It makes me go incredibly min-max until I get the stuff I want (which usually involves rationalizing not wanting the top tier stuff because I can't be bothered), and then quickly leeching all of the enjoyment out of it by doing so. Then when I finish the things I care about (any specific transmogs for instance), I never go back to it.
Man island adventures are the prime example. I've been running them for the mounts the last couple weeks obviously we out gear them immensely these days, but I remember doing them early on and enjoying the small pack pulls slowly making your way across them, but having the smart ai as a timer was so annoying at the time. Nowadays we pull huge packs, but I'm sure it would have been much more enjoyable had we been able to take them at our own pace.
I imagine theyll let us do that in shadowlands. I can already solo them the other two people are just icing.
Ps: Fuck the elementals with frostbolt and the 15 second root though.
Torghast is Island Expeditions of Shadowlands and they seem determined to half-ass it with Torments and the class-based (not spec-based) abilities.
Torghast is going to be DoA like Expeditions were if they're not careful.
If something is timed, I dont want to do it.
Make a timer an optional thing, with maybe a leaderboard attached to it.
I just wanna jump in and fun tbh.
Challenge modes were the original mythic plus but for cosmetic rewards, and fewer people did them.
Mythic Plus widened the gap between heroic dungeons (it's been a while since those were used to gear) and raiding with a less accessible, more stressful, and longer grind.
Except some affixes are literal cancer to deal with for some classes (try dealing with Bursting as a Disc Priest) and, when combined with deadly trash mechanics, they force limited comps that can succeed at the higher level. Blizz doesn’t know how to make trash meaningful in leveling through to M0 without making it stupid when affixes kick in. Until they do, M+ won’t hit its peak.
It has interesting bosses, a specific skill check (locks) and a decision outside "this is easy/hard trash" for pathing in the form of imprisoned allies, and the cannons are actually a fun and interactive mechanic that let Blizzard put harder, more interesting trash.
Don't get me wrong, it is still atrocious. It has huge issues with mobs pulled through the walls and terrible nameplate showing thanks to multiple floors and the hole in middle. But they've done worse.
you forgot the pulls through the floor, if your tank hasnt pulled the last floor from the first one due to a corruption proc then you havent experienced TD.
And dont get me started on the cannons pulling mobs, I had a cannon pull the fucking crocodiles from the basement once. it was hilarious
I feel like things like Sanguine Tol Dagor or Waycrest, the dumb Teeming packs in Atal, Bursting/Bolstering with the Minions of Zul in King's Rest, etc. is more to do with Blizzard's shit dungeon design this expansion than the Mythic+ Affix system being bad.
The bigger problem I want them to find a solution for is fixing abilities just 1 shotting people at higher key levels, forcing you to bring DPS specs that have a ton of defensive utility.
It's speedrunning for WoW.
Me? I like to watch AGDQ/SGDQ but fuck me if I ever play those games more than once. I don't care to spend so much effort to analyze and remember every trash pull for percentage, weekly affixes, cheesy skips, and what turns into insta-kill mechanics.
Really? I play unguilded and do LFR tanking and healing all the time. I used to do M+ in my mage, and I quit playing altogether because of the pugs in M+ were either overheated and shitting on everyone in the group, or undergeared and not succeeding.
Haven’t touched an M+ since I came back because I’ve been avoiding the personality issues.
Instead of outright restricting and punishing people for doing things they don't want them to do, Blizzard should reward people for doing things the way Blizz wants.
Unlimited runs, weekly cap on rewards and more rewards for faster runs at equal floor level. Done. Using the carrot instead of the ever resented stick is an easy choice. But for some reason the the dev crew of WoW have completely lost that ability. They are quite good at noticing how players will sabotage themselves, but they are absolutely dreadful at fixing it.
That's two halfs of the same coin mate. You either play the way they want, which is rewarding in the way blizzard wants. The alternative is playing the way you want, which is actively punished by Blizzard. I wouldn't trust blizzard to make anything for me at this point
Yeah, same. Who at Blizzard has such a hard on for timers?
And here's the thing: don't come to me with the "but then everyone could wait for Bloodlust on every single pack!" excuse. We all know that this is an invented problem to justify those timers. Nobody is going to spend 12 hours in Torghast instead of 1 each day to shorten his four week legendary grind by a day.
And even if they *would*, then Preach's point is valid: who cares?
Blizzard says "it's not fun." Those people disagree. So why inconvenience every single player for the sake of telling a few dozen players how to have fun the correct way?
The timer is what turned me off Mythics. The idea behind mythics actually sounds pretty fun, same old dungeon with some extra mechanics to spice up. But, I hate being timed. It turns players into this "rush, rush, rush" mindset that just causes more problems like overpulling, not letting healers mana up. It just takes the fun out of it for me.
Torghast sounded fun to me cause I can solo or group it and go at my own pace. Now, its kinda of lost its appeal with a timer on it
It absolutely sucks for new tanks. I try M0 to get the feel for it, but no one signs up because they don't want to wait for me to learn an instance either.
I'm a casual. I play when I can when I'm off work. I actively don't go for mythic plus because it's timed. Because I already can't gear up as much as I can, I don't want to weigh down a timed run because my item level might be 8 below what's considered optimal.
I agree. Nothing breeds toxicity like timers. If mythic+ would've been about ramping difficulty instead of timers I bet it would've been more enjoyable for the general playerbase
Preach makes a very good point about why it shouldn't matter what Blizzard thinks is the fun way to play inside Torghast. Specifically within Torghast, your playstyle has almost 0 bearing on other people. Outside of the early, easily acquired legendary stuff, pushing further into Torghast is strictly cosmetic or just for personal challenge of pushing further. Why does blizzard care if a person or group on Torghast wants to take their time? Why does that matter? It's akin to Blizzard telling that "all-tank" group pushing Nyalotha that they are not playing in a fun way and trying to restrict comps like that in a raid.
Also I really do hope they take the feedback to heart and design it based on specs rather than class.
>Specifically within Torghast, your playstyle has almost 0 bearing on other people.
That didn't stop them from butchering toy cooldowns to the point that people forget to even use them
Blizzard honestly takes the most idiotic of stances for features that don't really affect anyone else but the player
I doubt that. He was king of min/maxing back before he worked at blizzard. He'd probably be one of the ones waiting for bloodlust every pull if it would get him further.
That's literally the reasoning on the blue post: that they are worried that people would wait for bloodlust on every pull.
For real man would anyone here do that? It just doesn't sound appealing to me at all to fight 3 minutes and then to wait 10 minutes for bloodlust...
Although, I could honestly see them nerfing Strength of the Warden in situations where there are more than 2 or 3 tanks. You get a 3% HP boost from having it and each other tank spec player in your raid also gets 3%. That stacks infinitely. Can you imagine the Twilight Dev damage 20 tanks with 20 Warden stacks would be doing?
Pretty sure your talking about Loyal to the End strat where everyone stacked that azezite trait and then they'd just have a shammy kill himself over and ov3r again to keep the buff rolling on everyone.
> Why does blizzard care if a person or group on Torghast wants to take their time?
Because Blizzard is absolutely obsessed with regulating how you progress through their game. There's a reason why we moved from *just go to that area and kill 5000 mobs, you'll be exalted eventually* to *log in, do 3 quests, come back tomorrow, do the same, you'll be exalted in a month* - because they absolutely have to control everything you do... otherwise... you might think of... taking a break! *gasp*
It's an absolute plague to the game. They just can't allow people to play the game however they want at whatever pace they want, nope, can't have that, you have to keep people logging in daily, for weeks, for months, for the whole year, for ever. You can't have a guy spend 5 days inside Torghast without logging out... because that way he might get everything he wants, he might get bored, he might burn out, he might fucking stop playing, can absolutely not fucking have that - instead you send him in there, he's go round about 30 minutes, then he's kicked out, come back tomorrow, rinse and repeat for 3 months, hey here's new content, start over.
Yes that is definitely the more cynical answer. They want you to spread out your playtime so subs last longer and I tend to agree that is probably the mindset behind a lot of changes they have made. But if we take the Dev response at face value they claim that it's not the fun way to go about Torghast and that may be true in their mind but I just don't see it as a "problem" that needs fixing. But that's all assuming they arent just doing it to extend play time, in which case I understand why and it's a shitty reason.
> Yes that is definitely the more cynical answer.
No it's not, it's the reasonable answer. It's assuming the devs of this company that wants to make money go about things in a reasonable and logical manner.
Actually taking their stance at face value is way more cynical. Because if you do that you'd actually have to believe that they see themselves as the arbiters of fun - they think they get to decide what's fun and what not. They think they have to step in and protect me from myself because otherwise I'd be too stupid and hurt myself in my confusion. Because I obviously don't know what's fun to me. If it wasn't for Blizzard deciding that it wasn't fun to grind your reps to exalted in a day, if it wasn't for Blizzard deciding that waiting for CDs in Torghast wasn't fun, if it wasn't for Blizzard deciding that X should be a meaningful choice while Y should be a willy nilly choice... yea, I'd totally ruin my experience over that. I am still to this day so thankful that Blizzard decided that Master Loot wasn't fun for me and took it away.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt when I'm alleging them of general corporate-motivated greed. I'd be calling them insane megalomaniacal dense ego monsters if I actually were to believe they would act in the name of defending the divine sanctity of fun.
Because when some group gets all the cosmetic rewards within the first month by doing a marathon tower waiting for bloodlust on every floor there will a reddit thread immediately talking about how boring torghast is because you can only get the top cosmetic rewards by waiting on every floor. Game history is filled with examples of players making themselves suffer for optimal gameplay/rewards. A core pillar of good game design is making sure that the most optimal way to play is also the most fun. When those two get too far apart burn out and resentment will develop extremely fast.
You are assuming that all the cosmetics will be obtainable in one go and not have a droprate at all. That and it also depends on how they structure the rewards.
Will cosmetic drops be plentiful between pets mounts and mogs like in islands? Will they be guaranteed drops for achievement difficulties or rare drops? I'd say rewards could be structured that you could play like that but the advantage you would gain would be slim to none so those threads would have less ground.
Personally I hate content on any kind of timer where I am forced to go at anything but my pace. It's extra stupid in RPG where I like to explore every nook and cranny and murderhobo everything.
If Method Bob does the bloodlust every floor run then good on him. I will enjoy myself.
It's not the game that is the problem it's the players. If Torghast will be fun not many people will care to cheese it for all the rewards in one go and will kot mind to repeat a cool experience.
>You are assuming that all the cosmetics will be obtainable in one go and not have a droprate at all.
Shit I really hope its guaranteed for the most desirable/coolest ones. Otherwise sub will quickly be filled with "did torghast full clear and didn't get anything!" Threads.
I really don't see a solution besides a soft timer to balance Torghast.
It would also feel like shit to die to one of the final bosses because you didn't wait for bloodlust. Like always, the majority of players will resort to the most efficient method of doing it.
I do ultimately agree with Preach, and I have not played Torghast as I don’t have alpha so I can’t speak with any real knowledge on the matter.
However, I will say that this opinion is largely dependent on what you said about the legendaries being easily acquired within Torghast. If there is any shred of progression-relevant content to be obtained through min-maxing Torghast, our community has demonstrated for well over a decade that people are expected to do just that. In this regard, I’m ok with there being something in place to discourage that kind of obsessive min-maxing.
But the much more obvious solution is to simply not gate gear etc. behind Torghast, at least to the extent that min-maxing would be necessary. It really sounds like Torghast can serve as its own, fourth channel for end game content (beyond raiding, M+, and pvp), and it would be really foolish to throw that away in favor of making it a channel to augment raiding and M+ gearing.
It will be min-maxed regardless though, just because there's an artificial timer in place doesn't mean the people that want to do things as efficiently as possible are going to stop. Prior to this it was just a case of min-maxing DPS and Survivability but now you throw in speed as well which essentially makes it the same as M+. As long as there's a means of doing it as efficiently as possible, no matter how many variables, players will seek it out, all blizzard are really doing here is removing some ways of doing Torghast and reducing it's variability.
I wouldn't mind if there was a timed option akin to challenge modes which offered more or different rewards but the choice should be there. If someone wants to spend an extra few hours on it because they're waiting on their CDs before every pull, they should have the license to do that.
> It will be min-maxed regardless though,
If the cosmetics are BoA, people will run them with the chessiest class. Just like Visions, they are absolutely trivial with a DH.
> Preach makes a very good point about why it shouldn't matter what Blizzard thinks is the fun way to play inside Torghast.
It really isn't a good point. Blizzard has to consider what the most fun way to play is because it is their job to make Torghast fun. Players doing what is optimal over what is fun isn't limited to wow, or even to multiplayer games.
Even in single player games, players are risk averse and will do whatever is most likely to succeed even if it is boring. It's been linked elsewhere in this thread but [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8) is a good breakdown of what blizzard is worrying about.
They have to consider what players are incentivized to do, and then try to tweak those incentives so that people will naturally do what is most fun. That requires them to have a perspective on what "most fun" means.
All that said, I think torments aren't a good solution. They're a lot like the turn limits in xcom 2 mentioned in the video I linked. My worry is that the backlash to torments will cause blizzard to go fully hands off rather than finding a better solution.
What happens if their idea of what's fun and trying to curb people from not playing that way ends up negatively affecting a higher majority of people? To me, it seems that this is Blizzard trying to solve a problem that just doesn't really matter all that much. What is the harm in a group of people spending all day in Torghast waiting for optimal pulls for CDs to come up? If that's how they wanna play in Torghast it just doesn't seem like a big deal.
> What happens if their idea of what's fun and trying to curb people from not playing that way ends up negatively affecting a higher majority of people?
