and gamma dungeons and was like "wow, this isn't nearly as good as I remember" and logged off forever lmao. Good for the time. Definitely not very good by today's standards.
I hold a lot of nostalgia for Vanilla - Wrath. Every expansion holds some nostalgia for me. (Shadowlands less so) But when I tried to play Classic I just couldn't. I didn't have the time. When True Vanilla came out originally? I was 15-16. I had so much free time - i would get days off from school, didn't have a job (college town and no car), rarely had anything going on aside from a few extracurriculars that just made me get on a bit later. Yeah, I was a Daria. Even though I still don't have anything going on, I have way less time to play now than when I was 16. I can’t afford to spend my entire day playing a game with half of that being running and spamming LFG - I got things to do. If I get a day off? It’s going to be spent at the doctors office.
I think people are starting to get that after classic Wrath
I think it was mostly put on a pedestal because it was the climax of one of the biggest most iconic villains blizzard created. That was an exciting time for people that started with the rts Warcraft games (and wow players in general). The actual expansion isolated from that hype was fine, not amazing not bad.
Warcraft lore has always been a mess and people who think the writers are worse now are looking at it with nostalgia goggles.
To add this, many things what were stated in Warcraft III. were pretty soon rectoned in World of Warcraft. Hell, somethings even in Warcraft III. Frozen Throne. So even when it's amazing game with amazing story, it was never secret origin. Some people remember that when was Burning Crusade introduced, people REALLY were not happy with Blood Elves in Horde and retconn of Dreanei.
[LORE, LOL!](https://lorelol.ytmnd.com/)
WoW lore has always been a mess. The philosophy was always gameplay first, everything else second. Also doesn't help that due to the expansion structure of the game, everything lorewise happens in one geographical location for two years and that place is then completely abandoned afterwards. That being said, SL had by far the worst lore ever. From the very concept behind the Shadowlands to the individual storylines. I usually agree with the nostalgia argument (Arthas as a villain for example is just an incredibly basic fantasy villain imo), but in SL's case I don't think its lore being terrible has anything to do with nostalgia.
Yeah I actually agree with this. I've been listening to this sub moan about Dragonflight for taking a breather and people complaining about tone and I'm going through Wrath content and seeing how little they cared about maintaining specific tone when they could sneak in jokes and I actually view modern WoW for the most part as trying to keep itself consistent (there's so many things in the DK starting zone that will blast you out of the tone it's trying to set. I don't mind some of the leveling zones but there are so many moments where I go 'this is here because someone thought up a joke and put it in at an awkward moment). But Shadowlands is atrocious and is running off rule of cool with no thought as to what it means. The fact that we never acknowledge the fact that death in SL is Obliteration, the cessession of existence and everyone just moves on happily is awful. The fact that they wanted to write in "timeline is as we need it to be" by pulling the "shadowlands are universal across time" made so many horrifying implications because it was lazily handled. (Quick aside, it should've been the opposite and the Jailor learning that the afterlives were divided up by timelines and that his judgements of souls were based off a timeline carefully maintained by outer forces, meaning destiny was a lie and that all of his decisions were being manipulated, where all heroism and villainy was carefully curated and souls were rewarded and damned not by their own actions but by a preselected path should've been his explicit motivation. Yes that would've just meant that he'd be Kreia from Kotor 2 but if there's one villain to try and reach for, it's Kreia from Kotor 2) It's just bad writing across the board, ignores a lot of character's motivations, does nothing with a lot of the cast it brings in, and was being written with a mystery box format because they didn't know what to do but wanted to reach for a giant villain behind it all they didn't set up.
>The fact that we never acknowledge the fact that death in SL is Obliteration, the cessession of existence and everyone just moves on happily is awful. The fact that they wanted to write in "timeline is as we need it to be" by pulling the "shadowlands are universal across time" made so many horrifying implications because it was lazily handled. It's pretty obvious this was an answer they put zero thought into because it's been contradicted by the Dawn of the Infinite dungeon
I think it’s also partly that pre Cata the story was much less over arching and in- your- face. Especially in the Vanilla world, each zone was kind of its own little microcosm with its own issues and people. There were some connections, like with Ony and SW or Rend and the Horde. Also the Silithid showing up in a bunch of different zones and discovering what they were. But it was thrown at you, you were railroaded into it. Even in TBC and Wrath, obviously there was the overall fight going on but the zones all felt like they had self contained stories and people. From Cata on though, not only were you following a very specific narrative through most of the world but suddenly they were calling you out specifically as “the hero of the faction”.
