Can we have casual gear progression content that isn't a raid?

[Granyala]

It's not that hard. I just did the first solo scenario there on my SPriest (ilvl 458).

I did it on my 460 Boomkin. Not hard, no. But utterly frustrating, annoying and to be blunt UNFUN.
Kitty is right: The daily hubs are created with a modest gear progression in mind, thats why mob HP climbs a little from Patch to Patch.

I would be completely ok with alternate progressions outside of gear, but what can never change (especially in WoW) is that character progression typicaly equals power gain.

Well if raiding is your main endgame, then character progression has to be power gain, because the next raid is supposed to feel harder/meaner than the previous one.
Also in most RPGs character progression = power gain in some way. Be it new more powerful spells like in Skyrim or be it more raw damage like in wow due to gear.
All RPGs I know use that to create danger. To be able to create areas in the world where a "new born" character doesn't stand a chance.

Actually oblivion did scale the mobs to your gear/level and boy it was so ... lifeless. You just could go anywhere right off the bat and that's just wrong.

Whether you find it interesting or not, collecting the different pets and building a stronger library is a type of progression.

But it doesn't progress my character for the main game. It's a meta game and yes there is progression within, but it's not really connected to the world outside of that meta game other than artificial pet levels that are linked to zone levels. (Dunno if that sentence makes sense)

[Holtzmann]

You... do recognize that Paul Sams bought a minority stake in the Pittsburgh Steelers for $400,000,000 right?? if they don't have resources to spend on content, they have no one to blame but themselves when the new crop of games comes out, one of which (and one eventually will) decimates WoW.

I don't remember putting emphasis on money. I was talking about manpower, which is an entirely different resource that's a lot harder to get. Blizzard's development staff is not particularly big, specially for a triple-A company with three ongoing series (and likely a handful of side projects), and they have very strict standards for hiring new people for their art department. It's not they don't have the money, it's they don't have the people to spend that money with.

Given art is the chokepoint I was talking about in the original post you quoted, then yes it makes great sense to reuse art assets as much as you can. And given the amount of work put into the Mists of Pandaria world (seriously, some places look better than full-on dungeons/raids), I'm actually quite glad to go back to it in scenarios.

[Ronduwil]

Why do you need gear if you don't raid? Gear is only required for raiding.

Here we go again...

I see this argument all the time, and it's completely non-sensical. Raiding gear is useful for everything: You can grind through dailies faster. You can clear the areas around the nodes you're gathering faster. You can world PvP better. You can clear the mobs around your fishing spot faster. You can clear a space for your pet battles faster. No matter what activity you prefer in WoW, it's all easier with raiding gear. Notice how no one is asking for a different progression path for PvP gear. That's because PvP gear is only good for PvP. If a PvPer made the argument, "If you never do non-PvP you have no need for PvP gear because it's only good for PvP," I would agree with them. That argument makes no sense for raiders, though.

If you want raiding gear to only be for raiders then don't make it useful across every single other activity in the game.

[George Costanza]

Really REALLY want a MP system for dungeons, myself.

[Aquamonkey]

Here we go again...

If you want raiding gear to only be for raiders then don't make it useful across every single other activity in the game.

Making it easier is not the same as a requirement. Also, PvP gear makes all those activities easier too. Current PvP gear is 493 ilvl, way above what is required for dailies and farming. That's completely ignoring PvP servers, where PvP gear is almost a requirement for doing anything out in the world.

[Osmeric]

Making it easier is not the same as a requirement. Also, PvP gear makes all those activities easier too. Current PvP gear is 493 ilvl, way above what is required for dailies and farming. That's completely ignoring PvP servers, where PvP gear is almost a requirement for doing anything out in the world.

Heh. PvE gear is now much superior to PvP gear in world PvP.

[Bad Ashe]

be careful what you wish for, blizz might read something like this and decide "oh hey, they want moar stuffz!, let add an item everyone's been asking for for years, but only obtainable by doing 100,000,000 extra dailies!!!!"

