Some ideas to make Azeroth great again.

[DrBaldhead]

I want to make Azeroth great again!

Here's my ideas. Most of them effect the leveling process rather than the endgame. And yes, I tried to send it to Blizzard. Now I want to see some opinions here.

1. Stop being a Single Player MMORPG. At least partly.
It's a good thing to make the content accessible. Another thing - making the players accessible and interesting. In WoW, you don't need anybody to see all the content.
How do you do that?
Make players to be interested in inviting each other not just because they are chat buddies (which is still good, of course), but because choice of a company actually matters.
The classes should be altered in such a way that gameplay would really change depending on who you have in your party.
Right now, the difference is really slight. Like, tank, healer, dps, that's pretty much all.
Who is the most actually social guy today? A tank or a healer. Who needs a dps? Nah, there are tons of them. If you're DPS, you're not a class or a person, you just provide numbers and try not to die.
Let's make it to "we need a shaman", "we need a rogue", "we need a mage" and so on.

1.1 Why not make class effects more flashy?
Let's make players assigned as party leaders gain additional abilities. Changing the party leader after starting the first fight in the instance will not grant anything to the new leader. If the leader leaves the party, special abilities are lost. In a raid there can't be more than 1 character with the leadership abilities per 6 characters.
Here's an example of what it could be:

• Party leader is a Warrior;
  Thanks to his immense strength, the warrior can singlehandedly throw a party member to the places normally unreachable. Or just move him away from the fire. Or into it
• Party leader is a Rogue;
  The rogue gets the ability to perform an exceptionally effective ambush on up to five monsters in the dungeon. 30% chance that the target is killed instantly. Otherwise the rogue steals a part of the target's equipment forcing it to fight without a weapon or an ability when it is pulled. Stealing can rarely result in gaining special items which are tradable.
  Doesn't break stealth. Doesn't work on bosses. Might work on adds with lesser chances.
• Party leader is a Paladin;
  The paladin can try to convert up to three sentient humanoids in the dungeon. 30% chance that the target join the party for the rest of the dungeon as the Paladin's servant. Otherwise the target is stunned in confusion for 1 full minute.
  Doesn't work on bosses and adds. DOES work on rares.
• Party leader is a Priest;
  When casting spells on sentient humanoids priest can occasionally drag out a part of the target's soul. This part takes the form of the target becoming a severely weakened version on it and fights on the priest's side until the target dies.
  Some monsters can (RARELY) open their minds to the priest giving out information that enables the whole party to start an optional quest. Some quests are repeatable, some are actually rare.
  Doesn't work on bosses and adds.
• Party leader is a Monk;
  All the players in the party gain the "Extreme meditation" ability. Each time they get to 10% of health or lower they start meditating for 5 seconds. In this state they are invulnerable and regain 10% of total health over 5 seconds. The effect can occur not more often then once in 2 minutes. You could see a similar ability at the Argent Tournament.
• Party leader is a Mage;
  The mage can create portals and disintegrate otherwise inoperable doors at certain places, to reach areas usually unreachable, or just find a shortcut.
• Party leader is a Warlock;
  Warlock can perform a quite long casting spell to create an invisible portal trap that can banish a monster that stepped on it directly into the twisting nether for a minute. Then it returns with severely lowered health or even dead. Demons return unharmed and even healed. Doesn't work on the monsters that don't walk.
  Doesn't work on bosses. WORKS on other players! They return alive but with low health. So it can be used to make a party member completely disappear and lose all aggro.
• Party leader is a Shaman.
  The shaman can commune with the collective spirit of one of the types of the creatures inhabiting the dungeon. Mostly it is about animals and other not very sentient monsters. Once the ritual is done, the creatures of this type might become non-aggro and occasionally side with the shaman, fleeing after the end of the fight.
  It's naturally the same thing Thrall had done to the Alliance horses making them drag their riders away from the battlefield in the book "Lord of the Clans".

The idea is - encourage people to assemble specific parties and search for the people they need. To encourage people to find party members that won't leave. Make people NEED each other a bit more.

Conclusion 1.
Should all these things make the fights easier? Yes. Let the dungeons be relatively hard when you burst through them unprepared and with random, but somewhat easier and noticeably different in gameplay when you actually think who's with you.

I mean, it's cool to make the content accessible. But MMORPG should be the place where you fight along fellow heroes. Let's make experience you get from fighting alongside certain characters a bit more unique.

2. Leveling.
Leveling now is BOOORING! It's the same over and over. The quests are cool and elaborate, but it's not an adventure, it's an amusement park. However, it's not easy to rework the old world. Cataclysm clearly showed that even slight renovation will leave you with much less resources to spend on something actually new than ever. Yet, the problem is still there - new people quit at level thirty being bored of same rotation over and over while after another several useless level you get yet another boring ability and realize that you have to get 20 more levels to actually do something cool.
With each expansion, the leveling process becomes more and more watered down. I sincerely believe, there are people at Blizzard who want to fix this part of the game, to make it something more than casual and boring pre-game.