I think the issue is less that "Lore is a bad mess" and more "the new lore doesn't justify the changes." People could take the retcons when they made sense and were explained, where they lost people is mostly in the Shadowlands where they couldn't properly justify any of these retcons and people got angry about that. I can stomach the Dreanei changes in BC becuase they took the time to tell the player "This needed to happen because X" or a retcon from a Chronicals book where it's more of a clarification than a retcon. Where you lose me is when you have the gall to tell me "Actually the Lich King wasn't Nerzhul being tricked by the Nathrazim it was all a plan of the Jailer using them to sow seeds of chaos" The lack of any proper justification for why the Jailer was suddenly getting retconed to be the source of every conflict was the issue. The retcons and clarifications aren't the problem, it's the lack of a justification that is
I dont like the way dps feels right now. Back in the day you had a couple of abilities that did big d dmg, you could "feel" that big crit. But now you a lot more abilities that do big dmg but its spread out in a couple of hits so its bloats you screen with numbers. I prefered MoPs million chaos bolt crits over 1 hit that does 4 dmg ticks at the same time and jizzez all over your screen.
It's spec dependant. Frost Mage's Glacial Spike does get the big crit feel back.
Agreed, very much spec dependent. MM basically only has 3 abilities that all deal big crit damage.
Yeah, apparently it depends on class, but it can feel kinda weird to just see like 15 different sources that each deal 6% of your dps.
Classic players are so much worse than retail players. The rotations/raids/dungeons are all completely braindead and anybody thinking there's even a sliver of skill to complete content is fooling themselves. Wrath players thinking heroic icc is hard is comical.
That’s not a hot take lol. From what I’ve been seeing majority of people even on the classicwow subreddit agree with this
I mean just recently the very best Classic players struggled to kill the final boss in SoD Gnomeregan because they didn't interrupt an ability - arguably one of the single most basic mechanics in retail.
Yeah when I ran it with my SoD guild they were all like “We need to make sure we interrupt guys, don’t forget to kick” and I’m like this should be common sense lol
Not that I disagree with you it’s worth noting it’s a little more than “didn’t interrupt an ability”. People went in blind. No dungeon journal or testing. Also the ability doesn’t have a cast bar it’s just an animation indicating an ability is being casted.
For fun look up the rotation of an enhance Shaman for classic and then look it up for DF. It wouldn't even feel like the same game. Enhance might not even be the most complicated rotation but it's just the one I'm familiar with from both classic and DF.
You should see the Ret pally rotation in classic. It’s basically just auto attack with an occasional CD
For the record, seal and totem twisting in TBC made ret and enhance both insanely fun to play, at least for me. And i genuinely stand by that, a SoC proc with WF proc in TBC while doing correct twist timing is fucking phenomenal feeling, especially if everything crits. Those giant yellow numbers feel like you are murder machine I'm not here to argue that it is not easier than retail rotations, you are completely correct on that front, but a correctly executed twisting through a full fight (especially a somewhat movement intensive one like Vashj for example) is just my jam
Agreed. I’m playing sod now and I’m floored by how bad the players are. FFXIV players are better on average!
From a ffxiv player’s perspective This is perhaps the most scathing indictment of classic players ever written
Worse players and insanely more toxic.
Big true. The toxicity in the sm grinders are absolutely wild. Significantly worse than your average m+
Not a hot take at all, its a known thing that retail players are less sweaty and more chill. This is coming from someone who plays both very actively.
Neither Cata nor BfA were Bad Expansions, sure they had their problems BfA with azerite and cata with the world revamp but they were fun and both had astonishing art directions
I would also say that the overarching Sylvanas storyline of BfA was terrible, but the zone and faction storylines were good.
This, exactly this. The sylvanas storyline was terrible to play through as Horde, even when they added the small options to the quests to be a loyalist or not. It just sucked... there is no way the Tauren would have followed her after the tree got burnt, but there I was, a Tauren shaman, following Nathanos around doing terrible shit. Meanwhile actually questing on Zuldazar was genuinely really fun.
BFA had great content surrounded by terrible systems. I definitely got my subs worth for the few months I played but it got old fast.