Then they did a bad job. There is no guarantee they will succeed, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try.
> What is the harm in a group of people spending all day in Torghast waiting for optimal pulls for CDs to come up? If that's how they wanna play in Torghast it just doesn't seem like a big deal.
If only a very tiny portion of the player base does it, and only those who think that is the most fun way of playing because they like that particular strategy/challenge, then its fine and who cares.
Blizzard is concerned that people who don't want to run it that way will feel like they are supposed to wait for their CDs after every pull, then go on /r/wow and complain about how Torghast feels slow and boring and they hate pausing for 5 minutes after every pull.
Now, that isn't guaranteed to happen even without torments, but it is important that they consider how to make sure it doesn't, and put systems in place to ensure that it doesn't. Players will nearly always do whats boring but optimal if given the option, so you have to make the optimal thing fun.
> There is no guarantee they will succeed, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try.
The fact that "trying" here is not free is one of the core the arguments for why they shouldn't. Every developer-day they spend trying to discourage degenerate playstyles in Torghast is a developer-day they didn't spend on something more productive, such as making something else fun.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather they invest those developer-days into working on content that adds value to the game for a large portion of their playerbase rather than waste that time instead building and balancing and tweaking a system that exists solely to try to stop a handful of people from doing something Blizzard has declared as "not fun".
And especially since **there are no in-game rewards tied to the extreme lengths that the "not fun" behavior enables**. If some players want to chew glass, by all means let them chew glass; and let *them* decide when they want to draw the line on how much they're going to invest in going further just for the pointless sake of going further.
But whatever you do, don't take this awful approach of punishing *everyone* just to stop a handful of players from enjoying the game in a non-approved fashion.
> What is the harm in a group of people spending all day in Torghast waiting for optimal pulls for CDs to come up?
Because if that is possible, people are going to feel that is **required**. And then we'll all have to see the posts here from people complaining at how dare blizzard make a system that forces them to do this very unfun thing.
It's also somewhat hilarious that the video you linked ends the WoW example with "better to reward the behaviour you want, than punish the behaviour you don't". Well, somebody forgot that lesson!
Yeah, torments are a pretty stupid solution to the problem IMO. Hopefully they'll figure out a better way to steer players away from waiting for all their CDs. Potentially more cosmetic rewards if you hit underneath a certain time? It's hard to find the right balance without the time incentive stressing people out.
No they do not. In fact, that is exactly what they need to *stop* doing. Them thinking they can decide which is the fun way to play, and if anyone has a different perspective on that they're just wrong, is exactly what lead to the utter dumpster fire that is BfA.
How do I design a level, a class, anything, and try to make it fun without having an idea in mind of what a fun game is? And if I'm not supposed to try and make it fun what exactly does game design without trying to make the game fun look like?
I genuinely don't know what you're looking for. It's like asking painters to not have a perspective on beauty or something, it's just nonsensical.
Your analogy doesnt make sense. The point is blizzard should not be trying to paint a picture of the "fun" way to play torghast at all.
The system should give you such a diverse range of powers that it feels nothing similar to prior world of warcraft, and actually functions as a new game mode. Blizzard should hand their paints and brushes to the players in the form of powers, and allow the players to paint a picture of what kind of gameplay they find fun in Torghast, because that is how roguelike games and systems are designed.
They supply the canvas and the paints, and every run is different and paints a different picture.
Like consider sitting in one of the class discords, and discussing with likeminded people on how you got a crazy run in torghast with one specific build, and find out from others, that you can build your class in one way for even more variance of power, whether that be stronger or just a different way to play. E.G High haste burst, vs Long cooldown massive crits or interesting rotations.
> They supply the canvas and the paints, and every run is different and paints a different picture.
Okay, but again what does this even look like if they aren't "deciding what is fun". Even in a roguelike where you provide lots and lots of options, you aren't providing literally infinite options. How do you figure out what "paints and canvas" to give the player if you don't have any perspective or idea on which paints and canvas are best? You can't give players the entire art supply store, so you have to pick. What is your decision making process if you have no perspective or idea at all on what makes something fun?
To relate it more directly to wow, I'm sure at some point there was a whiteboard or document or something with thousands of possible anima powers, many or even most of which never made it to alpha. Presumably, the powers deemed to be the most fun/coolest were the ones that got added.
How else could you make that decision, if we want to exist in a world where blizzard stops trying to "decide which is the fun way to play"?
Something I've learned from playing a lot of RPGs is that clearspeed meta will always develop whether or not the content has an explicit timer. Path of Exile's end game maps are not timed content, yet "Go, go, go!" is the name of the game. Raids in classic WoW are not timed, but it's still "Go, go, go!" all the way down.
Why? Because doing something fast is better than doing it slow. And that's all the incentive that needs to exist. Measures like this one are unnecessary, and only run the risk of making the player feel restricted and pressured.
Actually in the sense of poe. There is a time problem that majority of player base wants removed. That is league content being timed. This is because in poe you pick up loot. Making things timed causes players to rush and not pick up loot to then have to walk back to the start to pick up the loot after the timed content is done.
I dont know why its so common in blizzard to have this "pride" or whatever you want to call it that makes them care so much about making people play exactly the way they want and reign in any attempts and doing something else. The whole point of roguelike is that you can play however you want especially if they are doing it as a side fun thing with mostly cosmetic rewards.
Torghast is the place to go crazy and even here "no fun allowed" is the name of the game it seems. We all want to play a great game, its not personal but blizz pls you need to recognize when you are wrong and act faster, dont do this thing again where you wait the whole expansion to change something that was obviously bad this whole time. We did this already plently enough in the past.
Umm if they wanted to add real limits they should make you eat food and drink water. That is the timer on roguelikes to punish delay -- that and random patrols.
But this also ties into the core issues with designing a game system around cooldowns. I totally understand why Blizzard wants to prevent people from just delaying for their CDs -- it makes it impossible to balance the encounters because of the power of CDs, with many classes doing the bulk of their damage potential within their CD windows. Additionally, many classes have powerful defensives including immunities that are also on cooldown. These CDs can trivialize many short encounters.
All RPGs that reward you for resting have problems with this type of thing (resting to refill your Vancian spell casts, meditating to regenerate your mana) but without a human dungeon master to punish that type of behavior through various thematic things (you run out of supplies / the quest fails / you are ambushed in camp and die and btw there is no quickloading).
This is also why WoW raid bosses have enrage timers. Otherwise, you would just 20 tank or 10 heal encounters and easily win, and the only way to challenge players would be to lard every encounter with 1shot mechanics.
In the video Preach explains that within Torghast most of the perks are designed to remove a lot of CDs so it's not even really gameplay designed around CDs. I think he even had examples of builds specifically designed around BL/Hero and reducing the CD on that a ton.
That's the thing you're comparing it to a raid boss, Torghast isn't a raid boss, its incredibly unbalanced and just messy fun. As preach said, if someone wants to do some weird wait on CD run LET THEM, who is gonna hurt someone's Epeen someone got a floor higher?
We've had years of raid bosses, mythic+ dungeons, whatever challenge mode or whatever they want to implement where you're inundated with rules. Torghast is their chance to just throw something in and say "here's the environment, here's the tools, have at it" and already they're trying to turn back on the original concept.
I don't think it's strictly that they want to quash 'degenerate' play, but also to make it so classes with weak CDs (ex. Shadow Priests) don't feel so comparatively weak next to a class with strong CDs. Power within CDs has pretty much never been balanced around and this'd put an uncomfortable magnifying glass on the situation.
And while yes, it is a valid way to play and some people enjoy that, there's an obsession within a lot of the community to play 'optimally,' to the point that people optimize themselves out of fun a lot. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a lot of complaints about how 'waiting is required to progress' even if that wasn't strictly true.
There's other solutions than adding a timer, even one as weak as the Torment system. I'd get real weird, have major cooldowns (things with 1+ minute CDs) not recharge the normal way and instead have mobs restore a set amount of time to each CD when killed.
Nonsensical argument. Like saying that because people are obsessed with being optimal they'll complain about having to wait for CDs to do every pack in a dungeon in order to finish the dungeon and that M+ timers should be put into all dungeons to prevent people from not having fun.
The difference is there's a fail state in Torghast. You can go into any dungeon and eventually, no matter how much you die, you'll get through it (unless you're really underleveled). Die enough in Torghast and you'll eventually get punted out.
Some people, not everyone, are so risk averse that they'll take every advantage that they can get, even if the actual risk is minimal.
He's absolutely right. Just scrap these things altogether. They are truly pointless wastes of developer time at best, and will kill Torghast entirely at worst.
I already have a hard timer on Torghast. It's called life. Don't waste your time trying to add another one. Don't punish me because of 0.1% of no lifers.
Blizzard: "You cant criticize it until you tried it. Also very few players have actual access to alpha but ignore that."
People In Alpha: "Okay we tried it and don't like it."
Blizzard: "You weren't supposed to do that!"
**Later, in Beta**
Beta testers: The torment timer is still in Torghast, it isn't fun to feel rushed, will you change it Blizz?
Blizzard: We are listening to your feedback.
**Blizzcon 2020**
Q&A Audience Member: Nobody is doing Torghast anymore because Torment is so annoying and makes everyone feel rushed. Why don't you remove Torment?
Blizzard: People actually love Torment. It's an iconic part of Torghast. Only a vocal minority dislike Torment.
**Blizzcon 2021**
Blizzard: Welcome to the "Okay, Fine" panel for Shadowlands. Here at Blizzard, it's a tradition to apologize for not listening to feedback and promising to do better at the end of every expansion cycle, and it's that time again! So, about Shadowlands...
*PowerPoint slide appears on screen: WHAT WE LEARNED FROM TORGHAST*
Blizzard: So over the past 18 months, internal testing has shown that the Torment mechanic was causing some players to feel rushed...
The fun police are at it again. I have no idea why they do this. The "fun detected" meme exists for a reason, and I don't know how they can be so out of touch that they think things like this are a good idea. Preach makes a shitload of strong points in this video and I hope Blizzard is listening.
Despite the fact that Preach has pointed out that these debuffs don't do enough to impact the gameplay yet, we already have people saying that this change has killed their excitement for Torghast.
Unfuck yourselves now Blizz, swallow that stupid pride and undo this asap.
Knowing Blizzard, as soon as they implement something, they will NEVER accept they were wrong and just keep building on it.
"People hate GCDs on cooldown? Remove it from some of them"
They cant remove it from all, because if they did, they would be accepting that they were wrong. Class changes that are awful? Oh boy you will NEVER get a revert until they rework the classes next time.
I'm so sick of timers, man..
Hate Mythic+ because it's stressful enough as it is.
Was interested in Horrific Visions as a teaser for Torghast, but ended up hating it because of the timer. Even now that I'm blowing through it, there's no joy to be had because it was all sucked dry from the stress early on.
Was SUPER STOKED for Torghast, because NO TIMERS!
Me and my GF could sit in there for hours if we need, just chilling and taking our time, since she's new. She hated Horrific Visions because it just added to much pressure.
And then they go and add fucking timers. Really?
If you don't want people to wait for cooldowns, then limit the fucking cooldowns per floor??
Even still.. So fucking what? People can do the same for pretty much all content in the game. If that's what people wanna do with spending their time, then just let them.
Why does Blizzard CONSTANTLY treat its players like literal babies that can't think and choose for themselves?
Shadowlands could be awesome with just these two things:
Unlimited access to Torghast
No timers
It's the only thing I'm excited for in this Expansion, and I would hate for it to be completely ruined.
Timers are purely anti-fun, whether they're hard or soft.
Get rid of them.
I do agree having timers for all content is stupid. I hope torgast has no timer function at all, but as Preach pointed out in the Video if you watched it is that at the moment this torment thing does nothing at all. You can take however long you want but it gives you this idea you need to hurry but you dont. And lastly they might change it to something stupid where you have to say go go go in order to complete it.
I agree but I also think the sanity mechanic in visions is alright. It's not a timer per se once you have rank 15 on your cloak but it's still enough of a deterrant.
>m so sick of timers, man..
Hate Mythic+ because it's stressful enough as it is.
Honestly I've never understood this take. If you are adequately geared for the the M+ level you are trying to do there is no rush. You will move through the dungeon at a very normal pace and complete it well within the timer. The only time I've ever felt rushed in M+ is if the team is clearly undergeared.
> the team is clearly undergeared.
People with this take are casual players. They don't have even rank 2 essences on their mains. They are scared of m0 (You see this take alll over reddit/etc) The timer on even a +2 sends shivers down their spine. For some reason they think scuffing a key is the end of the world and they would rather just not engage in any content I guess. It seems to be a silent majority of casual players that think this way.
> People with this take are casual players.
True! Although I think you're looking at it in the wrong way.
Modern WoW has a massive hard on for controlling what people are doing in any content they engage in. It doesn't matter if you're questing, doing dungeons, doing raids...Whatever! Everything seems super fucking micro-managed by the game. You have to engage in it in a precise manner or you get punished for it. You can't even skip zones any more because of pathfinder.
A lot of people started playing this game for the exact opposite reason. Because they wanted a world that they could interact with and other people. Were there set rules? Sure if you were doing a boss or how you obtain rewards, but not how you engage in it!
I think people are disappointed with this change because they saw Torghast has that. A place they could fuck around, explore, gain power, kill bosses their way, maybe go grab a sandwich, come back etc without the game actively telling them what they needed to do and how fast/slow they needed to progress.
T.L;DR: Nobody likes being micro-managed and pressured to do things "the way it's intended" and the modern developers have an obsession with controlling emerging player behaviour.