[Drithien]

All this talk of needing LFR because "possibly it allowed thousands of players to raid who otherwise would have just logged off...." why can't they just make some interesting things for players that is a gear progression path and nothing to do with raids?

People can't commit to set times, or want to deal with such environment... so create something for them unique instead of just taking existing raids and turning the slider to 1.


Stuff like Brawler's Guild, could have loot as you went along. More personal class quests. Dungeons that mattered. Adventurer style stuff that got you items if you explored a lot.


Why is the only solution raiding? There are a ton of MMO games out there now, just go steal some ideas from them. Seems so short sighted from a company that used to have great ideas.

Of course and there is. It has already been implemented in the past actually. So there is no need for Blizzard to look to other mmogs for ideas. After all, a lot of said mmogs pretty much recycled Blizzard's ideas in the first place.

It is called open-world role-playing experience. Pretty much what the game by definition is about. A vast, coherent, mostly-open, game-world, for the players to quest and explore in. Like the game was originally. You give players quests to do, environments to explore, reagents to gather and use in crafting things, some tough opponents to face, items to collect, secrets to uncover, and some group-dungeons to go through, maybe even entice them to join in some PVP, open-world or not. That is what vanilla was about. And that was the time when the vast majority of this game's players were happy playing.

Except for a tiny minority of course, who only cared about the end-game, most of which frequent forums such as this one. Talking about how "the game sucked", "rose-tinted glasses", and so on. Unable to understand that the reason the game is declining in popularity, and even more in excitement is not "balance", or "too little raiding content", because only very few players actually care much about these things. Most people are interested in playing an interesting and exciting game, and couldn't care less about warlocks being overpowered in raiding, that thunderforged gear is bloating gear-tables, or anything of that sort. Sadly, the few end-game advocates are by far the most vocal in places such as these forums. So they create an echo-chamber effect that makes it appear as though raiding is what defines PVE in this game.

When the fact is that most players don't care much about it. And even those that participate in it do so because there is little else to do in the game to advance their characters.

The solution is not more ways to gather points either. Scenarios, daily quests, etc, are nice alternatives to raiding. They are just more forms of repeated content. And thus equally boring.

The solution could be found in the game's past, its original form. World of WarCraft upon release, offered players tenths of zones to play in, six different racial campaigns to go through, the potential to fiddle around with the various specialisations and talent builds of its eight classes (not for min-maxing but for fun, mostly raiders, that way-too-loud 5% cared about min-maxing, most players played around with builds just to have some fun), class quests, neutral zones, lots of group-dungeons and some of them quite big, little-streamlined professions, and so on; a complex system of progression with occasional time-sinks that most players didn;t mind much, because most of the time they were treading new ground. New environments, new stories, new characters, gear, abilities, etc. The potential seemed limitless.

Now the playing experience has retreated to a safe, simple, streamlined-to-boredom stroll in the amusement park disguised as an expansion. From adventuring to facebook-gaming.

But the thing is, it's easier to develop for facebook-gaming. And cheaper. Oh so much cheaper. So tenths of zones became seven. Six campaigns became two. Lengthy questlines became extinct. Class quests almost gone. Sandbox feel erased. Space for creativity gone. And instead of adventure we got points. Whose inherent boredom befuddles the developers. Because in their mind, somehow, entering a haunting zone, filled with mystery and danger, is exactly the same as ganking "rare" mobs for keys and putting a statue together for the twentieth time...

[Shakari]

What caliber of gear do you expect? And if you're not running raids, why would you need a full set of raid-caliber gear?

You can gear up through dungeons, dailies, and rep. It won't be on par with normal-mode raiding, and it may be slow, but it does give something to do as you play.

Why does any player need better gear .... if you have gear to clear heroic and have done so why keep on doing it get all all heroic gear, you don't need it as you have killed everything ....

To improve your character and have another goal to aim for.