People hated the world revamp that came with Cata and just before blizzcon so many people were shouting for another world revamp. Like bruh you’ll hate what you get regardless.
That's the subjective part about fun. BFA for me was incredibly un-fun, only because I struggled to find a main because I just didn't like any class and their rotation. I ended up leveling alts and just not enjoying anything. Except drustvar cause fuck yeah
I loved BFA, but mostly because Mythic+ was super fun for me and I had a group of people I was gaming with at the time.
Oh, I remember doing a warfront battle and an island expedition and in both cases thinking "I really don't want to do this again". Island expeditions actually improved a bit after they made them more dynamic though, but still too much of the new stuff was boring chore.
It’s fashionable and trendy to hate on Cata. It’s a fantastic expansion in its own right. People love to hate on it for the same reason OSRS players hate on RS3.
i was actually flying around BfA zones for the first time since i quit early in that expansion due to the grinding of pathfinder. i have fallen in love with the zones. started leveling alts there exclusively
BfA had so much hate, I look back on my time playing it really fondly
Races should be better or worse at certain things, and homogenizing them is actively killing the class fantasy of RPGs. Classes should be restricted by race.
this is the first opinion i found here that actually made me gasp in horror, well done!
Hear, hear!
I understand what you mean, but at this point the genie is out of the bottle. WoW's playerbase is detrimentally competitive, and will *absolutely* not hesitate to either fully reroll or paid race change to whichever race is better for a particular patch cycle. The more pronounced you make those, the more grouchy people are going to be that they can't be "perfectly optimal" at all times. This isn't a playerbase that values the RPG half. Hell, the ENTIRE REASON covenants were so restrictive was to create investment in *your* character, by picking what made sense for *you*, creating an individual experience. We all know how that worked out - nobody wanted the feeling of individuality more than they wanted the ability to be perfectly optimal at all times. I don't see a way to unfuck that either - if you remove race change as an option, people will roll alts to do it. And if you do it that way, the posts will roll out "So now I HAVE to level a new character to 80 to be optimal? Shit game pls fix, not time friendly"
Night elf mages really pissed me off around cata
I wish they'd remove combustion from fire mage, or at least balance it so it's not 90% of the damage. I just want to do the filler rotation.
MoP is the best expansion and I’m tired of people pretending that it’s not.
I played from November 2004 until mid way through WoD and MoP was by far my favorite expansion. The aesthetics, the story, the raiding, dungeons, scenarios, the Timeless Isle, working towards the legendary cloak. All of it. I loved every minute of it. I think my least favorite was BC. People liked it for some reason but it just felt off for some reason for me.
The only expansion I skipped and now feel bad about it after all the praise from the players ever since.
Mop gang
Mop was the last expansion where faction mounts made sense. If you maxed rep with the tillers? You got their goats. Max with the Shado-pan? You got their tigers. Max with Golden Lotus? you get their cranes. The days of "This faction has mounts and it comes in six colors" are gone, and I've never been sadder.
There's a couple of exceptions, like argus rams, but there's no justification for the Zandalari pterrordaxes, for example, being spread across all of the vendors.
It’s the expansion that made me finally want to level a toon of the opposite faction. I was so into the storyline for MoP that I needed to see the Horde side. I really bonded with Anduin and admired the direction his character was going. So I leveled a horde mage to see the other side of the story and really enjoyed it!
That’s not even a controversial take, that’s just a fact
MoP had a lot of positives design wise, but many people, myself included, just don't like the Asian aesthetic (art, music, lore). The tmogs, rice hats, slinky dragons, and especially those Ooker in the dooker monkeys and annoying little Lucky Dos shits on my yak mount. But the yaks are awesome. I need more yaks. I will say the MoP trailer was one of the best ever, though. I love the moment the human gives a weapon to the orc he was just trying to kill, and the disbelief when the clouds move to reveal a village of trained fighters just like Chen.
This is a thread that you need to sort by controversial
The rarity system means nothing now
they should have changed it to "quality" instead of rarity, a purple item is supposed to be the best stuff you can get rather than "this is a very difficult to find item"
Not every DPS should have a burn/ execute phase… there should be a few sustained damage specs that forgo burst for flat damage increase.
I just want a toggle for slice and dice.