My suggestions:

• All the abilities not mandatory for raiding should be acquired via class quests. All the trademark abilities should be acquired via the class quests.
  What was wrong with rogues getting the stealth ability only at level 15 after a quest where you are sick for two days? What was wrong with druids getting their sea lion from the long chain of swimming here and there? NOTHING. It was nice to see how your character actually gets his trademark abilities. Also, wouldn't it encourage the class identity idea we want to incorporate in Legion?
• Quest chains to advance between expansions. But not the usual quest chains.
  They would be needed to actually allow your character to level past 60, 70, 80 and so on. Moreover, such players wont see anyone higher than their max level, unless they are in a no-fight zone or in the same party. Nobody above their current max level would be able to gang them. Those quests won't be too hard, it should be like, "Time goes on" and whatever, although not lazy. I think we'll be mildly amazed how many people will voluntarily lock themselves within an era for THE SAME SUBSCRIPTION FEE. It'll be like semi-functional Vanilla/TBC/Wrath/Cata realm within an usual realm.
  Bestin and Slotz you say? My answer is - let them rot.
• Professions should be a part of leveling process. Return the profession quests.
  Already done, I know. Daily cooking quests, daily fishing quests and so on. I think it should affect the leveling more.
  Back in the old days there were open world quests that actually required you to use your professions like, craft this, craft that.
  I suggest to return the profession quest lines that would actually allow you to progress in the profession, so leveling it would be an adventure by itself.
• Reputation system needs a change and I'll tell about it in the next chapter.
• Leveled class skills for all classes!
  Rogues MUST learn to pick locks. Yet we don't need something like that underdeveloped lesser copy of enchanting used by Death Knights.
  An example:
  
  • Rogues - lockpicking (and add more locks to the game!)
  • Mages - food conjuring ("disenchant" lots of different food and after some time invested finally be able to conjure food WITH BUFFS!)
  • Paladins - the nation's hope (buff and heal NPCs you meet and do as much quests as possible to gain growing bonus to reputation gains and shop/repair discount over all other discounts. Everyone should help a well known and kind paladin. Maxed out, it allows paladin to spend very little money. Because don't you dare charge the holy warrior!)
  • Hunters - Survival/taxidermy (make tents that would let you logout and accumulate the resting xp and build minicamps allowing you to go there with your hearthstone and never ever visit taverns as any wilderness-loving hunter should, practice taxidermy and sell your work or donate it to the Explorer's league/Reliquary which would have a big detailed exposition that serves as your personal PokeDex)
  • Death Knights - let them be with runeforging, at least they have 58 boring levels less.
  And so on.

Conclusion 2.
Current Wow leveling is not an RPG. It's a repetitive arcade where you ding levels, grab items with higher ilvl and your abilities just pop out of nowhere.
There's must be immersion, the feeling that your character evolves beyond just numbers you can't really control. It's the player who must do cool things, not just the environment.
This might make the leveling process much longer. But who cares if you are already selling level 100 for money?

AN ALTERNATIVE:
You know what? Make all the classes heroic. Let them all start at lvl 98. And old content? Nah, throw it away. What's good of it rather than be a penalty for those who doesn't want to buy a character boost? However... Ah, it seems I've just realized what the sinister plan it is!

3. Reputation.
What is reputation nowadays? Two major things: gear and pets/mounts. If you've got a nice guild and actively raiding you don't really need that. If you're casual, well, maybe, although there also might be next patch that will nerf the raids and give you much better gear from the new quest chains. Pets and mounts? They don't affect your gameplay, unless they can repair something.

My main suggestion:
Let the all factions in the game provide permanent bonuses, which won't be mandatory, but relevant and useful throughout all the expansions. Let there be tiny bonus for honored, slight bonus for revered and cool and sometimes useful ability for exalted reputation. The latter can be a toned down ability of a class associated with the faction which is given to you regardless of what class you are. Also this should be done mostly for overworld factions. Those who inhabit only certain raids are already complex enough. However, that might be an interesting idea too... Well, for example:

• I'm now Revered with Stormwind. I get an additional bank slot.
• I'm now Exalted with Stormwind. The guards salute me, I get the ability to cast slightly toned down version of a certain paladin seal on myself.
• I'm now Exalted with Darnassus. The guards salute me and monsters have 50% less chance to daze me when I'm riding a cat-like mount.
• I'm now Exalted with Tranquillion. Now I get +5% crit chance against elite undead while in overworld.
• I'm now Revered with Argent Dawn and I get slightly downtoned "Turn undead" spell regardless of my class.
• I'm now Honored with Golden Lotus. I deal +3% damage to all evil constructs made by the Titans.
• I'm now Revered with Cenarion Expedition and I get ability to temporarily pacify certain beasts in overworld and dungeons.
• I'm now Exalted with Kirin-Thor and can polymorph non-player target for 10 seconds with a cooldown of an hour.
• I'm now Revered with Kirin-Thor and can occasionally absorb non-player spells in overworld, lowering the damage dealt by 75% and getting damage bonus on my generic attacks. The additional damage is considered to be from the same school as the spell absorbed.
• I'm now Exalted with League of Arathor and can perform something so awesome, other players will envy me!