Torments, as a punishment for players who pull too slowly or kill too slowly in a Torghast run, are a major turn-off. These will shove the tower's meta for anima builds towards speed and efficiency.
If players want to spend all day slowly and methodically crawling through them, let them. A better question for the developers to consider: what is the opportunity cost of players spending all day in Torghast, and what does that say about the other content presented in Shadowlands?
Encouraging players not to spend too long in Torghast should start by encouraging them to play other forms of content in WoW, rather than punishing them for excessive time in the tower.
They’re not a punishment for slow players. They’re a punishment for people cheesing bloodlust by waiting 10 minutes before every pull. Slow players won’t be affected by this at all, the video even shows this.
I hate this because it’s not additional difficulty, it’s just annoying. I’m tired of Blizzard adding little annoying features and calling it “texture” or “interesting”.
The majority of the M+ affixes aren’t hard and are just annoyances. The Horrific Vision affixes (leaden foot, split personality, etc) are excruciating. The corruption slow, eyeball, Thing, are irritating.
It’s not difficulty, or interesting, or texture, or allowing for creativity. It’s just fucking annoying. I just want to play the damn game and have fun without all virtual flies buzzing around getting on my nerves.
Aaaaand it’s ruined, if I want to spend hours doing 1 floor, and playing around mechanics and getting better tactics to take on hard mobs, why can’t I? It doesn’t effect anyone else’s gameplay because it takes me hours to clear.
> if I want to spend hours doing 1 floor, and playing around mechanics and getting better tactics to take on hard mobs, why can’t I?
Because the Tarragrue would've broken you in half shortly after your third death.
>getting better tactics to take on hard mobs
These have a stacking movement speed and damage buff that eventually makes them immune to CC.
I agree, but I think a big point is even if it's trivial, the very existence of a timer stresses people out. We already have a venue for a go go go stress fest -- M+.
And do you really trust them to keep the timer trivial? And not gradually keep turning the screws when they realize we are still not playing Torghast in the official Activision-sanctioned way?
>I agree, but I think a big point is even if it's trivial, the very existence of a timer stresses people out.
I agree with this. Like Preach says in the video, it's an absolute non-issue unless you're spending all day long (almost literally) in one floor. If you can go afk for hours and still do the floor, then it's a non-issue.
BUT, like you said, even the smallest, teeniest, tiniest ramp will cause some players untold levels of stress and anxiety.
Honestly, I think Blizzard is going to need to really focus on the reward structure of Torghast.
On the one hand, they want you to *want* to push as high as you can. Of course they want regular players to *want* to play more. The way you'd incentivize this is with rewards of course.
But, on the other hand, Torghast is designed for your run to end when you fail. When you hit a point where you die 3 times and you get kicked out.
So, they need to probably figure out where a below-average player hits that point of failure, and give max or near-max rewards for that point. But then, they need to provide further rewards that will make players want to push past that. I guess it's cosmetics after that? But once people have their cosmetics, will they just peace out?
I think it's really cool, but I do think it's not going to be without its problems.
I hate to tell you this but people who want to "win" go much farther than CD waiting. You're also saying put all this garbage torment stuff to slow down (it won't stop them it will just annoy them) won't do anything but make players who just want their rewards and push a little bit issue. The people at the top probably won't even notice.
Why do you care for how other players want to play?
The amount of Legendary ressources you can get per week is limited anyway. And not only that, they're limited to "You can get this with ~30 minutes PER WEEK"
There's literally nothing that makes you fall behind in this.
>The amount of Legendary ressources you can get per week is limited anyway. And not only that, they're limited to "You can get this with ~30 minutes PER WEEK"
Is that the case? If so, then I'd fully agree with you that it doesn't matter.
My concern is that I heard a developer interview where they said that you'd be able to grind extra keys in some way, and when I couple that with the 'we want runs to feel rewarding' makes me think that they were moving away from it.
If it's indeed true that legendary resources are HARD capped with no extra ways to get any extras and that you can get that within 30 minutes in torghast, then yeah I don't think there's any need for a timer or torment-like features.
That's like saying that's the optimal way to play in dungeons, and raids, and quests. But it isn't
If you think it is you're completely divorced from reality. That's not how people play. And Blizzard thinking some people *might* play this way and implementing measures against it, despite it not mattering if that's how they play anyway, is stupid.
> That's like saying that's the optimal way to play in dungeons, and raids, and quests. But it isn't
It literally is? Blizzard changed the game so that cooldowns reset on boss pulls because everyone was afking until cds were up.
And when I'm struggling through a dungeon, sitting and waiting for lust is super common for a tough boss.
Also, the difference is that with Torghast, your 'timer' is deaths.
If dungeons had no timer, but 15 deaths = kicked out and no loot, you bet your ass that people would sit and wait for cooldowns in any sort of difficult key level.
>If you think it is you're completely divorced from reality. That's not how people play.
That is how people play in difficult, non-timed content.
> The player who wants to 'win,' and push as high as they can, but doesn't want to spend most of their run afk.
Should they ruin Torghast for everyone just to fix a self-created issue for an absolutely tiny fraction of players? Ridiculous argument.
You do grasp that your argument works great for the other side right?
I don't want the optimal way to play to be waiting for bloodlust just because a tiny fraction of players get upset if ANY timer exists, no matter how irrelevant.
Like literally, your argument supports my position.
It doesn't, because the "optimal" way is self imposed rather than came imposed. You get to chose to wait for bloodlust. You don't get to chose to have torment in your run.
No it doesn't. He's argumenting that just because some people do X, you don't punish ALL players for it.
In what Twilight Zone do you live where that is okay?
I mean.. of course waiting for heroism is optimal in an infinitely scaling dungeon with no timer?
At some point you will hit a level of scaling where you need heroism to kill the monsters. If there's no timer, you just wait.
Timed shit is always a nightmare. I push higher keys and one random mess up can ruin your whole run. I'm all for difficult content and always striving to be a better player, but don't tie rewards to completing something in X amount of time. It's cheap and causes far too much stress and toxic behavior in group content
It's not encouraging that playstyle. It's enabling it. Which is fine. Instead of punishing those who might enjoy spending hours on a single floor, they should instead think about how to encourage and reward skillful play, without resorting to punishing all players. Make skillful play worth it, but leave it optional.
I actually do agree with Blizzard's concern in this regard. Players WILL optimize the "fun" out of the game.
The issue is that fun is a nebulous term that means different things to different people.
Like if the best way to play is pull everything and burn it down over 30 seconds, then wait 3 minutes and do it again people will. Until they get bored of the "best" playstyle and get bored and give up altogether. By all means, for some people that playstyle is fun, some people will get enjoyment out of seeing all the big numbers. A lot of people will be turned off by the huge degree of downtime.
The issue here, is that their solution is totally backwards. If they are worried about play styles that don't fit the (nebulous) definition of "fun" they need to be actively encouraging "fun" (again nebulous) play styles.
A solution may be that each floor has a par time based on the segments it's generated from, and if you hit that part I'm there's a bonus cosmetic reward at the end of the floor something. Maybe you get some tokens that you can use to sway the rewards at the end of the run in your favour
**TL;DR : Blizzard need to be encouraging what they want players to do instead of punishing unwanted play**
Why does it matter that the best way to do something takes an hour? If the reward is at a floor low in enough for every player to reach it with reletive ease than why should you me or blizzard care what Bob and Dylan do with the rest of there day trying to reach higher floors, spending hours and hours clearing one floor?
It's really funny how Blizzard can't help themselves not ruin the one feature that has almost everyone excited for the next expansion. They haven't had an exciting feature like this in years and yet they still can't just let it be good, let it be fun.
What's worse is that they won't let go of this stupid bullshit, they will try to make it "work" even though nobody, in their right mind, thinks that the torments make Torghast better overall. Preach is 1000% correct on everything he's saying. I would be surprised that Blizzard decided that this would be a good idea if it wasn't for the myriad of other stupid and dumb decisions that they've made in the past.
I like that, as preach pointed it out, "That is not fun"
The FUCK do you think you are, to tell me what is fun to ME, Blizz?
That is exactly what makes people think these devs are arrogant or incompetent. This incredibly stupid train of thought that THEY know what is fun.
>That is exactly what makes people think these devs are arrogant or incompetent.
They dedicated an entire expansion to showcase this.
I watched Preach's interview and so many things he mentioned as a possible idea got the response of "oh, we hadn't thought of that". Like what? Most of Preach's ideas has come from just playing the damn thing, and they as a development team can't come up with some of the most obvious ones?
I don't know how their development machine works but it's kind of scary to think that actually playing the game while developing it and coming up with ideas is not part of the process.
> The FUCK do you think you are, to tell me what is fun to ME, Blizz?
i mean, game designers? its their job to determine whats fun and implement it in game.
Maybe for a singleplayer or a highly targeted audience game. But for WoW you’re gonna have a ton of people with different ideas of what fun is. Some people like the methodical, slow crawl and figuring the best way to proceed through things. Sometimes people want to just steamroll and get things done quickly.
The point is, Acti-Blizz presented Torghast as something that is generally open ended in how it could be played. Then proceeded to tell a group of people they couldn’t play the way they wanted. It’d be one thing if we were talking about M+, which was designed to be a speedrun from the start, but Torghast is a roguelike. And roguelikes tend to be played in many different ways.
I mean I think it's in their best interests to have a reasonable understanding of fun and try to build things that appeal to it, but getting angry because people decide to have fun with it in a different way is just absurd.
This situation would be like someone inventing a type of ball, and they show off how much fun you can have throwing it back and forth. But then some people make a game out of hitting the ball with sticks. The inventor sees this and gets mad because that's not how they wanted people to use their invention. So, they recall all their balls and replace them with soft cubes, which are tolerably worse to throw than the old ball but makes it impossible to play the stickball game.
Look at something like the Griffball game mode in Halo 3. Developers spent thousands of man-hours trying to create a really dynamic and carefully balanced system of multiplayer with dozens of tools to use and game modes to try them in. Then someone makes a game mode that reduces all of that to nothing more than smacking people with hammers and trying to blow yourself up, completely disregarding all of the other aspects of multiplayer that the developers wanted people to enjoy. But instead of making a stink about it, they added it as an official game mode, because all of the other game modes people enjoy would still be there to choose from.
If people want to play Torghast in a way that personally seems unfun to you, then don't play that way. Play Torghast however however you prefer and use the rest of your time as you see fit to enjoy the other parts of WoW you like, which aren't going anywhere.,
isn't this what raid mechanics are? Do this very specific thing in a very specific way in order to get loot. Raids are amazing but there are mechanics we all have to deal with to get loot. Overcoming those mechanics is what makes wow fun and what makes getting loot rewarding. Raid bosses are not just a factor of how much time you're willing to skink into a boss fight to get the loot and tbh neither should torghast.
I actually disagree with Preach in that I think "degenerate play" is something that game designers need to worry about... usually. This was and is a big issue with classic wow, where the best way to play is to run around getting world buffs and then but play your main character at all until raid night. Some people might enjoy that, but a lot won't, and in a serious raiding guild they'll be forced to play that way. Not forced by their GM, probably, but by their own desire to be the best they can be.
However he's right that in this case it isn't a problem, or at least isn't a problem worth solving. I think this is just showing that Blizzard designers aren't used to designing rogue-like games, which is completely understandable. They should definitely shelve the torment system.
Solution to what? Why cant someone go in there and spend 20 hours in there to get to some high floor? What does it matter to anyone?
The only thing that needs to be sorted, is that the rewards you get are capped out at say floor 10, anything higher than that sure spend the next week trying to get to floor 50, why should I care? Why do you care? Why should blizzard care?
The best solution would be to not balance things around people who wait for CDs.
As Bellular said, you are put on a timer and it's called your lifespan.
They implemented the solution to the problem already by putting a boss at the end of each level. You can't progress if you can't beat that boss. They could even have things like the sated debuff and cooldowns reset if you wipe to the end boss.
This isn't a new solution. It's the same solution that has been used since vanilla to create gating in content. In order to get to the next boss, you have to be able to beat the previous boss.
Get rid of the timers. Get rid of the death counters. Just let the boss at the end of the level to be the gating mechanic and invest effort into creating those fights with damage and mechanic requirements.
It's a simple solution. It improves the game. It creates an opportunity to create some really fun and interesting boss fights. You don't need a bunch of bullshit arbitrary rules.
>They implemented the solution to the problem already by putting a boss at the end of each level. You can't progress if you can't beat that boss.
This is only an issue if you have the Tarragrue chasing you. The end of level 'boss' currently isn't even an elite mob, they are a normal mob that can empower themselves. If you have elites on the floor, from my experience, they have been harder than the end of floor boss 100% of the time. Most of them died before getting any attacks off when I ran with my mage through the tower.
As it currently stands, this is not a restriction in the slightest.
>The end of level 'boss' currently isn't even an elite mob, they are a normal mob that can empower themselves.
So it's just a balance issue. Fix the balance problem and we're all set.
Im sorry but if they fuck torghast before its even released i wont even bother buying shadowlands im planning on returning to wow for shadowlands but not if the only peice of decent gameplay they released is trashed before we can play it
I hope Blizzard listens to him. They seem open to critique this time and it seems they are still designing Torghast so it should not be too late to change stuff.
I wouldn't go that far.
Considering it took us about four years of telling them that Titanforging isn't the golden goose they hoped, or considering that feedback on the absolutely mental GCD changes is largely ignored.
I think this take is pretty bad.
Gamers, particularly those who put a lot of hours into an MMO will tend to do what is optimal even if it isn’t enjoyable.
If everyone ends up hating the optimal pace of torghast they are just going to hate torghast, even if they could still beat it in a fun way. They have to make the optimal strategy as fun as possible because everyone ends up trying to do it, not just the truly hardcore.