[Catalystics]

1. What we need is dungeons with bosses that drop transmo gear(without class restrictions, with a somewhat lower droprate(to give us a reason to come back there)
2. Some sort of daily quest hub, that gives us the opportunity to make something ( like mount ornaments saddles etc)
3. More 1 man scenarios but longer with other reward then gear (except if it is nice looking:P)
4. 1 man speed/challenge modes!
5. Mountraces (ground)
6. 1v1 arena (just for fun) after each 10 wins u will get an exotic bag

more to come

[Darmalus]

Heh. PvE gear is now much superior to PvP gear in world PvP.

What's that phrase gankers like to use so much? "Wold PvP isn't fair." I believe.

Besides, only the best PvE gear is better than PvP gear. Most people are in LFR gear or worse, drastically inferior to PvP gear.

[Ferocity]

WoW has an incredible amount of solo content. Hell you can get almost the item level of normal mode raiding w/o ever having to actually deal with another player, since LFR is pretty much like Unreal Tournament with Bots.

Even if to consider full VP geared toon with LFR gear in missing slots, it means worse than normal mdoe raiding level, especially if to consider awful itemization of VP items.

Where does the crap stop and peeps say "Dude. MMO. Not meant to be soloed."

Key factor in MMO is social interaction. E.g., if all raid gear would become BoE, it would lead to growth of social interaction element. Making it BoP and making high dexterity reqs for raids creates closed communities within playerbase and doesn't really support much social interaction.

About "solo factor". Raid-locked character progression was started by EQ, and it's legacy (FF 11 took some ideas there, then WoW, then most of other WoW clones). If you look on other kinds of MMORPGs (Yserbius, UO, RO, and many others) - your character progression was never locked to participating in some big group activities and having to schedule your time around it. Big group activities were present, they had nice rewards as well, but inability to participate in them on scheduled basis wasn't a lock on character progression in those games. Why aren't they called solo RPGs? It would be nice subject to think about for some people here. Scheduling gametime around game (especially with RNG-based reward system and 1-week respawns/lockouts) is one of the tricks used by raid-centric games in order to get subscribers p(l)ay for longer. And it doesn't work successfully, WoW was exception because it was "casual" version of EQ (and thus got tons of ex-EQ players), and went further with "casualization" in TBC and WotLK. Then it started to face heavy decline once develoeprs tried to go backwards and make various means of gating, heavily dexterity-based content, etc.

About gear. We had game recently - Diablo 3, where necessity of gear was heavily argued. In result, when people were done with Diablo Inferno - they could delete the game and play something else, because their character progression didn't work. Half-year or so after release D3 got Paragon Levels, and people's interest to the game started to slowly come back. But according to your logic - Paragon Levels are mistake, as you don't need them to kill Diablo Inferno?

Character progress is key factor in MMORPG, speaking that someone doesn't need it is stupid. World in WoW doesn't consist exclusively from raids, and raiders are quite a small minority. So why then they are a lock to character progression, with top gear being immensely more powerful than anything non-raider gets (and gets it through awful amount of time playing with RNG)? Which causes a huge impact on their combat capabilities in all out-of-raid areas. Arguing about why non-raiders need gear is same as arguing why heroic raider need gear. They are there for the challenge, and last boss shouldn't even drop any gear at all, as that gear won't help them anywhere.

At one point I'd wonder what would happen if Kittyvicious suggestion would come true exactly as (s)he wrote and even moreso - so that raid gear would be completely useless outside current raids (having zero stats when not in current raid). Why? Raiders need gear exclusively for raids, so let them. But I am sure that such change would cause big revolt from raiders. But maybe then they'd understand how people feel when most of character progression is locked behind raids, with immense difference in combat capabilities between raider and non-raider.

[notorious98]

1. I'm not going to go searching for your sources. If you want to throw out numbers as fact, point to the source directly. Until you do, your numbers should be regarded as bullshit.
2. They created WoW? So that means they worked on it 9+ years ago? Why would anything they have to say be relevant to the current breakdown of players or the current direction of the game?

