How Would You Make WoW Harder?

[Jayded1]

actually, it was harder.

Harder to level your toon and profs.
Harder to farm whatever was needed.
Considering raids had only ''heroic'' mode, they were also much harder to get into and unforgiving.
Even 5 man heroics were harder and longer.

Actually it wasnt. it was MUCH easier. You have a bad memory or you were just bad then.

[Sylreick]

Harder? No, I don't think harder is a great thing to push (except possibly in 5-mans... make them at least a little challenge, let raid gear be their nerf).

There are things I would like to see that would possibly make me enjoy the game a bit more, though.
1. Player progression while leveling (talents are practically gone, and yeah we get skills still... but we got skills back then, this argument is invalid).
2. Have mechanics that can be reduced/avoided by having the player interact with the environment, whether damaging a powering tower/closing a gate that spawns adds or other similar effects.
3. Add a way to ignore a player, rather than just the character they're on.
4. Provide some mini-games that are based in the world (pet battles weren't a bad start, but they're not for everybody). Some ideas would be flying restricted zones with jumping puzzles, dungeons in world that are phased for parties of 5 (but with the new technology to scale with group size from 1-5) where there are elites or more powerful mobs and a few bosses that reward gear or cosmetic items.
5. A new character progression at max level that isn't gear based, but still has a meaningful impact on gameplay.
6. Separate PvP and PvE already... they are pretty much separate games already, just separate them so spells won't be affected by the opposite form of playing.
7. Have a safeguard for LFR, rather than improving drop rate each MCP (there are two ideas I could see going with, one being have a stacking buff that increases chance for items to drop and each drop you get reduces the buff by half, the other idea would be making LFR of the previous tier drop limit removed so you can run it more than once a week to access current content a little faster... more in line with 5-mans of the ICC/DS era).
8. Improve gathering game play, something more fun than fly to node + click + tap foot for a couple seconds = profit.
9. Allow transmog enchants (mainly cosmetic for weapons).
10. Define roles of specs more, the idea of all specs being viable in both PvE and PvP is a good one... but it isn't as fun as it sounds (and you get a lot of people complaining about their spec not being equal to the others, and it goes on because this effects nerfs/buffs which will snowball into the other type of gameplay that didn't need a change).*
11. Redefine specs within themselves (make assassins THE sneaky dagger quick one, combat to the more fortified/less stealth reliant dual swords/maces/axes/fists brawler, and subtlety would be more reliant on bleeds/poisons/tools and not so heavily reliant on weapons... for one example).**


*Note on 10, wouldn't be necessary... if they separated PvE and PvP.
** This could open up potential for variants, more in pures... but still in many of the other classes. Rogues could have subtlety be a ranged spec, using (x)bows/guns/thrown (but optional melee, if preferred... as in skills would activate from both melee and ranged weapons). This would be a large change, though, but I'd really want to see different specs with very different abilities (more like the different lock specs currently, or druids).

All of this would make the game so much more fun. Need more variation in content (not just combat content like quests/scenarios/dungeons/raids, but more like pet battles and to use an example of non-combat mini-games... the temples in ffx where you worked with glyph orbs to open certain doors for better loot and work your way through the area), and in specs/abilities. Could use more personal progression options, other than leveling and gathering gear (possibly remove personal improvements from being a certain profession, and put them into something else, that everyone can access regardless of profession, and making profession items matter a little more).

Eh, obviously this is a highly opinionated post, but I would love to get back into the game.

[Mercadi]

Double all damage. Make those healers sweat! Make healing cost blood instead of mana.

[Al Gorefiend]

I'd just make character progression more like EverQuest II.

Y'know, the literal spiderweb of a talent system, overflowing with choices ranging from racials, to spec, to class.

Then theres the end-game progression thats completely seperate from everything else you've done while leveling.

WoW's progression system feels like holding the hands of players to 90.

[Dabrix32]

1. remove self healing from everyone except healers. This is a MMO people should want to group together as they level. No one wants to solo from 1-90 thats boring as hell. If you want to do that then play a FPS.

2. Dungeons should be hard and test each group. Instances at the start of cata and during TBC were perfect. No one wants faceroll stuff because its boring and just puts you to sleep because theres no reason at all to pay attention when its impossible to die. Every fight should have 1 shot mechanics from 5 man bosses to o course raid bosses

3. remove instancing. Everquest was so much fun because raiding meant you were up against the other guilds on your server. If you werent the first to amass your forces then someone else got the kills. Laziness should NOT be rewarded. Also it was much more satisfying to get kills cause you also cockblocked someone else who wont get any kills until respawn

4. Bring back gating and attunements for everything. Bring back required rep to run heroic modes for 5 mans

5. Remove valor/justice vendors. You either get your gear the correct way by putting in work and effort doing raids or you wear shit gear. I mean if you dont even raid why do you even need raid gear quality gear in the first place

[Archangel Tyrael]

Actually it wasnt. it was MUCH easier. You have a bad memory or you were just bad then.

And you proved that it wasn't because you said I was bad....

right.