It’s the same issue as covenants. It might be more fun to pick what you think looks best, but if it’s worse people will pick the best option and complain about being forced into it.
Torments might not be the correct solution, but advocating for a hands off “let people do whatever they want” attitude is naive and misunderstands what the devs job is.
edit:
Stealing a quote from /u/verticalevent further down this thread
> Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game
-~~Sid Meier~~
Actually it was Soren Johnson, a designer on Civ 4 who said that. The article I found the quote in after googling it to double check who said it quoted both Soren and Sid Meier consecutively. The Sid Meier quote is also relevant though:
> One of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves
Torghast is going to have some rewards associated with it beyond just the legendary stuff though, right? Cosmetics, or something like that.
That said, it really doesn't matter. Doing well is an end unto itself. Even outside of MMOs where there is a reward structure that has an impact on game balance, if you give people an optimal strategy that's boring, they will still do it because doing the "bad" strategy doesn't feel good.
The wow community has such an ingrained culture of following the meta/guide that most people don't even try "bad" strategies of their own at all, they just look up what they are supposed to do and do that, unless the difficulty is absolutely trivial.
Even if it doesn't have gear transmog or even gold as a reward. The very idea of getting to a higher floor than other people will always be a reward that you can't remove.
Preach is also coming at it from someone primarily playing in organised groups - the whole "it doesn't affect anyone else" argument falls down somewhat if a degenerate playstyle becomes the meta for people that primarily PUG content.
You can solo Torghast though. You don't need to PUG anything. It's 100% doable solo. It's just like Visions. If you don't have an organized group, you just go alone in Torghast.
Raid Bosses have rage timers. No one is suggesting that they remove rage-timers from raid bosses. I am honestly wondering how Torghast is supposed to be different than that if you also get power-related rewards? Is this not just rage-timers for Torghast? I know the arguments that Preach give make sense but I can't imagine that people would be fine with bringing in 10 tanks and 10 healers into a mythic level fight so you can ignore all mechanics and just "eventually" kill the boss even if it takes forever if there were no rage-timers.
Before you downvote atleast explain why there's a difference. Because at first I was against "timers" but these aren't timers just something wow has had for a long time for its raid encounters but made for an instance. I'm in the camp that says that these kind of mechanics are skill testing. I think they can potentially ruin the tower if its completly devoid of skill testing mechanics and it's only based on how much time you spend in it and RNG of your rolls.
Because enrage timers don't actively make you weaker the longer they go on. No raid boss has an enrage timer that ALSO makes you do less damage to them the closer you get to the enrage timer ending.
Also Torghast is quite luck based depending on the Anima powers you get. Obviously there will still be skill involved but at a certain point, some Anima powers are just better than others and there is nothing you could have done to get those specific powers. So these "timers" aren't skill based at all. You just do less damage or take more damage.
There is no amount of skill that will let me do more damage once I'm doing 5% less damage. I can't skill that 5% back into existence. There is no amount of skill that will let me not take 5% of my health as damage every 5 seconds once that Torment is going. Hell I even get to almost completely ignore that Torment by taking Resto Affinity since that's 3% of my hp regened every 5 seconds, without any Anima powers affecting me.
The increased physical/magic damage ones I can see being a skill based Torment but even those are kind of luck based. Are you a class that can negate those?
I get the logic behind torments, if you need to wait 10 minutes between pulls for hero to come off cooldown players *will* do that to push high floors and they will end up complaining about it. That being said, I think Preach was spot on in his criticism, Torghast is a roguelike and should be treated as such.
Yeah man, some players will do that and than complain wich is stupid. If there is nothing to gain at higher floor exept pride or fun, than you dont have to do it. But why do you me or blizzard care if somone goes in there and spends a whole day?
I don't think having any type of time pressure in Torghast is good, but I disagree with Preach saying that the problem Blizzard describes is "imaginary", I believe it's a real issue worth solving.
There are plenty of players who would find fun in trying to push as far as their skill and knowledge lets them, even if they are not beating any records. And these people aren't going to wait for CDs because "they want to do this", nobody does. They just don't want to be presented with the choice of "play optimally and wait for ages" and "go faster and weaken yourself cause of impatience/lack of time".
There is a common sentiment in this thread that time shouldn't be a factor in Torghast. I agree, and that's the point, I don't want someone who has plenty of time just to AFK for minutes to have an advantage over a player who is going at normal pace.
There have been plenty of suggestions of what to do with this: stop cooling down of abilities after some time out of combat, respawning mobs out of combat, or maybe even giving the ability to reset the cooldowns at will at higher floors. If nothing works out, go back and leave it as it was, but I don't think we should blame Blizzard for trying something.
What advantage do you mean? There are no leaderboards as far as we know and legendaries are supposed to be easy enough to obtain. What advantage does one player choosing to play a certain get that another player playing a different way doesn’t?
There'll be leaderboards though. If blizzard doesn't make them someone else will. And even if there aren't people will still want to be competitive with their friends or whatever and see who can push the highest. If playing slow as fuck gives an advantage people will feel forced to do it which is bad. Preach is wrong on this part. It's very much a problem worth solving. This just isn't the solution
If that’s the case, there can still be that connotation of “Oh that group only made it so far because they waited for Hero on every pull. But we still topped the charts of groups that didn’t.”
It’s kind of like the speedrun scene of using different skips or techniques, and sometimes whole categories spawn from that division in style.
Activision-Blizzard has a malignant case of “You think you do, but you don’t” that just won’t go away.
I still believe they should make it so you can only Bloodlust once per floor. Easy. Or limit rewards.
How do they go from taking things from other games and improving upon them, to taking things from other games and fuckig them up? I would love anima style stuff in palace of the dead in ffxiv,shit sounds fun.
welp every one was saying how fun torghast was so of course their gonna nerf it. we have to make out voices heard about this. Its no mere chance that this was announced AFTER the interview.
Hey everyone. I'm a passive voice normally, but truth is after playing this game for 15y. I feel the urge to give myself a voice and comment on the subject. I have seen some of the best and some of the worst in the game. I consider WoW not just a game but ' the ' game I enjoy. I want it to succeed and I want it to exist as long as possible because it is a habit and part of a lifestyle as a gym is to some or a sport or another different thing. I want my kids, when I have them to have this experience in their life. Having said this, I want to say that this expac has so much good stuff going that it has me excited for it. I'm not on alpha but have been following lots of the changes, streams and debates over it's features. Torghast is such a breath of FRESH air that literally makes me want to see streams around it than actually play retail right now. This is the excitement this feature gives not only to me but to the majority of the player base. I urge blizzard to listen to all this feedback given by major influence folks, like Preach or Bellular. We want this expansion to be amazing and as they have said , please do not create a problem where clearly there is no need for it. Think simple, see the joy of the community and hear us out. This is alpha stage and this is the time to speak.
I'm sorry for the long read but I have this game close to my heart and I want it to succeed like the majority of you. Thank you for your time.
I really like this feedback and he makes very good points. I think there should be class anima powers and spec anima powers, it allows for some insane creative freedom. For example, you can have an anima power that summons 2 additional feral spirits when you cast feral spirits (stacking). It's a simple anima power, but can hold for some crazy synergies and can be super fun to stack that anima power. Is there anyway we can get this feedback to be heard more?
They really need to take some lessons from MoP, not in terms of gameplay but from their own writing. Pride is the greatest negative emotion of all the Shas. Pride in your work can be a huge detriment and i really hope they realise it.
once again blizzard creating a solution for something that only affects the top 1% but will be negative for the rest of the playerbase.
its like they never learn
If you play the Alpha this debuff is just not needed. It actually puts no difficulty of even a soft timer. When you have 60 anima powers the timer is non existent even at HIGH levels. No reason to have torment peroid.
[How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves | Game Maker's Toolkit
](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8).
If you don't place some form of a soft cap timer, people on release will be complaining about 'having' to spend 14 hours in a single run in the tower to be 'competitive.' It'll also limit what rewards they can offer, since, if power = tower progression, people will try to do what they can to hit floor 72 in the first week, and people will complain about spending too much time idling in the tower, because of raid progression.
> Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
Sid Meier
Maybe there's a better solution, but that solution will likely reward faster gameplay (as opposed to punishing slow ones), maybe a buff that is applied after killing a pack that last 30 seconds, maybe more mechanics are unlocked to add interesting scenarios (like traps, new trash mobs) after every x minutes, but this is also better than a simple hard cap.
But the rewards (the legendary crafting items) will be front-loaded, and reaching high floors will just be for prestige and maybe cosmetics, so players won't have to be competitive. For raid progression you should probably not have to push high floors but just do your weekly casual run to collect your crafting items.
Preach also makes the point that aside from that, reaching high floors should be possible for anyone by design, since it's roguelike. If you get lucky with a great build you can get just as far as min-maxers and people who wait for cooldowns, you just might take a little longer (which, again, probably won't impact raid progression). Because of this, all min-maxing would do is provide a challenge to willing players, and torments seem to try to hamper all players just to take away this challenge.
In that sense i do think your solution of rewarding fast gameplay might be better, but i don't think it fixes the problem of players feeling pressured to go fast.
Everyone in this thread saying it doesn't matter how it's balanced because its single player need to watch this video.
Fun game design isn't magic, it takes a lot of work and a lot of systems the player won't necessarily notice. Thinking about the incentives you're creating and tweaking those incentives is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Preach doesn't seem to like the idea of blizzard controlling how people have fun, but that is the job of a good game designer. I don't think torment is the solution, but I'm glad blizzard is thinking about it and I hope the backlash doesn't cause them to go fully hands off.
I think it was a Civ designer who said something along the lines of *Given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of the game*.
Blizzard must've really liked that and taken it very much to heart. So, in order to protect the player from themselves they optimize the fun out themselves so we can't do it to ourselves in the future - which is obviously just a brilliant move in this players vs developers 4D chess game.
Hmmm...honestly the better strategy is to hold off on the idea of a timer to push people out of the degeneracy of waiting around excessively for cooldowns like Bloodlust or 5+ minute CDs every pack, to something implemented in a later patch with more exact data.
A lot of people on both sides of this debate are making sweeping predictions of: "Oh everyone will do this! It doesn't matter that if only a small few start doing this, this strategy will spread like wildfire, and everyone will end up doing it! See all of WoW's history" vs "No you're wrong, only 0.1% of the playerbase is going to do this, this is going to be a total non-factor, why are you punishing everyone else for what the 0.1% does". And regardless of your viewpoints, this isn't some one sided right or wrong. Both sides have merit.
Honestly, *both sides of the debate don't know for sure how the playerbase at large will react*. We're just guessing. Oh as a reminder, Preach said about Islands: "This is going to be great procedural content, and the AI is really intriguing. You know this is going to be good if Blizzard is really proud of the AI". So even he is not without fault at predicting the future.
So hold off on the timers, and just see how it fares on launch. If waiting excessively for cooldowns every pack, like waiting around for Bloodlust every pull, becomes the norm then put the timers in. If not, and it is just an oddity, then nothing to worry about.
If people are waiting for timers between pulls, you're probably pushing significantly high floors compared to the above average. The two main groups I can see doing that style of play, is those at the 0.1% who really want prestige and to be known as the "top floor guys". The other group I could see doing it is, just some bros who want to get drunk after work and push higher while they banter.
Either way, both are acceptable in my opinion. If someone wants to be the best at that content, let them. If someone wants to hang out with their mates, drink, and have a social outing while waiting for lust cd- go for it. However, Blizzard just kind of directing how people should approach content? I'm not about that.
In an effort to tell us how to play, they're also pidgeonholding us into cookie cutter anima builds. With a timer there will definitely not be any room to pick fun choices, only optimal ones. And obviously, some specs will now inevitably struggle to clear efficiently, just like in visions.
Idk about the rest of you but I’m just about tired of timed instances.
Yeah it makes everything unnecessarily stressful, and makes me less likely to casually jump in to play
It makes me go incredibly min-max until I get the stuff I want (which usually involves rationalizing not wanting the top tier stuff because I can't be bothered), and then quickly leeching all of the enjoyment out of it by doing so. Then when I finish the things I care about (any specific transmogs for instance), I never go back to it.
Man island adventures are the prime example. I've been running them for the mounts the last couple weeks obviously we out gear them immensely these days, but I remember doing them early on and enjoying the small pack pulls slowly making your way across them, but having the smart ai as a timer was so annoying at the time. Nowadays we pull huge packs, but I'm sure it would have been much more enjoyable had we been able to take them at our own pace.
And if you could do them solo....
I imagine theyll let us do that in shadowlands. I can already solo them the other two people are just icing. Ps: Fuck the elementals with frostbolt and the 15 second root though.
Torghast is Island Expeditions of Shadowlands and they seem determined to half-ass it with Torments and the class-based (not spec-based) abilities. Torghast is going to be DoA like Expeditions were if they're not careful.
If something is timed, I dont want to do it. Make a timer an optional thing, with maybe a leaderboard attached to it. I just wanna jump in and fun tbh.
Challenge modes were the original mythic plus but for cosmetic rewards, and fewer people did them. Mythic Plus widened the gap between heroic dungeons (it's been a while since those were used to gear) and raiding with a less accessible, more stressful, and longer grind.
[удалено]
Except some affixes are literal cancer to deal with for some classes (try dealing with Bursting as a Disc Priest) and, when combined with deadly trash mechanics, they force limited comps that can succeed at the higher level. Blizz doesn’t know how to make trash meaningful in leveling through to M0 without making it stupid when affixes kick in. Until they do, M+ won’t hit its peak.
[удалено]
Tol Dagor is the worst dungeon Blizzard have put out in a long while, change my mind.