Exalted abilities may be limited by the number of active abilities at a time. Similar to legendary passives at Diablo 3.

A guild can adjust reputation bonuses by completing special guild quests.

Conclusion 3.
The main idea is: the more you actually explore the game and interact with factions or just remarkable persons, the more options you get in the endgame. It might not make you overpowered (although we shouldn't be too afraid of that), but would make the experience cooler.

4. Attunements.
I want attunement quests to return. Yes, some people disliked this system, but with the quest mechanics invented after the Cataclysm it all can be so much better!
Actually, it's even sad that while WoW gained more and more options for story telling, there were less and less quests actually trying to fully utilize the new potential.

So, the suggestion:
Each raid boss gets an attunement quest chain. It ISN'T required to get to the boss. But, if the player completes it, he can enter the battle with the boss and thrash mobs in the same wing. For doing that, he will receive a buff which would rescale player's numbers to actually fight the boss as a normal raider.
Such attunement quest chain should be relatively long and hard. At the end there must be an encounter, sometimes designed for a group of 4-5 players, which will be hard and will simulate the boss' abilities. Attunements can send the players into both dungeons and the other raids.
Players who have already defeated the corresponding boss will get the buff mentioned above if they want to, but it might actually scale them down and the boss will begin to drop various cosmetic items or pets.
There can be a problem to find the sights where those quest chains would actually take place, but the phasing technology solves it radically.

Such measures will cause following benefits:

• You don't have to nerf the bosses;
• You don't have to hand out high level gear;
• You can expand the lore of each boss, add new experience to the encounter;
• Noobs can catch up without boring themselves waiting for groups;
• Geared up players can get a bit of replay-ability.

Conclusion 4.
Don't hand out items. Let people feel they've earned it. And don't listen to those who says that they've earned everything the moment they've paid for the subscription.

[Sierra85]

Basically you're argueing to decasualify the game and remove alot of quality of life changes?

I want to make Azeroth great again!

First step, build a wall.

[judgementofantonidas]

Basically you're argueing to decasualify the game and remove alot of quality of life changes?



First step, build a wall.

a really big wall

[Cyberowl]

First step, build a wall.

a really big wall

Around OPs with under 500 posts who think they can make WoW interesting with some shitty and annoying changes?

Take my vote!

[DanThePaladin]

I like the wall idea in the previous posts. I could support that.
The rest of the ideas I don't really give much for..

[Deleted]

Around OPs with under 500 posts who think they can make WoW interesting with some shitty and annoying changes?

Take my vote!

How about around Blizzard so they don't fuck with the game anymore and give it to the people from Nos (just so we can get that flame war starting right now)

Infracted: Don't derail the thread. Don't incite people into flame wars {MoanaLisa}

[Sam the Wiser]

Blizzard will never make Azeroth great again.

[Deleted]

There is nothing wrong with the game, there is just a massive lack of community, that is something you will only get with either very few servers without cross-realm, or in small niche games.

That old MMO community was fostered because it was in everyones best interests to get along, you didnt want to get a bad reputation because eventually people would remember your name and you'd be forced to level a new character to escape the stigma, if you were known from voice chat as a generally scummy guy, well though luck, time to switch servers.

Take a look at the RP communities, they are tight knit, know each other well and are largely unaffected by content drought because their main source of gameplay enjoyment is the RP between each other. The only reason why older MMOs felt like they had less of a content drought is because they hade more grind and more RNG involved. Either that or you really played more in order to chat with your online friends than actually playing the game.

I still greatly enjoy WoW for what it is, and I'm not dissillusioned enough to try and remember it for something it never was, but that doesnt mean I play it 24/7 non-stop, no... I play it from time to time when I feel like it, I have easily over 2-3 years total ingame time spent, the money was well spent IMO.

The reason why vanilla servers and such were so popular, werent the gameplay as much as the sense of community, you knew who people were.... I mean I tried playing on such servers, but.... I just missed my QoL changes, so many things back in vanilla, tbc and wrath were really awful to play around sadly.