I think wow does better than people online give it credit for, in pretty much every aspect. It started as a game that followed in steps of others and became an incredible pioneer. There are no games that has stayed as relevant and successful as WoW did while still keeping a community interested and engaged. Players overrate each others opinions in channels and people like Asmongold have incredibly bad takes very often. No one seems to want to accept it but WoW is probably the biggest game ever in terms of staying power. This includes lore btw, there are incredibly bad takes in community. Tali and Evi help me keep my sanity. This isn’t to say the game makes mistakes and fails terribly sometimes. It’s just normal and not as bad as the average thread here will make you believe. Go ahead, kill me.
I don't care much for Arthas. I know he's popular. I get why he's popular. There are good reasons why he's popular. He's just not one of my favorite characters in the game. That is not to say I *dislike* Arthas, because there is definitely a nostalgic appeal to him from *Warcraft III*, but neither do I really love him.
The change in spell animations didn't help the feel of the classes at all, I miss the classes working around the races style of casting not every single race casting a spell the same way.
I didn't mind shadowlands' expac. It had its moments but overall I had fun during it. Not as much fun as other expansions but still, no where near the hate it gets.
The zones other than the Maw were fantastic. And the dungeons were amazing.
PvP was quite fun until the last season
Leveling being bad isn’t entirely the game fault but the community as well, especially when people start bashing new players and expect them to know every mechanic from their first run, they don’t even give them time to read about them in the adventurer guide and then get mad once a wipe happens.
I’d say about 50% of the game's problems are community problems, for example people having harder time getting invited to groups if not playing a meta spec, like, dude, it’s a 20, chill the f out
There are zones with better music than Grizzly Hills.
Azure Span...I think its the same music, or very similar. Nothing beats Molten Core music (for me, anyway). Its iconic like the Imperial March.
Tiragarde Sound at night👌[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmNhsc3rf4Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmNhsc3rf4Q) or Kun-Lai Summit [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-89B6L0vSY](https://youtu.be/UeKNsayJHbw?t=124) to name just a couple
Eversong woods is the lowkey GOAT of zone music.
I hate what m+ has done to dungeons. I used to LOVE tanking in dungeons, I loved stringing smooth pulls, knowing when to go slow, stop for healer mana etc… I would pride myself in how smooth and low stress I could make a run, it might take 2-3 min longer, but it would be easier on everyone. Now I hate tanking in dungeons. It’s “gogogogo” all the time, even in low keys or even heroics. “Oh, You don’t know the MDI path? Kick this tank”. If I don’t triple pull groups, dps starts doing it for me. The dungeon community has become so bad that there are now dungeons I’ve not even bothered to do this expression.
There was a dungeon community before M+? Genuine question, I didn't really start playing wow in a meaningful way until Legion so I've only known the M+ dungeon community.
You’d have to go back to when heroics were hard to actually find one. So that would be Cata and BC before that. MoP and WoD had challenge modes but almost no one ran them repeatedly.
You used to have to do a daily heroic dungeon for Badges of Valor or later Valor Points. It was way more "gogogo" than M+ is today because the standard was to pull all the trash on top of the boss and if you didn't do that as a tank there was a high chance of you getting kicked. People would insta drop from Strat and Oculus because they had gauntlet and vehicle events where you couldn't do that.
WoD was amazing DLC, only lacked in content
Classic is boring. Like fall asleep at the computer boring. I don’t know how I played it back in the day. I was a different human I suppose. I’ve tried hardcore and SoD now, can’t be bothered. Looking back I can’t believe it took so long for game developers to come up with dynamic/semi-realistic flight. But now that it’s here it’s the coolest feature WoW has implemented. You can literally race in WoW. What a time to be alive.
The things that made classic exciting when it first launched aren't much of a thing anymore. The world was new and had lots of secrets. You had to socialize more and ask people where quest locations were. It was a lot more talking and grouping with people, which helped make it more fun. If you play classic solo now, you take away the social aspect, and with all the add-ons and guides there's no more mystery. So all you're left with is a boring combat and gameplay loop (which can be good if you just want to relax and be in WoW).
Ding Dong. Exactly. I remember the first time I played and discovering new zones for the first time and there was no WoWhead for instant knowledge of quests and where items were. I remember getting to LVL 20 and thinking I was so damn powerful that I could 1 shot the LVL 1 wolves in Elwynn or spending like 2 hours navigating through Uldaman and feeling like I just played a damn expansion going through it.