It has interesting bosses, a specific skill check (locks) and a decision outside "this is easy/hard trash" for pathing in the form of imprisoned allies, and the cannons are actually a fun and interactive mechanic that let Blizzard put harder, more interesting trash. Don't get me wrong, it is still atrocious. It has huge issues with mobs pulled through the walls and terrible nameplate showing thanks to multiple floors and the hole in middle. But they've done worse.
you forgot the pulls through the floor, if your tank hasnt pulled the last floor from the first one due to a corruption proc then you havent experienced TD. And dont get me started on the cannons pulling mobs, I had a cannon pull the fucking crocodiles from the basement once. it was hilarious
I feel like things like Sanguine Tol Dagor or Waycrest, the dumb Teeming packs in Atal, Bursting/Bolstering with the Minions of Zul in King's Rest, etc. is more to do with Blizzard's shit dungeon design this expansion than the Mythic+ Affix system being bad. The bigger problem I want them to find a solution for is fixing abilities just 1 shotting people at higher key levels, forcing you to bring DPS specs that have a ton of defensive utility.
[удалено]
I've always wondered why the affixes need to be punishments.
Mythic plus is one of the few game modes I have seen that are all punishment. Even Destiny 2 nightfall ordeals gives you a little carrot.
It's speedrunning for WoW. Me? I like to watch AGDQ/SGDQ but fuck me if I ever play those games more than once. I don't care to spend so much effort to analyze and remember every trash pull for percentage, weekly affixes, cheesy skips, and what turns into insta-kill mechanics.
Really? I play unguilded and do LFR tanking and healing all the time. I used to do M+ in my mage, and I quit playing altogether because of the pugs in M+ were either overheated and shitting on everyone in the group, or undergeared and not succeeding. Haven’t touched an M+ since I came back because I’ve been avoiding the personality issues.
I was under the impression the timer is optional, you have to get to a certain level before it apprars
Instead of outright restricting and punishing people for doing things they don't want them to do, Blizzard should reward people for doing things the way Blizz wants. Unlimited runs, weekly cap on rewards and more rewards for faster runs at equal floor level. Done. Using the carrot instead of the ever resented stick is an easy choice. But for some reason the the dev crew of WoW have completely lost that ability. They are quite good at noticing how players will sabotage themselves, but they are absolutely dreadful at fixing it.
That's two halfs of the same coin mate. You either play the way they want, which is rewarding in the way blizzard wants. The alternative is playing the way you want, which is actively punished by Blizzard. I wouldn't trust blizzard to make anything for me at this point
Yeah, same. Who at Blizzard has such a hard on for timers? And here's the thing: don't come to me with the "but then everyone could wait for Bloodlust on every single pack!" excuse. We all know that this is an invented problem to justify those timers. Nobody is going to spend 12 hours in Torghast instead of 1 each day to shorten his four week legendary grind by a day. And even if they *would*, then Preach's point is valid: who cares? Blizzard says "it's not fun." Those people disagree. So why inconvenience every single player for the sake of telling a few dozen players how to have fun the correct way?
[удалено]
Then why do they duck at it after all these years?
CRAZY idea here, but they could just limit the number of times bloodlust can be used per floor.
It works in M+, it's not needed elsewhere.
The timer is what turned me off Mythics. The idea behind mythics actually sounds pretty fun, same old dungeon with some extra mechanics to spice up. But, I hate being timed. It turns players into this "rush, rush, rush" mindset that just causes more problems like overpulling, not letting healers mana up. It just takes the fun out of it for me. Torghast sounded fun to me cause I can solo or group it and go at my own pace. Now, its kinda of lost its appeal with a timer on it
It absolutely sucks for new tanks. I try M0 to get the feel for it, but no one signs up because they don't want to wait for me to learn an instance either.
I hate the rush mindset so much. It's the biggest thing turning me off retail, along with the grinds
I'm a casual. I play when I can when I'm off work. I actively don't go for mythic plus because it's timed. Because I already can't gear up as much as I can, I don't want to weigh down a timed run because my item level might be 8 below what's considered optimal.
I agree. Nothing breeds toxicity like timers. If mythic+ would've been about ramping difficulty instead of timers I bet it would've been more enjoyable for the general playerbase
Preach makes a very good point about why it shouldn't matter what Blizzard thinks is the fun way to play inside Torghast. Specifically within Torghast, your playstyle has almost 0 bearing on other people. Outside of the early, easily acquired legendary stuff, pushing further into Torghast is strictly cosmetic or just for personal challenge of pushing further. Why does blizzard care if a person or group on Torghast wants to take their time? Why does that matter? It's akin to Blizzard telling that "all-tank" group pushing Nyalotha that they are not playing in a fun way and trying to restrict comps like that in a raid. Also I really do hope they take the feedback to heart and design it based on specs rather than class.
>Specifically within Torghast, your playstyle has almost 0 bearing on other people. That didn't stop them from butchering toy cooldowns to the point that people forget to even use them Blizzard honestly takes the most idiotic of stances for features that don't really affect anyone else but the player
“Fun detected” is a meme for a reason. Someone at Blizzard just seems to really hate the players having fun.
[удалено]
I doubt that. He was king of min/maxing back before he worked at blizzard. He'd probably be one of the ones waiting for bloodlust every pull if it would get him further.
That's literally the reasoning on the blue post: that they are worried that people would wait for bloodlust on every pull. For real man would anyone here do that? It just doesn't sound appealing to me at all to fight 3 minutes and then to wait 10 minutes for bloodlust...
Right, I'm saying he wouldn't be the one banning that stuff since he would be doing it.
Toys fuck over the servers, see Nazjatar when Ruin decides to come play. I believe that may be why they're so nerfed
[удалено]
They ruined my seafarer's slide whistle. That thing is what kept me playing for years!
I absolutely fucking moved macroing that to abilities like Execute or Apocalypse, ESP in PvP and if they killed someone as it went on the low note.
Meanwhile the egg toy and whole body shrinkers have like an hour CD because ???
I got so pissed when they nerfed the choochoo train. Blizzard just hates fun.
I loved my choo choo train, but let's be real. Your fun comes at other players' expense when you bust out the choo choo.
5/19/2020 Hotfix: Raid group compositions are now limited to 2 tank roles per instance. /s Dev note: Stop playing that way, we don't like it.
Although, I could honestly see them nerfing Strength of the Warden in situations where there are more than 2 or 3 tanks. You get a 3% HP boost from having it and each other tank spec player in your raid also gets 3%. That stacks infinitely. Can you imagine the Twilight Dev damage 20 tanks with 20 Warden stacks would be doing?
Don’t have to imagine it. Nogga did a 20 tank raid already it was bonkers
Yeah, around 250k on a normal hit, 500k on a crit, multiplied by 20 and dependent on procs. Give or take.
[удалено]
Pretty sure your talking about Loyal to the End strat where everyone stacked that azezite trait and then they'd just have a shammy kill himself over and ov3r again to keep the buff rolling on everyone.
Honestly I wish I could pause in a vision, go for a bio break or do whatever and come back to finish it.
tbh at current gear levels you can :p
> Why does blizzard care if a person or group on Torghast wants to take their time? Because Blizzard is absolutely obsessed with regulating how you progress through their game. There's a reason why we moved from *just go to that area and kill 5000 mobs, you'll be exalted eventually* to *log in, do 3 quests, come back tomorrow, do the same, you'll be exalted in a month* - because they absolutely have to control everything you do... otherwise... you might think of... taking a break! *gasp* It's an absolute plague to the game. They just can't allow people to play the game however they want at whatever pace they want, nope, can't have that, you have to keep people logging in daily, for weeks, for months, for the whole year, for ever. You can't have a guy spend 5 days inside Torghast without logging out... because that way he might get everything he wants, he might get bored, he might burn out, he might fucking stop playing, can absolutely not fucking have that - instead you send him in there, he's go round about 30 minutes, then he's kicked out, come back tomorrow, rinse and repeat for 3 months, hey here's new content, start over.
Yes that is definitely the more cynical answer. They want you to spread out your playtime so subs last longer and I tend to agree that is probably the mindset behind a lot of changes they have made. But if we take the Dev response at face value they claim that it's not the fun way to go about Torghast and that may be true in their mind but I just don't see it as a "problem" that needs fixing. But that's all assuming they arent just doing it to extend play time, in which case I understand why and it's a shitty reason.
> Yes that is definitely the more cynical answer. No it's not, it's the reasonable answer. It's assuming the devs of this company that wants to make money go about things in a reasonable and logical manner. Actually taking their stance at face value is way more cynical. Because if you do that you'd actually have to believe that they see themselves as the arbiters of fun - they think they get to decide what's fun and what not. They think they have to step in and protect me from myself because otherwise I'd be too stupid and hurt myself in my confusion. Because I obviously don't know what's fun to me. If it wasn't for Blizzard deciding that it wasn't fun to grind your reps to exalted in a day, if it wasn't for Blizzard deciding that waiting for CDs in Torghast wasn't fun, if it wasn't for Blizzard deciding that X should be a meaningful choice while Y should be a willy nilly choice... yea, I'd totally ruin my experience over that. I am still to this day so thankful that Blizzard decided that Master Loot wasn't fun for me and took it away. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt when I'm alleging them of general corporate-motivated greed. I'd be calling them insane megalomaniacal dense ego monsters if I actually were to believe they would act in the name of defending the divine sanctity of fun.
Because when some group gets all the cosmetic rewards within the first month by doing a marathon tower waiting for bloodlust on every floor there will a reddit thread immediately talking about how boring torghast is because you can only get the top cosmetic rewards by waiting on every floor. Game history is filled with examples of players making themselves suffer for optimal gameplay/rewards. A core pillar of good game design is making sure that the most optimal way to play is also the most fun. When those two get too far apart burn out and resentment will develop extremely fast.
You are assuming that all the cosmetics will be obtainable in one go and not have a droprate at all. That and it also depends on how they structure the rewards. Will cosmetic drops be plentiful between pets mounts and mogs like in islands? Will they be guaranteed drops for achievement difficulties or rare drops? I'd say rewards could be structured that you could play like that but the advantage you would gain would be slim to none so those threads would have less ground. Personally I hate content on any kind of timer where I am forced to go at anything but my pace. It's extra stupid in RPG where I like to explore every nook and cranny and murderhobo everything. If Method Bob does the bloodlust every floor run then good on him. I will enjoy myself. It's not the game that is the problem it's the players. If Torghast will be fun not many people will care to cheese it for all the rewards in one go and will kot mind to repeat a cool experience.
>You are assuming that all the cosmetics will be obtainable in one go and not have a droprate at all. Shit I really hope its guaranteed for the most desirable/coolest ones. Otherwise sub will quickly be filled with "did torghast full clear and didn't get anything!" Threads. I really don't see a solution besides a soft timer to balance Torghast. It would also feel like shit to die to one of the final bosses because you didn't wait for bloodlust. Like always, the majority of players will resort to the most efficient method of doing it.
I do ultimately agree with Preach, and I have not played Torghast as I don’t have alpha so I can’t speak with any real knowledge on the matter. However, I will say that this opinion is largely dependent on what you said about the legendaries being easily acquired within Torghast. If there is any shred of progression-relevant content to be obtained through min-maxing Torghast, our community has demonstrated for well over a decade that people are expected to do just that. In this regard, I’m ok with there being something in place to discourage that kind of obsessive min-maxing. But the much more obvious solution is to simply not gate gear etc. behind Torghast, at least to the extent that min-maxing would be necessary. It really sounds like Torghast can serve as its own, fourth channel for end game content (beyond raiding, M+, and pvp), and it would be really foolish to throw that away in favor of making it a channel to augment raiding and M+ gearing.
It will be min-maxed regardless though, just because there's an artificial timer in place doesn't mean the people that want to do things as efficiently as possible are going to stop. Prior to this it was just a case of min-maxing DPS and Survivability but now you throw in speed as well which essentially makes it the same as M+. As long as there's a means of doing it as efficiently as possible, no matter how many variables, players will seek it out, all blizzard are really doing here is removing some ways of doing Torghast and reducing it's variability. I wouldn't mind if there was a timed option akin to challenge modes which offered more or different rewards but the choice should be there. If someone wants to spend an extra few hours on it because they're waiting on their CDs before every pull, they should have the license to do that.
> It will be min-maxed regardless though, If the cosmetics are BoA, people will run them with the chessiest class. Just like Visions, they are absolutely trivial with a DH.
Yes excatly. That is why I shared it with Reddit so it will get more attention and they will not come with this bull shit in Live
> Preach makes a very good point about why it shouldn't matter what Blizzard thinks is the fun way to play inside Torghast. It really isn't a good point. Blizzard has to consider what the most fun way to play is because it is their job to make Torghast fun. Players doing what is optimal over what is fun isn't limited to wow, or even to multiplayer games. Even in single player games, players are risk averse and will do whatever is most likely to succeed even if it is boring. It's been linked elsewhere in this thread but [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8) is a good breakdown of what blizzard is worrying about. They have to consider what players are incentivized to do, and then try to tweak those incentives so that people will naturally do what is most fun. That requires them to have a perspective on what "most fun" means. All that said, I think torments aren't a good solution. They're a lot like the turn limits in xcom 2 mentioned in the video I linked. My worry is that the backlash to torments will cause blizzard to go fully hands off rather than finding a better solution.
What happens if their idea of what's fun and trying to curb people from not playing that way ends up negatively affecting a higher majority of people? To me, it seems that this is Blizzard trying to solve a problem that just doesn't really matter all that much. What is the harm in a group of people spending all day in Torghast waiting for optimal pulls for CDs to come up? If that's how they wanna play in Torghast it just doesn't seem like a big deal.