Again, tell me how it was harder when you didn't have

Flying in Azeroth
Reputation gains were much harder
Attunements
Only one mode of raiding
Gear was much harder to come by
Leveling professions / alts were much more intense and time consuming
No LFR
actual talents which people claimed to be ''cookie cutter'', yet the random joe somehow fucked them up pretty bad

Oh, by the way, I just played this game from Vanilla to WotLK in a server first guild but hey, surely I was bad.

So again, thanks for enlightening all of us with that massive proof that the game was easier back then.

[darsh333]

And you proved that it wasn't because you said I was bad....

right.

Again, tell me how it was harder when you didn't have

Flying in Azeroth
Reputation gains were much harder
Attunements
Only one mode of raiding
Gear was much harder to come by
Leveling professions / alts were much more intense and time consuming
No LFR
actual talents which people claimed to be ''cookie cutter'', yet the random joe somehow fucked them up pretty bad

Oh, by the way, I just played this game from Vanilla to WotLK in a server first guild but hey, surely I was bad.

So again, thanks for enlightening all of us with that massive proof that the game was easier back then.

Everything you mentioned was tedious. By no means was any of that hard it was simply time consuming.

[jbombard]

Everything you mentioned was tedious. By no means was any of that hard it was simply time consuming.

Well depending on how you look at things, simply walking 5 feet to kill a mob could be viewed as tedious by some people. When it comes to just moving around flying is great. When it allows you to complete quest objectives without fighting any monsters at all, I think it makes things easier. Of course you could say that fighting monsters is tedious, and I could say you should have to fight hundreds of monsters just to get from one point to the other, but really the balance lies somewhere in between. Some things are just tedious others provide the pacing and excitement needed for the overall health of the game.

I would be happy if they adjusted the pace of progression to what it was in vanilla or even BC.

[Archangel Tyrael]

Everything you mentioned was tedious. By no means was any of that hard it was simply time consuming.

Tedious to you, many people liked it.

Also, as I said, if it was so easy many people would have raided back then, that wasn't the case, because even if you didn't factor in the time consuming process, you still had raids without the ''I don't have a brain'' mode on.

You couldn't simply click a button and OH LOOK, I'm defeating a version of this boss made for 5 years olds, get more than decent enough loot to help your way (specially considering how little ''effort'' there is) and then do the boss again, knowing already how he works, and having much better gear than you could possibly have in TBC or Vanilla before raiding.

And also, again, on leveling - if it was more time consuming then one could argue that it was harder.

And it was IN FACT HARDER, because you couldn't ''lulz spam 1'' on a group of mobs/elite and kill all of them and proceed.
Elites were actually that, ELITE mobs, who would stomp your shit if you tried enganging them on your own.

[jbombard]

Tedious to you, many people liked it.

Also, as I said, if it was so easy many people would have raided back then, that wasn't the case, because even if you didn't factor in the time consuming process, you still had raids without the ''I don't have a brain'' mode on.

You couldn't simply click a button and OH LOOK, I'm defeating a version of this boss made for 5 years olds, get more than decent enough loot to help your way (specially considering how little ''effort'' there is) and then do the boss again, knowing already how he works, and having much better gear than you could possibly have in TBC or Vanilla before raiding.

And also, again, on leveling - if it was more time consuming then one could argue that it was harder.

And it was IN FACT HARDER, because you couldn't ''lulz spam 1'' on a group of mobs/elite and kill all of them and proceed.
Elites were actually that, ELITE mobs, who would stomp your shit if you tried enganging them on your own.

Did you raid in vanilla? You had tons of people with "I don't have a brain mode on" and it seemed like somebody was always afk. Trying to get 40 people to do anything was like herding sheep. The boss mechanics themselves weren't terribly difficult, people simply had less tools to work with.

[ChaosWolf]

Only problem would be that there wouldn't even be 25 people in total on such a realm

True. People who brag and complain and people who can back up such things with proof are two completely different animals.

[Nearmyth]

I'm not sure its fair to say that the game is too linear for new players. The old world in particular has strong structure and direction now, but that is obvious to us because we are looking back at the entire leveling journey. For a newcomer to the game, or the genre entirely, each level and zone is a new experience, with no real idea of what is coming next.

I leveled a lot of alts pre-Cata, and plenty more in the post-Cata old world. Quest flow and story telling were vastly improved by the remake. More quest hubs, more places to go, and you can always go back to a city to find out what zones you ought to be in for your level. Before Cataclysm, the world was large, obscure, and easy to get lost in. In my first few months of WoW, I did far too many green quests until I found some leveling guides to point me in the right direction. "Efficient leveling" required bouncing across both continents, hunting down quests from multiple points in a zone before starting even one of them, and grinding to finish out levels before you could head in the next zone.

It's been a long time since I was "brand new", but I don't think newcomers are finding it a completely effortless experience. I've had very little playtime lately; all I've really done this spring is level a dwarf and a tauren through the teens, sans heirlooms. I've seen a fair share of dead toons around the low level zones, and even got myself killed a few times because I didn't pay attention to my miniscule, heirloomless HP. Dungeons were fun, even if I was coasting in the wake of the heirloomed party members, but PvP was full of swift deaths.