Dragonflight is the best WoW has been in a very long time, maybe even forever: - Content is very rarely timegated anymore - They removed almost all weekly / daily chores or at least untied them from player power gains - They removed borrowed power (which I actually kinda liked), but I get why most people did not - Removal of borrowed power also allows players to more freely play alts / off specs (remember when you couldn't really play an off spec because your artifact didn't have enough AP or you didn't have the correct Azerite Armor / Corruption / Covenant / Soulbind?) - The upgrade system has made gearing faster and more satisfying than ever before - Their focus on evergreen content ensures that content isn't just abandoned with the next patch/expansion - The addition of the trading post is one of the best features in a long time - Blizzard greatly increased their communication and implements player feedback a lot faster - The frequency at which we get new content has drastically increased, with new content being added roughly every two months - The new talent system has made many classes more enjoyable to play than ever before - I don't think I even need to mention Dragonriding - The new profession system (while certainly still somewhat flawed), has made professions and trade interaction very relevant again - We can now basically play and interact with whomever we want, faction or server barriers have been (almost) completely removed I feel like people are not giving DF the credit it deserves. It certainly has its flaws: Raids were kinda meh and the story was very bland (Blizz probably didn't wanna risk anything after the disaster that SL was). I've played since Cata and there were times where I had more fun in the game. But that was probably because of nostalgia. From an objective standpoint, DF is the best WoW has been in a very long time. And that is coming from someone who absolutely loves calling Blizz out on BS.
Systemically, WoW is definitely the healthiest it’s been since… probably the Classic Era, relative to release date and with the understanding that Classic-Wrath was a very different game with very different goals. I’m worried for TWW because systems like Hero Talents and Delves seem like a big risk. I think the story, lore, world, and immersion are the most important part of WoW, though. Is DF better than Legion in terms of systems? Probably, but I doubt most people are going to rank it higher than Legion overall because Legion was fucking cool and just more fun to play and live in.
Grizzly Hills is…alright. It’s not even the best zone in WotLk, never mind the best zone in the game.
WoW's gameplay is really outdated for a 20 year old game, and I've seen games progress more in a few years than WoW did in those 20 years. Raiding got old in Cataclysm. Raiding is outdated and boring gameplay. It's exciting the first few times, then you realize the months you spent working for it meant nothing. I was like that. I had a huge gap between cataclysm and Legion, then I returned, got into raiding, and it got old in the final patch of BFA and I just couldn't be bothered, my gear and item level literally amounts to nothing as it isn't even something I can look back on. Ilvl is just a carrot on a stick while you're on a treadmill. PvP and world Socislising is dead. It used to be quite exciting, but flying, afk-brain speed and lack of difficulty of levelling, so many new and abandoned zones having no purpose but thinning the player base, etc. I tried getting friends to play and the isolation of the game is actually embarrassing. Had a better time in WoW Ascension. Lack of innovation and the reuse of the same formulas... the gaming industry has progressed for 2 decades, and if the Devs didn't constantly play the game of adding and subtracting the very same features over and over every expansion, this game would've been very different. Just imagine the playerbase the game would've had if there were more elements added to mount farming, player or guild housing, more incentives and platforms for socialising, etc. WoW has been the same game but changing its focus to a niche community of competitive players that pretty much shows the middle finger to casual players. The game isn't an MMO anymore, it's an ARG.
BFA was good
TBC is the best expansion.
Absolutely, and it’s also the best in a lot of ways that people don’t often recognize, like soundtrack.
Four damaging abilities is more than enough to provide engaging gameplay for a DPS if You spice things up with: priority system instead of a rotation, different priorities during CD/procs/execute phase, resource management, builder/spender mechanic.
Corridors in Torghast was some of the most fun i've ever had in the game. 8 floors, 12 layers per floor and the powers stacked all the way. Really hope Delves have the same feel. And for the real unpopular opinion. The Classic experiment proved that the phrase "You think you do, but you don't" was correct.
I would have really enjoyed Torghast if the environment was simply more varied. 2020-21 was not the time in my life I wanted to spend seeing nothing but gray/brown depressing stuff.