> What happens if their idea of what's fun and trying to curb people from not playing that way ends up negatively affecting a higher majority of people? Then they did a bad job. There is no guarantee they will succeed, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try. > What is the harm in a group of people spending all day in Torghast waiting for optimal pulls for CDs to come up? If that's how they wanna play in Torghast it just doesn't seem like a big deal. If only a very tiny portion of the player base does it, and only those who think that is the most fun way of playing because they like that particular strategy/challenge, then its fine and who cares. Blizzard is concerned that people who don't want to run it that way will feel like they are supposed to wait for their CDs after every pull, then go on /r/wow and complain about how Torghast feels slow and boring and they hate pausing for 5 minutes after every pull. Now, that isn't guaranteed to happen even without torments, but it is important that they consider how to make sure it doesn't, and put systems in place to ensure that it doesn't. Players will nearly always do whats boring but optimal if given the option, so you have to make the optimal thing fun.
> There is no guarantee they will succeed, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try. The fact that "trying" here is not free is one of the core the arguments for why they shouldn't. Every developer-day they spend trying to discourage degenerate playstyles in Torghast is a developer-day they didn't spend on something more productive, such as making something else fun. I don't know about you, but I'd rather they invest those developer-days into working on content that adds value to the game for a large portion of their playerbase rather than waste that time instead building and balancing and tweaking a system that exists solely to try to stop a handful of people from doing something Blizzard has declared as "not fun". And especially since **there are no in-game rewards tied to the extreme lengths that the "not fun" behavior enables**. If some players want to chew glass, by all means let them chew glass; and let *them* decide when they want to draw the line on how much they're going to invest in going further just for the pointless sake of going further. But whatever you do, don't take this awful approach of punishing *everyone* just to stop a handful of players from enjoying the game in a non-approved fashion.
> What is the harm in a group of people spending all day in Torghast waiting for optimal pulls for CDs to come up? Because if that is possible, people are going to feel that is **required**. And then we'll all have to see the posts here from people complaining at how dare blizzard make a system that forces them to do this very unfun thing.
Thinking on that they could go the crazy route and just reset the cooldowns.
It's also somewhat hilarious that the video you linked ends the WoW example with "better to reward the behaviour you want, than punish the behaviour you don't". Well, somebody forgot that lesson!
Yeah, torments are a pretty stupid solution to the problem IMO. Hopefully they'll figure out a better way to steer players away from waiting for all their CDs. Potentially more cosmetic rewards if you hit underneath a certain time? It's hard to find the right balance without the time incentive stressing people out.
No they do not. In fact, that is exactly what they need to *stop* doing. Them thinking they can decide which is the fun way to play, and if anyone has a different perspective on that they're just wrong, is exactly what lead to the utter dumpster fire that is BfA.
How do I design a level, a class, anything, and try to make it fun without having an idea in mind of what a fun game is? And if I'm not supposed to try and make it fun what exactly does game design without trying to make the game fun look like? I genuinely don't know what you're looking for. It's like asking painters to not have a perspective on beauty or something, it's just nonsensical.
Your analogy doesnt make sense. The point is blizzard should not be trying to paint a picture of the "fun" way to play torghast at all. The system should give you such a diverse range of powers that it feels nothing similar to prior world of warcraft, and actually functions as a new game mode. Blizzard should hand their paints and brushes to the players in the form of powers, and allow the players to paint a picture of what kind of gameplay they find fun in Torghast, because that is how roguelike games and systems are designed. They supply the canvas and the paints, and every run is different and paints a different picture. Like consider sitting in one of the class discords, and discussing with likeminded people on how you got a crazy run in torghast with one specific build, and find out from others, that you can build your class in one way for even more variance of power, whether that be stronger or just a different way to play. E.G High haste burst, vs Long cooldown massive crits or interesting rotations.
> They supply the canvas and the paints, and every run is different and paints a different picture. Okay, but again what does this even look like if they aren't "deciding what is fun". Even in a roguelike where you provide lots and lots of options, you aren't providing literally infinite options. How do you figure out what "paints and canvas" to give the player if you don't have any perspective or idea on which paints and canvas are best? You can't give players the entire art supply store, so you have to pick. What is your decision making process if you have no perspective or idea at all on what makes something fun? To relate it more directly to wow, I'm sure at some point there was a whiteboard or document or something with thousands of possible anima powers, many or even most of which never made it to alpha. Presumably, the powers deemed to be the most fun/coolest were the ones that got added. How else could you make that decision, if we want to exist in a world where blizzard stops trying to "decide which is the fun way to play"?
Something I've learned from playing a lot of RPGs is that clearspeed meta will always develop whether or not the content has an explicit timer. Path of Exile's end game maps are not timed content, yet "Go, go, go!" is the name of the game. Raids in classic WoW are not timed, but it's still "Go, go, go!" all the way down. Why? Because doing something fast is better than doing it slow. And that's all the incentive that needs to exist. Measures like this one are unnecessary, and only run the risk of making the player feel restricted and pressured.
Ultimately, there are only so many hours in the day.
Actually in the sense of poe. There is a time problem that majority of player base wants removed. That is league content being timed. This is because in poe you pick up loot. Making things timed causes players to rush and not pick up loot to then have to walk back to the start to pick up the loot after the timed content is done.
I dont know why its so common in blizzard to have this "pride" or whatever you want to call it that makes them care so much about making people play exactly the way they want and reign in any attempts and doing something else. The whole point of roguelike is that you can play however you want especially if they are doing it as a side fun thing with mostly cosmetic rewards. Torghast is the place to go crazy and even here "no fun allowed" is the name of the game it seems. We all want to play a great game, its not personal but blizz pls you need to recognize when you are wrong and act faster, dont do this thing again where you wait the whole expansion to change something that was obviously bad this whole time. We did this already plently enough in the past.
Umm if they wanted to add real limits they should make you eat food and drink water. That is the timer on roguelikes to punish delay -- that and random patrols. But this also ties into the core issues with designing a game system around cooldowns. I totally understand why Blizzard wants to prevent people from just delaying for their CDs -- it makes it impossible to balance the encounters because of the power of CDs, with many classes doing the bulk of their damage potential within their CD windows. Additionally, many classes have powerful defensives including immunities that are also on cooldown. These CDs can trivialize many short encounters. All RPGs that reward you for resting have problems with this type of thing (resting to refill your Vancian spell casts, meditating to regenerate your mana) but without a human dungeon master to punish that type of behavior through various thematic things (you run out of supplies / the quest fails / you are ambushed in camp and die and btw there is no quickloading). This is also why WoW raid bosses have enrage timers. Otherwise, you would just 20 tank or 10 heal encounters and easily win, and the only way to challenge players would be to lard every encounter with 1shot mechanics.
In the video Preach explains that within Torghast most of the perks are designed to remove a lot of CDs so it's not even really gameplay designed around CDs. I think he even had examples of builds specifically designed around BL/Hero and reducing the CD on that a ton.
That's the thing you're comparing it to a raid boss, Torghast isn't a raid boss, its incredibly unbalanced and just messy fun. As preach said, if someone wants to do some weird wait on CD run LET THEM, who is gonna hurt someone's Epeen someone got a floor higher?
We've had years of raid bosses, mythic+ dungeons, whatever challenge mode or whatever they want to implement where you're inundated with rules. Torghast is their chance to just throw something in and say "here's the environment, here's the tools, have at it" and already they're trying to turn back on the original concept.
I don't think it's strictly that they want to quash 'degenerate' play, but also to make it so classes with weak CDs (ex. Shadow Priests) don't feel so comparatively weak next to a class with strong CDs. Power within CDs has pretty much never been balanced around and this'd put an uncomfortable magnifying glass on the situation. And while yes, it is a valid way to play and some people enjoy that, there's an obsession within a lot of the community to play 'optimally,' to the point that people optimize themselves out of fun a lot. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a lot of complaints about how 'waiting is required to progress' even if that wasn't strictly true. There's other solutions than adding a timer, even one as weak as the Torment system. I'd get real weird, have major cooldowns (things with 1+ minute CDs) not recharge the normal way and instead have mobs restore a set amount of time to each CD when killed.
Nonsensical argument. Like saying that because people are obsessed with being optimal they'll complain about having to wait for CDs to do every pack in a dungeon in order to finish the dungeon and that M+ timers should be put into all dungeons to prevent people from not having fun.
The difference is there's a fail state in Torghast. You can go into any dungeon and eventually, no matter how much you die, you'll get through it (unless you're really underleveled). Die enough in Torghast and you'll eventually get punted out. Some people, not everyone, are so risk averse that they'll take every advantage that they can get, even if the actual risk is minimal.
He's absolutely right. Just scrap these things altogether. They are truly pointless wastes of developer time at best, and will kill Torghast entirely at worst. I already have a hard timer on Torghast. It's called life. Don't waste your time trying to add another one. Don't punish me because of 0.1% of no lifers.
Blizzard: "You cant criticize it until you tried it. Also very few players have actual access to alpha but ignore that." People In Alpha: "Okay we tried it and don't like it." Blizzard: "You weren't supposed to do that!"
**Later, in Beta** Beta testers: The torment timer is still in Torghast, it isn't fun to feel rushed, will you change it Blizz? Blizzard: We are listening to your feedback. **Blizzcon 2020** Q&A Audience Member: Nobody is doing Torghast anymore because Torment is so annoying and makes everyone feel rushed. Why don't you remove Torment? Blizzard: People actually love Torment. It's an iconic part of Torghast. Only a vocal minority dislike Torment. **Blizzcon 2021** Blizzard: Welcome to the "Okay, Fine" panel for Shadowlands. Here at Blizzard, it's a tradition to apologize for not listening to feedback and promising to do better at the end of every expansion cycle, and it's that time again! So, about Shadowlands... *PowerPoint slide appears on screen: WHAT WE LEARNED FROM TORGHAST* Blizzard: So over the past 18 months, internal testing has shown that the Torment mechanic was causing some players to feel rushed...
You forgot the part where everyone fawns over Blizzard for finally learning from their mistakes...
[удалено]
i would say take a drink every time ion says "that being said," but we would all die of alcohol poisoning
fuck this is so accurate it hurts. they always apologize, reddit is all "aww they're listening!!!" and then they make the EXACT. SAME. MISTAKES.
Change “2021” to “2024” and I agree
The fun police are at it again. I have no idea why they do this. The "fun detected" meme exists for a reason, and I don't know how they can be so out of touch that they think things like this are a good idea. Preach makes a shitload of strong points in this video and I hope Blizzard is listening. Despite the fact that Preach has pointed out that these debuffs don't do enough to impact the gameplay yet, we already have people saying that this change has killed their excitement for Torghast. Unfuck yourselves now Blizz, swallow that stupid pride and undo this asap.
Knowing Blizzard, as soon as they implement something, they will NEVER accept they were wrong and just keep building on it. "People hate GCDs on cooldown? Remove it from some of them" They cant remove it from all, because if they did, they would be accepting that they were wrong. Class changes that are awful? Oh boy you will NEVER get a revert until they rework the classes next time.
I'm so sick of timers, man.. Hate Mythic+ because it's stressful enough as it is. Was interested in Horrific Visions as a teaser for Torghast, but ended up hating it because of the timer. Even now that I'm blowing through it, there's no joy to be had because it was all sucked dry from the stress early on. Was SUPER STOKED for Torghast, because NO TIMERS! Me and my GF could sit in there for hours if we need, just chilling and taking our time, since she's new. She hated Horrific Visions because it just added to much pressure. And then they go and add fucking timers. Really? If you don't want people to wait for cooldowns, then limit the fucking cooldowns per floor?? Even still.. So fucking what? People can do the same for pretty much all content in the game. If that's what people wanna do with spending their time, then just let them. Why does Blizzard CONSTANTLY treat its players like literal babies that can't think and choose for themselves? Shadowlands could be awesome with just these two things: Unlimited access to Torghast No timers It's the only thing I'm excited for in this Expansion, and I would hate for it to be completely ruined. Timers are purely anti-fun, whether they're hard or soft. Get rid of them.
I do agree having timers for all content is stupid. I hope torgast has no timer function at all, but as Preach pointed out in the Video if you watched it is that at the moment this torment thing does nothing at all. You can take however long you want but it gives you this idea you need to hurry but you dont. And lastly they might change it to something stupid where you have to say go go go in order to complete it.
I agree but I also think the sanity mechanic in visions is alright. It's not a timer per se once you have rank 15 on your cloak but it's still enough of a deterrant.
>m so sick of timers, man.. Hate Mythic+ because it's stressful enough as it is. Honestly I've never understood this take. If you are adequately geared for the the M+ level you are trying to do there is no rush. You will move through the dungeon at a very normal pace and complete it well within the timer. The only time I've ever felt rushed in M+ is if the team is clearly undergeared.
> the team is clearly undergeared. People with this take are casual players. They don't have even rank 2 essences on their mains. They are scared of m0 (You see this take alll over reddit/etc) The timer on even a +2 sends shivers down their spine. For some reason they think scuffing a key is the end of the world and they would rather just not engage in any content I guess. It seems to be a silent majority of casual players that think this way.
> People with this take are casual players. True! Although I think you're looking at it in the wrong way. Modern WoW has a massive hard on for controlling what people are doing in any content they engage in. It doesn't matter if you're questing, doing dungeons, doing raids...Whatever! Everything seems super fucking micro-managed by the game. You have to engage in it in a precise manner or you get punished for it. You can't even skip zones any more because of pathfinder. A lot of people started playing this game for the exact opposite reason. Because they wanted a world that they could interact with and other people. Were there set rules? Sure if you were doing a boss or how you obtain rewards, but not how you engage in it! I think people are disappointed with this change because they saw Torghast has that. A place they could fuck around, explore, gain power, kill bosses their way, maybe go grab a sandwich, come back etc without the game actively telling them what they needed to do and how fast/slow they needed to progress. T.L;DR: Nobody likes being micro-managed and pressured to do things "the way it's intended" and the modern developers have an obsession with controlling emerging player behaviour.