Gaming is moving away from MMOs, as sad as that is to face, it's the truth. I mean MMOs were a niche to begin with, they only grew big due to WoW and later F2P titles, and the people who truly enjoyed that niche still do to this day.
I mean I loved EQ, I loved camping out in a zone with a few friends grinding mobs for hours and chatting along, but would I enjoy it today? No, I wouldnt, those friends are gone and the gameplay is not something I enjoy anymore.

The best thing WoW can do is move forward, and aim more along the line of a persistant world with gamemodes that you can jump into when you have 30,60,120 minutes to spare. And that is what they are doing, we got arenas, battlegrounds, world quests, dungeons, raids and well.... pet battles I guess? The point is, all these game modes take varying ammounts of time to complete, meaning there is something for pretty much everyone there. And that is the direction that WoW will have to take going forward if it is to survive tbh. (I mean WoW could survive on 1-2 million subs alone, and there are at least that many REALLY loyal fans out there).

OT: Your ideas aren't good, they are convuluted and would lead to massive class favoritism and well... Annoyance really.

[DrBaldhead]

OT: Your ideas aren't good, they are convuluted and would lead to massive class favoritism and well... Annoyance really.

Well, thanks for an actual opinion, I guess

Class favoritism is inescapable until there's no difference between the classes and thus no point in them at all. Right now the system recognizes class roles much more than character classes. It doesn't seem very good to me.

[Deleted]

First step, build a wall.

..a wall of text...
And apparently we're supposed to be paying for it

But yeah, all I see is "remove QoL, make everything tedious again"-changes. No thanks, I kinda like the way it is now.

[HordeFanboy]

Delete garrisons

[judgementofantonidas]

Around OPs with under 500 posts who think they can make WoW interesting with some shitty and annoying changes?

Take my vote!

oh no. mmo champ number of posts elitism.

[DrBaldhead]

..a wall of text...
And apparently we're supposed to be paying for it

But yeah, all I see is "remove QoL, make everything tedious again"-changes. No thanks, I kinda like the way it is now.

I'm trying to make things INTERESTING. An ADVENTURE. In a ROLEPLAYING game. And the presence of people like you, who really shouldn't be attending this game and play some more suitable genre, saddens me greatly.

Yet, thanks for your opinion. Actually, it gave me an interesting thought.

The main mistake of the modern WoW is not in controversial changes or some kind of "casualification". It's all just consequences.

The problem is, WoW has attracted so much people, that many of them actually don't like RPGs and don't want to play it the way it should be.

And now, when more and more people who liked the RPG aspect leave, Blizzard is trying to keep the player base together by remaking WoW into something it wasn't designed to be to begin with. Into a mix of suboptimal arcade, suboptimal action, suboptimal movie-like quest.

All this only reassures me that I was right when I cancelled my Legion pre-order. I don't want to play this mess of suboptimal mini-games built on an RPG engine with you guys. It's really becoming a facebook with WoW client instead of browser.

You think you like this game, but you really don't. And your reaction for my suggestions speaks for it. Or at least it seems to me that way. And I would be glad to be wrong.

[Stuffs]

Around OPs with under 500 posts who think they can make WoW interesting with some shitty and annoying changes?

Take my vote!

What on earth does his post count have to do with anything

[Vichan]

No /10chars

[Deleted]

The problem is, WoW has attracted so much people, that many of them actually don't like RPGs and don't want to play it the way it should be.

And now, when more and more people who liked the RPG aspect leave, Blizzard is trying to keep the player base together by remaking WoW into something it wasn't designed to be to begin with. Into a mix of suboptimal arcade, suboptimal action, suboptimal movie-like quest.

Indeed, you hit the nail on the head here. I commented this in some other thread as well just while ago.

MMORPG's are a very niche market. Only WoW managed to attract mainstream gaming interest for a while, but rest of the MMORPGs are still and have always been in the 500k-sub category. That's what the market for these games are. WoW was always anomaly. Many tried to copy the success but failed - for a while there was a definitive "MMORPG-bubble" as all the tripple-A companies were pushing out their MMOs - but none of them survived.. because there was no market and WoW just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Now the bubble burst couple of years ago. No one is making full-budget tripple-A MMOs anymore, because there's no market. WoW is also on it's way towards that niche where it belongs.

Blizzard and the developers are of course trying to delay that - and they've implemented a lot of features that have nothing to do with classic RPGs - like automated queue/lobby stuff.

In the end, the players who are left are those who love the MMORPG genre, but the game they're playing is nothing like MMORPG.

[Deleted]

How about around Blizzard so they don't fuck with the game anymore and give it to the people from Nos (just so we can get that flame war starting right now)

Oh so you want the game to stagnate for 12 years and the game never survive more then the first 3 month? as stupid as the ops idea....

[Deleted]

Oh so you want the game to stagnate for 12 years and the game never survive more then the first 3 month? as stupid as the ops idea....

What is it now? Stagnate for 12 years or die after 3 months, you cannot have both...