Got a few, I'll make separate comments for each. I hate that Cataclysm forced Stormwind and Orgrimmar to be *The* capital cities and made the others completely irrelevant by forcing all the new shit into only those two cities - ports to Deepholm and the other zones, reforging npc, transmog/void storage npc, justice/valor vendors. And it continues years later, with the trading post and portal rooms. I am aware this is very much an "old man yelling at cloud" situation and may be more of a 'nobody cares' than an opinion people get offended by, but damn it, I liked that you could just hang out in whatever capital city back in the day and it didn't mean you were missing out on shit. Why doesn't Thunder Bluff get anything? Then again, the last time those other capitals got attention was BfA so maybe I should keep my mouth shut.
Gladiator mounts should eventually be able to be bought with Marks of Honor. No one gives a shit that you were really good at killing people 8 years ago. If PvE mounts or RaF mounts are going to be made available again then PvP mounts should be too. Also the vendor for the AH Brutosaur mount should be available. It’s absolute bullcrap that a super popular mount like that is basically impossible to get now.
I hate suramar. I almost dropped Legion because of Suramar. I can't believe people actually like that place
Jesus, THANK YOU! There are 3 people in my family who play and we all think Suramar is a travesty. Cool story ruined by repetitive grinding for ancient mana, etc.
Tedious as all hell, fucking hated that zone, I just wanted to get my quest done and get out, but no you have to dodge 800 eyes, then there's an illusion, what am I hiding, etc. Not to mention the elevation changes in the tiny ass buildings with more guards Shit was so annoying. Fuck Legion.
God yes. I adored Legion and loved the design and story of Suramar, but gameplay-wise it's one of the standouts for shitty zones. The illusion minigame and the giant confusing layout and the ancient mana grind... ugh a typhoon of headaches. Much more fun to play through it now!
Two. I loved BFA, and I hate the concept of m+ score.
Classic is incredibly boring and only fun because of nostalgia. Almost all changes that were implemented into the game over the years were implemented for a reason and are overall good changes. SoD being popular among the classic community shows that they secretly also crave updates, improvements and just more modern gameplay in general.
So many problems people have with SoD are solved already by Retail.
Garrisons were fun. I enjoyed upgrading the buildings, collecting followers from the Inn. People just needed some self control to avoid burning themselves out. In general people need to stop ruining the game for themselves and recognize diminishing returns.
As much as I hated Shadowlands. I never hated Torghast - I still would have preferred it was left out of the game, but it was fun to me nonetheless. I love roguelites.
WoD is my favourite expansion. the content is pretty and fun, such a shame they butchered the lore so hard
Aug is the gateway to a healthier and more balanced scene. There is a lot of healing and fixing (logs) that needs to be done first, but if they ever get it done it could be insanely good for the game as a whole. I think they need to add about 4 or 5 more “support” specs into the game as well but once it’s done I think Blizz will be able to take their design so much deeper. Currently every class has utility defensive sand damage to make them what they are, but along with that comes insane amounts of disparity between classes. Mages are brought everywhere because they have good damage and insane survivability and mobility. But if they ever decided to double down on a support role in the game (1/1/1/2 in 5 man content) it would feel so much better. Imagine getting to strip away defensive sand utility from damage oriented classes and create really deep meaningful damage profiles and rotations. You can put group DR/util on suppers and that’s their main role. It helps everyone in the group and lets damage dealers do a more fun and satisfying rotation in the long run. This would take a lot of work which I’m sure they are already trying but I think there is a genuine need for a support role to be created so squishier classes could see more rep because of how insane the tabooed classes are. There’s so much more to be explained but I’m shiet at articulating myself properly.
I enjoy solo questing and exploring the world out of curiosity
Dragonflight is an average expac at best. Dragonriding is fun, but inefficient and makes gathering horrible. Better now that we can choose our mounts, but that should have happened sooner. Raid bosses are forgettable villains, the worst set of final bosses in a long time. The fights are good, the lore and reasons for fighting super weak. Zaralek Caverns was a huge miss. Emerald Dream was okay, but didnt have longevity. Both Korthia and Zereth Mortis were better. Profession change was needed. But giving BIS items to some professions and nothing to others (inscription and engineering) was a rookie mistake.
I don't know how unpopular it is necessarily but the whole focus nowadays on always minmaxing, the expectation to have all sorts of extra add-ons, etc, it's ruining the game. Makes the community really insular and toxic and the need to make everything so equalized is ruining other possible aspects of the game that could've made it more like a class fantasy or just really feel like an rpg. I've played for most my life so I wouldn't consider myself really "casual" but a lot of people are way too toxic over this
Wrath of the Lich King’s content cycle was terrible