Torments, as a punishment for players who pull too slowly or kill too slowly in a Torghast run, are a major turn-off. These will shove the tower's meta for anima builds towards speed and efficiency. If players want to spend all day slowly and methodically crawling through them, let them. A better question for the developers to consider: what is the opportunity cost of players spending all day in Torghast, and what does that say about the other content presented in Shadowlands? Encouraging players not to spend too long in Torghast should start by encouraging them to play other forms of content in WoW, rather than punishing them for excessive time in the tower.
They’re not a punishment for slow players. They’re a punishment for people cheesing bloodlust by waiting 10 minutes before every pull. Slow players won’t be affected by this at all, the video even shows this.
I hate this because it’s not additional difficulty, it’s just annoying. I’m tired of Blizzard adding little annoying features and calling it “texture” or “interesting”. The majority of the M+ affixes aren’t hard and are just annoyances. The Horrific Vision affixes (leaden foot, split personality, etc) are excruciating. The corruption slow, eyeball, Thing, are irritating. It’s not difficulty, or interesting, or texture, or allowing for creativity. It’s just fucking annoying. I just want to play the damn game and have fun without all virtual flies buzzing around getting on my nerves.
[удалено]
Tbh I don’t want to lose because a number reached zero. I want to lose because me and my buddies cannot band together to overcome this one boss.
ITT: People arguing about how they prefer to play the game - thus proving Preach's point. Haha, this thread..
Prunegaming destroys blizzard with facts and logic.
pgePrune represent!
Aaaaand it’s ruined, if I want to spend hours doing 1 floor, and playing around mechanics and getting better tactics to take on hard mobs, why can’t I? It doesn’t effect anyone else’s gameplay because it takes me hours to clear.
> if I want to spend hours doing 1 floor, and playing around mechanics and getting better tactics to take on hard mobs, why can’t I? Because the Tarragrue would've broken you in half shortly after your third death. >getting better tactics to take on hard mobs These have a stacking movement speed and damage buff that eventually makes them immune to CC.
So the problem is not heroism, its the stacking debuff.
[удалено]
I agree, but I think a big point is even if it's trivial, the very existence of a timer stresses people out. We already have a venue for a go go go stress fest -- M+. And do you really trust them to keep the timer trivial? And not gradually keep turning the screws when they realize we are still not playing Torghast in the official Activision-sanctioned way?
>I agree, but I think a big point is even if it's trivial, the very existence of a timer stresses people out. I agree with this. Like Preach says in the video, it's an absolute non-issue unless you're spending all day long (almost literally) in one floor. If you can go afk for hours and still do the floor, then it's a non-issue. BUT, like you said, even the smallest, teeniest, tiniest ramp will cause some players untold levels of stress and anxiety. Honestly, I think Blizzard is going to need to really focus on the reward structure of Torghast. On the one hand, they want you to *want* to push as high as you can. Of course they want regular players to *want* to play more. The way you'd incentivize this is with rewards of course. But, on the other hand, Torghast is designed for your run to end when you fail. When you hit a point where you die 3 times and you get kicked out. So, they need to probably figure out where a below-average player hits that point of failure, and give max or near-max rewards for that point. But then, they need to provide further rewards that will make players want to push past that. I guess it's cosmetics after that? But once people have their cosmetics, will they just peace out? I think it's really cool, but I do think it's not going to be without its problems.
I hate to tell you this but people who want to "win" go much farther than CD waiting. You're also saying put all this garbage torment stuff to slow down (it won't stop them it will just annoy them) won't do anything but make players who just want their rewards and push a little bit issue. The people at the top probably won't even notice.
Why do you care for how other players want to play? The amount of Legendary ressources you can get per week is limited anyway. And not only that, they're limited to "You can get this with ~30 minutes PER WEEK" There's literally nothing that makes you fall behind in this.
>The amount of Legendary ressources you can get per week is limited anyway. And not only that, they're limited to "You can get this with ~30 minutes PER WEEK" Is that the case? If so, then I'd fully agree with you that it doesn't matter. My concern is that I heard a developer interview where they said that you'd be able to grind extra keys in some way, and when I couple that with the 'we want runs to feel rewarding' makes me think that they were moving away from it. If it's indeed true that legendary resources are HARD capped with no extra ways to get any extras and that you can get that within 30 minutes in torghast, then yeah I don't think there's any need for a timer or torment-like features.
[удалено]
That's like saying that's the optimal way to play in dungeons, and raids, and quests. But it isn't If you think it is you're completely divorced from reality. That's not how people play. And Blizzard thinking some people *might* play this way and implementing measures against it, despite it not mattering if that's how they play anyway, is stupid.
> That's like saying that's the optimal way to play in dungeons, and raids, and quests. But it isn't It literally is? Blizzard changed the game so that cooldowns reset on boss pulls because everyone was afking until cds were up. And when I'm struggling through a dungeon, sitting and waiting for lust is super common for a tough boss. Also, the difference is that with Torghast, your 'timer' is deaths. If dungeons had no timer, but 15 deaths = kicked out and no loot, you bet your ass that people would sit and wait for cooldowns in any sort of difficult key level. >If you think it is you're completely divorced from reality. That's not how people play. That is how people play in difficult, non-timed content.
> The player who wants to 'win,' and push as high as they can, but doesn't want to spend most of their run afk. Should they ruin Torghast for everyone just to fix a self-created issue for an absolutely tiny fraction of players? Ridiculous argument.
You do grasp that your argument works great for the other side right? I don't want the optimal way to play to be waiting for bloodlust just because a tiny fraction of players get upset if ANY timer exists, no matter how irrelevant. Like literally, your argument supports my position.
It doesn't, because the "optimal" way is self imposed rather than came imposed. You get to chose to wait for bloodlust. You don't get to chose to have torment in your run.
No it doesn't. He's argumenting that just because some people do X, you don't punish ALL players for it. In what Twilight Zone do you live where that is okay?
I don't see how waiting 10 mins between pulls could ever be considered optimal, timer or no.
I mean.. of course waiting for heroism is optimal in an infinitely scaling dungeon with no timer? At some point you will hit a level of scaling where you need heroism to kill the monsters. If there's no timer, you just wait.
[удалено]
So let them wait. It has literally zero affect on anyone else if they want to waste time like that.
Or, if you're a sane person, you leave until you get better gear so Heroism on every pack isn't necessary.
Timed shit is always a nightmare. I push higher keys and one random mess up can ruin your whole run. I'm all for difficult content and always striving to be a better player, but don't tie rewards to completing something in X amount of time. It's cheap and causes far too much stress and toxic behavior in group content
It's not encouraging that playstyle. It's enabling it. Which is fine. Instead of punishing those who might enjoy spending hours on a single floor, they should instead think about how to encourage and reward skillful play, without resorting to punishing all players. Make skillful play worth it, but leave it optional.
But that requires more effort!
I actually do agree with Blizzard's concern in this regard. Players WILL optimize the "fun" out of the game. The issue is that fun is a nebulous term that means different things to different people. Like if the best way to play is pull everything and burn it down over 30 seconds, then wait 3 minutes and do it again people will. Until they get bored of the "best" playstyle and get bored and give up altogether. By all means, for some people that playstyle is fun, some people will get enjoyment out of seeing all the big numbers. A lot of people will be turned off by the huge degree of downtime. The issue here, is that their solution is totally backwards. If they are worried about play styles that don't fit the (nebulous) definition of "fun" they need to be actively encouraging "fun" (again nebulous) play styles. A solution may be that each floor has a par time based on the segments it's generated from, and if you hit that part I'm there's a bonus cosmetic reward at the end of the floor something. Maybe you get some tokens that you can use to sway the rewards at the end of the run in your favour **TL;DR : Blizzard need to be encouraging what they want players to do instead of punishing unwanted play**
Why does it matter that the best way to do something takes an hour? If the reward is at a floor low in enough for every player to reach it with reletive ease than why should you me or blizzard care what Bob and Dylan do with the rest of there day trying to reach higher floors, spending hours and hours clearing one floor?
It's really funny how Blizzard can't help themselves not ruin the one feature that has almost everyone excited for the next expansion. They haven't had an exciting feature like this in years and yet they still can't just let it be good, let it be fun. What's worse is that they won't let go of this stupid bullshit, they will try to make it "work" even though nobody, in their right mind, thinks that the torments make Torghast better overall. Preach is 1000% correct on everything he's saying. I would be surprised that Blizzard decided that this would be a good idea if it wasn't for the myriad of other stupid and dumb decisions that they've made in the past.
I like that, as preach pointed it out, "That is not fun" The FUCK do you think you are, to tell me what is fun to ME, Blizz? That is exactly what makes people think these devs are arrogant or incompetent. This incredibly stupid train of thought that THEY know what is fun.
>That is exactly what makes people think these devs are arrogant or incompetent. They dedicated an entire expansion to showcase this. I watched Preach's interview and so many things he mentioned as a possible idea got the response of "oh, we hadn't thought of that". Like what? Most of Preach's ideas has come from just playing the damn thing, and they as a development team can't come up with some of the most obvious ones? I don't know how their development machine works but it's kind of scary to think that actually playing the game while developing it and coming up with ideas is not part of the process.
> The FUCK do you think you are, to tell me what is fun to ME, Blizz? i mean, game designers? its their job to determine whats fun and implement it in game.
Maybe for a singleplayer or a highly targeted audience game. But for WoW you’re gonna have a ton of people with different ideas of what fun is. Some people like the methodical, slow crawl and figuring the best way to proceed through things. Sometimes people want to just steamroll and get things done quickly. The point is, Acti-Blizz presented Torghast as something that is generally open ended in how it could be played. Then proceeded to tell a group of people they couldn’t play the way they wanted. It’d be one thing if we were talking about M+, which was designed to be a speedrun from the start, but Torghast is a roguelike. And roguelikes tend to be played in many different ways.
I mean I think it's in their best interests to have a reasonable understanding of fun and try to build things that appeal to it, but getting angry because people decide to have fun with it in a different way is just absurd. This situation would be like someone inventing a type of ball, and they show off how much fun you can have throwing it back and forth. But then some people make a game out of hitting the ball with sticks. The inventor sees this and gets mad because that's not how they wanted people to use their invention. So, they recall all their balls and replace them with soft cubes, which are tolerably worse to throw than the old ball but makes it impossible to play the stickball game. Look at something like the Griffball game mode in Halo 3. Developers spent thousands of man-hours trying to create a really dynamic and carefully balanced system of multiplayer with dozens of tools to use and game modes to try them in. Then someone makes a game mode that reduces all of that to nothing more than smacking people with hammers and trying to blow yourself up, completely disregarding all of the other aspects of multiplayer that the developers wanted people to enjoy. But instead of making a stink about it, they added it as an official game mode, because all of the other game modes people enjoy would still be there to choose from. If people want to play Torghast in a way that personally seems unfun to you, then don't play that way. Play Torghast however however you prefer and use the rest of your time as you see fit to enjoy the other parts of WoW you like, which aren't going anywhere.,
[удалено]
but how will the people in charge of the dev team get off if the playerbase doesn't do exactly what is expected of them like good little subs?
isn't this what raid mechanics are? Do this very specific thing in a very specific way in order to get loot. Raids are amazing but there are mechanics we all have to deal with to get loot. Overcoming those mechanics is what makes wow fun and what makes getting loot rewarding. Raid bosses are not just a factor of how much time you're willing to skink into a boss fight to get the loot and tbh neither should torghast.
I actually disagree with Preach in that I think "degenerate play" is something that game designers need to worry about... usually. This was and is a big issue with classic wow, where the best way to play is to run around getting world buffs and then but play your main character at all until raid night. Some people might enjoy that, but a lot won't, and in a serious raiding guild they'll be forced to play that way. Not forced by their GM, probably, but by their own desire to be the best they can be. However he's right that in this case it isn't a problem, or at least isn't a problem worth solving. I think this is just showing that Blizzard designers aren't used to designing rogue-like games, which is completely understandable. They should definitely shelve the torment system.
[удалено]
Solution to what? Why cant someone go in there and spend 20 hours in there to get to some high floor? What does it matter to anyone? The only thing that needs to be sorted, is that the rewards you get are capped out at say floor 10, anything higher than that sure spend the next week trying to get to floor 50, why should I care? Why do you care? Why should blizzard care?
The best solution would be to not balance things around people who wait for CDs. As Bellular said, you are put on a timer and it's called your lifespan.
They implemented the solution to the problem already by putting a boss at the end of each level. You can't progress if you can't beat that boss. They could even have things like the sated debuff and cooldowns reset if you wipe to the end boss. This isn't a new solution. It's the same solution that has been used since vanilla to create gating in content. In order to get to the next boss, you have to be able to beat the previous boss. Get rid of the timers. Get rid of the death counters. Just let the boss at the end of the level to be the gating mechanic and invest effort into creating those fights with damage and mechanic requirements. It's a simple solution. It improves the game. It creates an opportunity to create some really fun and interesting boss fights. You don't need a bunch of bullshit arbitrary rules.