According to the Daedalus Project, it's actually the opposite. As of the time of this study's release, 60% of female players and 55% of male players grouped with other people. However, there is still a decent chunk of players who play solo for differing reasons, the most prominent of which seems to be lack of time commitment.

[Ronduwil]

Making it easier is not the same as a requirement. Also, PvP gear makes all those activities easier too. Current PvP gear is 493 ilvl, way above what is required for dailies and farming. That's completely ignoring PvP servers, where PvP gear is almost a requirement for doing anything out in the world.

So by your logic once you get your first Heroic Ra-den kill you should stop being eligible for loot, right? I mean since you managed to kill him with your current set of gear you obviously don't require any more gear. That's about how much sense people make when they claim that non-raiders should cap out at 463 because all they do is Heroic Dungeons.

This attitude of, "Not only are we not going to put out any more content that is tailored for you, but we're also going to halt your gear progression," is what drives subscribers away in droves. When Blizzard only gave us two heroic dungeons in the first major Cataclysm patch it felt like they were shouting, "F U," on top of giving us the finger by having them cap out at ilevel 353 gear. It was fitting that they were troll instances.

[notorious98]

So by your logic once you get your first Heroic Ra-den kill you should stop being eligible for loot, right? I mean since you managed to kill him with your current set of gear you obviously don't require any more gear. That's about how much sense people make when they claim that non-raiders should cap out at 463 because all they do is Heroic Dungeons.

This attitude of, "Not only are we not going to put out any more content that is tailored for you, but we're also going to halt your gear progression," is what drives subscribers away in droves. When Blizzard only gave us two heroic dungeons in the first major Cataclysm patch it felt like they were shouting, "F U," on top of giving us the finger by having them cap out at ilevel 353 gear. It was fitting that they were troll instances.

While I generally agree with the idea that there should be a form of alternate advancement, your comments have actually been proven wrong. When the game was advancing at the highest rate with subscribers, the only way to truly advance your gear was through raiding. In Classic and TBC, there were no dungeons added that gave out gear that was even as good as raiding gear until 2.4 and Magister's Terrace. The reason why so many people were pissed about 4.1 had nothing to do with iLevel and everything to do with a complete lack of original content. ZG was new stuff, but ZA was basically the exact same thing as the original raid. Other than that, there were no new raids and little in terms of content.

[Paulosio]

I think this is a tricky one.

Blizzard tried dailies for casuals to slowly unlock gears on their own pace. But a lot of raiders jumped in and say they are being forced to do dailies and unlock gears at an extremely slow speed.

Blizzard created crafting for casuals to slowly get mats and create gear upgrades. But a lot of raiders jumepd in and say they are being forced to craft to prepare for raid.

If brawler or pet battle gives out any sort of significant rewards, you will hear raiders jump in and say now they are being forced to do brawlers and pet battle.

Basically, as soon as Blizzard add something for casual to unlock slowly for gear progression, raiders will jump in and moan about how slow it is. Then proceed to blame blizzard for forcing them to do all these extra stuff when all they wanted to do is raid. I think it will be extremely difficult for Blizzard to come up with a gear progression path for casuals to slowly progress on their own pace without raiders flipping the table and whine on forums. Even if Blizzard put in a flag that says "if you raid normal or heroic, these rewards will be blocked" to thawrt raiders feeling forced, raiders will still complain about casuals gettin "welfare epix" and scream game being dumbed down and unfair treatment.

So in the end, the problem is in the community and less on the game design imo.

Easy to blame raiders for making the progression paths you mentioned not be viable... the fact is a lot of none raiders didn't like dailies and complained that all the hubs were too time consuming for them etc.

[Aquamonkey]

So by your logic once you get your first Heroic Ra-den kill you should stop being eligible for loot, right? I mean since you managed to kill him with your current set of gear you obviously don't require any more gear. That's about how much sense people make when they claim that non-raiders should cap out at 463 because all they do is Heroic Dungeons.