If anything, to help new players compete better, I think heirlooms ought to have a stat nerf, to be on par with greens of their level. This would keep new players on a more even footing with veterans who are leveling alts, while still letting those vets get to level cap faster.

Don't get me wrong, I love the new quests and the hubs in each of the zones. I think the questing itself has vastly improved. It just doesn't compare to the drive, danger, and mystery the old world had. I guess it's better for me to more directly say that the questing is too "safe." New players wouldn't know the difference, of course. They wouldn't really mind or care. But that's something I've noticed is lacking in mmo's, and games in general, the danger and mystery. What I bolded in your post is exactly what made the adventure more memorable, and more like an "adventure." It'd be cool if they could find a good balance between the large, obscure world to get lost in and the seamless stories and leveling content and questlines to experience.
But now this is getting less in terms of difficulty, and more in terms of actual progression and leveling it seems lol.

[Archangel Tyrael]

Did you raid in vanilla? You had tons of people with "I don't have a brain mode on" and it seemed like somebody was always afk. Trying to get 40 people to do anything was like herding sheep. The boss mechanics themselves weren't terribly difficult, people simply had less tools to work with.

I don't understand, what does ''being afk'' has to do with what I was saying?

Also, - yes, I did raid in Vanilla, but only up until BWL, sadly I couldn't do AQ.
(also, not sure if you noticed, but I wasn't ONLY speaking of Vanilla, but also of TBC - are you implying that Kael/Vashj, for example, were easy at the time?)

[Anastacy]

Just because the game was hard for you back in Vanilla/BC doesn't mean it as hard for everyone

WoW was never, ever hard (barring the challenging dungeons/raids, which is a whole 'nother beast, and they've only been amped up since). Leveling was tedious (and doable 1-60 and 1-70 completely solo). Keys/attunements were tedious. Reputation farms were tedious.

Sure, there was the oddball "group quest" that, yeah, you'd get fucked if you tried to solo (duh? not HARD to figure out), or the oddball "solo challenge" type quests (Hunter bow/staff and the Benediction/Anathema), but those were too few and far between to be able generalize the whole game as hard.

TEDIOUS DOES NOT EQUAL HARD, people. It. Doesn't.

It means boring.

Dailies, in their current iteration (and abundance), are also tedious. Do you really wanna tell me that they're hard?

Edit: Wanna make WoW hard again?

Ban MMO-Champ and any WoW related "infoz" site.

Ban YouTube videos of boss kills (specifically, the FatBoss-esque strategy guides).

Get rid of DBM, BigWigs, and any "nicety" type add-ons.

(or, since none of those would actually work, limit your own personal usage of these to 0 [and try to convince your guildies to do the same, without them laughing at you])

No more PTR testing, and if a class is broke in Patch 5.4, it stays broke until "Patch 5.4.2".

[Heathy]

there were still info sites back in classic, allakhazam for example had some strategies and complete loot lists.

[Anastacy]

there were still info sites back in classic, allakhazam for example had some strategies and complete loot lists.

And?

Take them all away, insta-hard-game.

I did say "and any WoW infoz site", yeah?

I wasn't making a comparison between now and then. Still, take them ALL away. Game = harder.

[Pejo]

I am still in hope of seeing a form of monster power in WoW as I am all for select your own difficulty. It would be very interesting for instances (only available to premades I guess?) and out in the open world. Sadly, it is too easily exploited and I shan't have my fun.

[Heathy]

because the internet exists it won't make any difference, when one team figures out a good strat they'll find somewhere to post it.

[whatthefudge]

The game has such a wide range of difficulties. If you want hard content, it is there, you have to choose to do it. If the hardest content available isn't challenging enough for you that the game doesn't make you feel fulfilled then you're in a small minority and WoW just probably isn't the game for you.


I'll stand by my thoughts that the harder content already exists and 99% of the people that don't do it either aren't capable or don't want to do it and very few genuinely find it not challenging.

[FuxieDK]

Create 'hard-mode' servers, or whatever name you want to give them.

Flat 150% increase in mob strength
50% + in required experience per level
No LFG or LFR
No crossrealm features of any kind
Weak, slow spawning guards
Flying mounts have a 10 second cast time and require to be out of pvp combat for 2 minutes
No transfer services of any kind, must level up from beginning if start on server
No badges / points / valor of any kind
Raiding is 25 man only

+150% strength? Health or damage? If damage, then they one-shot everything.. Won't work..
+50% xp required doesn't make it harder, only more tedious..
Weaker and slower guards makes it easier, NOT harder..
Flying change is rediculous..
No transfer server, already exist.. Those servers are labelled "New players"..
No badged etc will bloat loot tables even more than they already are.. Won't make the game harder, only more frustrating, that your loot never drops..
Only 25man raiding, will kill the server.. The majority today prefer 10man..

Basically, the only good suggestions in your lst is the CrossRealm/LFG/LFR removal...