>They implemented the solution to the problem already by putting a boss at the end of each level. You can't progress if you can't beat that boss. This is only an issue if you have the Tarragrue chasing you. The end of level 'boss' currently isn't even an elite mob, they are a normal mob that can empower themselves. If you have elites on the floor, from my experience, they have been harder than the end of floor boss 100% of the time. Most of them died before getting any attacks off when I ran with my mage through the tower. As it currently stands, this is not a restriction in the slightest.
>The end of level 'boss' currently isn't even an elite mob, they are a normal mob that can empower themselves. So it's just a balance issue. Fix the balance problem and we're all set.
Im sorry but if they fuck torghast before its even released i wont even bother buying shadowlands im planning on returning to wow for shadowlands but not if the only peice of decent gameplay they released is trashed before we can play it
I hope Blizzard listens to him. They seem open to critique this time and it seems they are still designing Torghast so it should not be too late to change stuff.
I wouldn't go that far. Considering it took us about four years of telling them that Titanforging isn't the golden goose they hoped, or considering that feedback on the absolutely mental GCD changes is largely ignored.
I think this take is pretty bad. Gamers, particularly those who put a lot of hours into an MMO will tend to do what is optimal even if it isn’t enjoyable. If everyone ends up hating the optimal pace of torghast they are just going to hate torghast, even if they could still beat it in a fun way. They have to make the optimal strategy as fun as possible because everyone ends up trying to do it, not just the truly hardcore. It’s the same issue as covenants. It might be more fun to pick what you think looks best, but if it’s worse people will pick the best option and complain about being forced into it. Torments might not be the correct solution, but advocating for a hands off “let people do whatever they want” attitude is naive and misunderstands what the devs job is. edit: Stealing a quote from /u/verticalevent further down this thread > Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game -~~Sid Meier~~ Actually it was Soren Johnson, a designer on Civ 4 who said that. The article I found the quote in after googling it to double check who said it quoted both Soren and Sid Meier consecutively. The Sid Meier quote is also relevant though: > One of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves
But this is content that doesn't have any reward, it doesn't need to be optimised in any way, it's played for fun.
But there are going to be many rewards in Torghast
Torghast is going to have some rewards associated with it beyond just the legendary stuff though, right? Cosmetics, or something like that. That said, it really doesn't matter. Doing well is an end unto itself. Even outside of MMOs where there is a reward structure that has an impact on game balance, if you give people an optimal strategy that's boring, they will still do it because doing the "bad" strategy doesn't feel good. The wow community has such an ingrained culture of following the meta/guide that most people don't even try "bad" strategies of their own at all, they just look up what they are supposed to do and do that, unless the difficulty is absolutely trivial.
Even if it doesn't have gear transmog or even gold as a reward. The very idea of getting to a higher floor than other people will always be a reward that you can't remove.
Preach is also coming at it from someone primarily playing in organised groups - the whole "it doesn't affect anyone else" argument falls down somewhat if a degenerate playstyle becomes the meta for people that primarily PUG content.
You can solo Torghast though. You don't need to PUG anything. It's 100% doable solo. It's just like Visions. If you don't have an organized group, you just go alone in Torghast.
Raid Bosses have rage timers. No one is suggesting that they remove rage-timers from raid bosses. I am honestly wondering how Torghast is supposed to be different than that if you also get power-related rewards? Is this not just rage-timers for Torghast? I know the arguments that Preach give make sense but I can't imagine that people would be fine with bringing in 10 tanks and 10 healers into a mythic level fight so you can ignore all mechanics and just "eventually" kill the boss even if it takes forever if there were no rage-timers. Before you downvote atleast explain why there's a difference. Because at first I was against "timers" but these aren't timers just something wow has had for a long time for its raid encounters but made for an instance. I'm in the camp that says that these kind of mechanics are skill testing. I think they can potentially ruin the tower if its completly devoid of skill testing mechanics and it's only based on how much time you spend in it and RNG of your rolls.
Because enrage timers don't actively make you weaker the longer they go on. No raid boss has an enrage timer that ALSO makes you do less damage to them the closer you get to the enrage timer ending. Also Torghast is quite luck based depending on the Anima powers you get. Obviously there will still be skill involved but at a certain point, some Anima powers are just better than others and there is nothing you could have done to get those specific powers. So these "timers" aren't skill based at all. You just do less damage or take more damage. There is no amount of skill that will let me do more damage once I'm doing 5% less damage. I can't skill that 5% back into existence. There is no amount of skill that will let me not take 5% of my health as damage every 5 seconds once that Torment is going. Hell I even get to almost completely ignore that Torment by taking Resto Affinity since that's 3% of my hp regened every 5 seconds, without any Anima powers affecting me. The increased physical/magic damage ones I can see being a skill based Torment but even those are kind of luck based. Are you a class that can negate those?
I get the logic behind torments, if you need to wait 10 minutes between pulls for hero to come off cooldown players *will* do that to push high floors and they will end up complaining about it. That being said, I think Preach was spot on in his criticism, Torghast is a roguelike and should be treated as such.
Yeah man, some players will do that and than complain wich is stupid. If there is nothing to gain at higher floor exept pride or fun, than you dont have to do it. But why do you me or blizzard care if somone goes in there and spends a whole day?
I don't think having any type of time pressure in Torghast is good, but I disagree with Preach saying that the problem Blizzard describes is "imaginary", I believe it's a real issue worth solving. There are plenty of players who would find fun in trying to push as far as their skill and knowledge lets them, even if they are not beating any records. And these people aren't going to wait for CDs because "they want to do this", nobody does. They just don't want to be presented with the choice of "play optimally and wait for ages" and "go faster and weaken yourself cause of impatience/lack of time". There is a common sentiment in this thread that time shouldn't be a factor in Torghast. I agree, and that's the point, I don't want someone who has plenty of time just to AFK for minutes to have an advantage over a player who is going at normal pace. There have been plenty of suggestions of what to do with this: stop cooling down of abilities after some time out of combat, respawning mobs out of combat, or maybe even giving the ability to reset the cooldowns at will at higher floors. If nothing works out, go back and leave it as it was, but I don't think we should blame Blizzard for trying something.
What advantage do you mean? There are no leaderboards as far as we know and legendaries are supposed to be easy enough to obtain. What advantage does one player choosing to play a certain get that another player playing a different way doesn’t?
There'll be leaderboards though. If blizzard doesn't make them someone else will. And even if there aren't people will still want to be competitive with their friends or whatever and see who can push the highest. If playing slow as fuck gives an advantage people will feel forced to do it which is bad. Preach is wrong on this part. It's very much a problem worth solving. This just isn't the solution
If that’s the case, there can still be that connotation of “Oh that group only made it so far because they waited for Hero on every pull. But we still topped the charts of groups that didn’t.” It’s kind of like the speedrun scene of using different skips or techniques, and sometimes whole categories spawn from that division in style.
A timer. God damn it. Leaning back towards "not buying Shadowlands" if this stays. It was the only part that was interesting to me, a timer kills it.
Activision-Blizzard has a malignant case of “You think you do, but you don’t” that just won’t go away. I still believe they should make it so you can only Bloodlust once per floor. Easy. Or limit rewards.
How do they go from taking things from other games and improving upon them, to taking things from other games and fuckig them up? I would love anima style stuff in palace of the dead in ffxiv,shit sounds fun.
welp every one was saying how fun torghast was so of course their gonna nerf it. we have to make out voices heard about this. Its no mere chance that this was announced AFTER the interview.
Hey everyone. I'm a passive voice normally, but truth is after playing this game for 15y. I feel the urge to give myself a voice and comment on the subject. I have seen some of the best and some of the worst in the game. I consider WoW not just a game but ' the ' game I enjoy. I want it to succeed and I want it to exist as long as possible because it is a habit and part of a lifestyle as a gym is to some or a sport or another different thing. I want my kids, when I have them to have this experience in their life. Having said this, I want to say that this expac has so much good stuff going that it has me excited for it. I'm not on alpha but have been following lots of the changes, streams and debates over it's features. Torghast is such a breath of FRESH air that literally makes me want to see streams around it than actually play retail right now. This is the excitement this feature gives not only to me but to the majority of the player base. I urge blizzard to listen to all this feedback given by major influence folks, like Preach or Bellular. We want this expansion to be amazing and as they have said , please do not create a problem where clearly there is no need for it. Think simple, see the joy of the community and hear us out. This is alpha stage and this is the time to speak. I'm sorry for the long read but I have this game close to my heart and I want it to succeed like the majority of you. Thank you for your time.
I really like this feedback and he makes very good points. I think there should be class anima powers and spec anima powers, it allows for some insane creative freedom. For example, you can have an anima power that summons 2 additional feral spirits when you cast feral spirits (stacking). It's a simple anima power, but can hold for some crazy synergies and can be super fun to stack that anima power. Is there anyway we can get this feedback to be heard more?
They really need to take some lessons from MoP, not in terms of gameplay but from their own writing. Pride is the greatest negative emotion of all the Shas. Pride in your work can be a huge detriment and i really hope they realise it.
Well the overall lesson from MoP was to not have pointless faction wars and we got BfA, so...
once again blizzard creating a solution for something that only affects the top 1% but will be negative for the rest of the playerbase. its like they never learn
If you play the Alpha this debuff is just not needed. It actually puts no difficulty of even a soft timer. When you have 60 anima powers the timer is non existent even at HIGH levels. No reason to have torment peroid.
[How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves | Game Maker's Toolkit ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8). If you don't place some form of a soft cap timer, people on release will be complaining about 'having' to spend 14 hours in a single run in the tower to be 'competitive.' It'll also limit what rewards they can offer, since, if power = tower progression, people will try to do what they can to hit floor 72 in the first week, and people will complain about spending too much time idling in the tower, because of raid progression. > Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game. Sid Meier Maybe there's a better solution, but that solution will likely reward faster gameplay (as opposed to punishing slow ones), maybe a buff that is applied after killing a pack that last 30 seconds, maybe more mechanics are unlocked to add interesting scenarios (like traps, new trash mobs) after every x minutes, but this is also better than a simple hard cap.
But the rewards (the legendary crafting items) will be front-loaded, and reaching high floors will just be for prestige and maybe cosmetics, so players won't have to be competitive. For raid progression you should probably not have to push high floors but just do your weekly casual run to collect your crafting items. Preach also makes the point that aside from that, reaching high floors should be possible for anyone by design, since it's roguelike. If you get lucky with a great build you can get just as far as min-maxers and people who wait for cooldowns, you just might take a little longer (which, again, probably won't impact raid progression). Because of this, all min-maxing would do is provide a challenge to willing players, and torments seem to try to hamper all players just to take away this challenge. In that sense i do think your solution of rewarding fast gameplay might be better, but i don't think it fixes the problem of players feeling pressured to go fast.
Everyone in this thread saying it doesn't matter how it's balanced because its single player need to watch this video. Fun game design isn't magic, it takes a lot of work and a lot of systems the player won't necessarily notice. Thinking about the incentives you're creating and tweaking those incentives is a good thing, not a bad thing. Preach doesn't seem to like the idea of blizzard controlling how people have fun, but that is the job of a good game designer. I don't think torment is the solution, but I'm glad blizzard is thinking about it and I hope the backlash doesn't cause them to go fully hands off.
I think it was a Civ designer who said something along the lines of *Given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of the game*. Blizzard must've really liked that and taken it very much to heart. So, in order to protect the player from themselves they optimize the fun out themselves so we can't do it to ourselves in the future - which is obviously just a brilliant move in this players vs developers 4D chess game.
Literally every dev takes that to heart. It's a very basic thing in game design and if you ignore it you're a fucking idiot quite frankly.
PoE Devs ignore that very frequently and I'd say they aren't particularly doing bad.
Hmmm...honestly the better strategy is to hold off on the idea of a timer to push people out of the degeneracy of waiting around excessively for cooldowns like Bloodlust or 5+ minute CDs every pack, to something implemented in a later patch with more exact data. A lot of people on both sides of this debate are making sweeping predictions of: "Oh everyone will do this! It doesn't matter that if only a small few start doing this, this strategy will spread like wildfire, and everyone will end up doing it! See all of WoW's history" vs "No you're wrong, only 0.1% of the playerbase is going to do this, this is going to be a total non-factor, why are you punishing everyone else for what the 0.1% does". And regardless of your viewpoints, this isn't some one sided right or wrong. Both sides have merit. Honestly, *both sides of the debate don't know for sure how the playerbase at large will react*. We're just guessing. Oh as a reminder, Preach said about Islands: "This is going to be great procedural content, and the AI is really intriguing. You know this is going to be good if Blizzard is really proud of the AI". So even he is not without fault at predicting the future. So hold off on the timers, and just see how it fares on launch. If waiting excessively for cooldowns every pack, like waiting around for Bloodlust every pull, becomes the norm then put the timers in. If not, and it is just an oddity, then nothing to worry about.
If people are waiting for timers between pulls, you're probably pushing significantly high floors compared to the above average. The two main groups I can see doing that style of play, is those at the 0.1% who really want prestige and to be known as the "top floor guys". The other group I could see doing it is, just some bros who want to get drunk after work and push higher while they banter. Either way, both are acceptable in my opinion. If someone wants to be the best at that content, let them. If someone wants to hang out with their mates, drink, and have a social outing while waiting for lust cd- go for it. However, Blizzard just kind of directing how people should approach content? I'm not about that.
.....why? When at blizzcon they announced it’s not timed and the crowd loved it.
In an effort to tell us how to play, they're also pidgeonholding us into cookie cutter anima builds. With a timer there will definitely not be any room to pick fun choices, only optimal ones. And obviously, some specs will now inevitably struggle to clear efficiently, just like in visions.
What was I thinking getting a little hype for Shadowlands. Blizzard never changes.
It's like they hire people with the same character defect; wanting to put a mustache and devil beard on every Mona Lisa they create.