This attitude of, "Not only are we not going to put out any more content that is tailored for you, but we're also going to halt your gear progression," is what drives subscribers away in droves. When Blizzard only gave us two heroic dungeons in the first major Cataclysm patch it felt like they were shouting, "F U," on top of giving us the finger by having them cap out at ilevel 353 gear. It was fitting that they were troll instances.

That gear is a reward for completing the hardest content in the game. It's a reward vs effort thing. Why should rewards be so high for content of such low effort you can AFK through?

I'm not against giving "casual players" high level rewards so long as it reflects the amount of effort required. LFR is not it. Just look at the old T0.5. It was almost as good as raid gear but came from 5man dungeons and required a lot of work. That was Vanilla's equivalent of LFR gear, but actually required people to put in some effort.

[Ronduwil]

While I generally agree with the idea that there should be a form of alternate advancement, your comments have actually been proven wrong. When the game was advancing at the highest rate with subscribers, the only way to truly advance your gear was through raiding. In Classic and TBC, there were no dungeons added that gave out gear that was even as good as raiding gear until 2.4 and Magister's Terrace. The reason why so many people were pissed about 4.1 had nothing to do with iLevel and everything to do with a complete lack of original content. ZG was new stuff, but ZA was basically the exact same thing as the original raid. Other than that, there were no new raids and little in terms of content.

It's the combination of "no content" in addition to "no gear" that I was complaining about. In BC you had to grind rep to even enter heroic dungeons, so the casual player always had something to work towards. In MoP you enter heroic dungeons as soon as you ding and you faceroll through them, gear or no gear, within maybe one or two days. Then you're done, unless you want to mindlessly grind out repetitive dailies for the chance to buy gear that's not even as good as what you can get from LFR.

[notorious98]

It's the combination of "no content" in addition to "no gear" that I was complaining about. In BC you had to grind rep to even enter heroic dungeons, so the casual player always had something to work towards. In MoP you enter heroic dungeons as soon as you ding and you faceroll through them, gear or no gear, within maybe one or two days. Then you're done, unless you want to mindlessly grind out repetitive dailies for the chance to buy gear that's not even as good as what you can get from LFR.

Honestly, it didn't take much to get to honored with any of the factions to be able to grab the key. More often than not, if you did every quest in that particular zone, you probably were already honored. There was very little grinding involved with entering any heroic dungeon in TBC. The problem with dungeons has everything to do with LFG. LFG eliminated the daily lockout and demanded the difficulty stay simple in exchange for convenience.

And the "no gear" didn't really matter. Considering there wasn't a new tier of gear in 4.1, why would you expect those dungeons to give you higher iLevel gear than what you could obtain in current raids? It was never like that in the past, so I don't know what would have irritated you about it. I mean, shit, the gear was still better than anything you could obtain in any heroic dungeon until that point. So, if anything, it should have actually made you happy.

---------- Post added 2013-06-17 at 10:56 PM ----------

I'm not against giving "casual players" high level rewards so long as it reflects the amount of effort required. LFR is not it. Just look at the old T0.5. It was almost as good as raid gear but came from 5man dungeons and required a lot of work. That was Vanilla's equivalent of LFR gear, but actually required people to put in some effort.

The best part about those dungeons is that they could last a couple hours. Those dungeons were so large but could never exist today because of LFG and the general lack of focus.

[Aquamonkey]

Honestly, it didn't take much to get to honored with any of the factions to be able to grab the key. More often than not, if you did every quest in that particular zone, you probably were already honored. There was very little grinding involved with entering any heroic dungeon in TBC. The problem with dungeons has everything to do with LFG. LFG eliminated the daily lockout and demanded the difficulty stay simple in exchange for convenience.

It originally required revered to get the heroic keys. It was reduced to honored quite a bit later.