Does it feel like the player skill level is dropping drastically?

[Chemii]

I highly doubt any casual player is 880+ item level. And if they are they are 1% of the casual player base. Raider are still the best geared out there. Even more so when NH comes out.

The gap is still far smaller than it has ever been, I personally wouldn't say 880 is even that well geared now, which is the point I was making.

However, I do agree that once tier gear is released and can only be obtained in its mythic version from killing those bosses, that will separate the good from the bad.

[Deleted]

And now you aren't problem solving? Have you been actually playing the game at the hardest levels? Only because the game has easy mode added doesn't mean it has become easier than before. Top gameplay is miles away in difficulty from what it was in Vanilla and TBC.

You may still be problem solving (in the same way there used to be a small amount of micromanagement back in the day) but it is incredibly dumbed down compared to what you used to do back in the day. That's also why blizzard has a lot of troubles balancing things.

You tend to see design flaws as good design. The game should challenge your skill. It should not challenge your time to farm stuff. Also, if things are 1 shotting ppl something is wrong. And that was the whole "difficulty" in early TBC. With later fixes that issue was gone and heroics weren't really that hard.

I m obviously talking about the raid and dungeons bosses. No legion bosses have mechanics we haven't seen before in previous expansions.

Also, I don't agree Legion is holding your hand. WoW still does really poor job of actually teaching you play your toon. They are trying to improve on that field but imo it's still not enough. When someone starts to play a game (especially multiplayer) they should learn all the basics from the game. WoW still requires from people too much of browsing external sources. That is still a huge flaw. There is nothing wrong with theorycrafting but that should be only needed for ppl who really want to push themselves to the max.

Legion is holding your hand because you no longer have to choose which skills you have to use for your spec. Before the revamp of the specialization system you used to have most of the class spells available to each player of any given class regardless of their specialization. Also, from legion and the expansions hereafter, you started to be able to do things you used to have a lot of trouble doing before with a good amount of coordination in your group (like holding aggro, solo tanking lots of adds, AOE healing, and so on) automatically. As that stuff is now performed automatically, and as the bulk of pre 3.0 gameplay was to coordinate to attain the same result, Blizzard obviously had to shift the difficulty somewhere else (the Naxx 25 debacle should be a good indication as to the result of the dumbing down of the battle system, as everybody steamrolled on the instance).

You tend to see design flaws as good design. The game should challenge your skill. It should not challenge your time to farm stuff. Also, if things are 1 shotting ppl something is wrong. And that was the whole "difficulty" in early TBC. With later fixes that issue was gone and heroics weren't really that hard.

No offense but you need to go in mythic 15 + to start playing at the level of difficulty of the olds TBC dungeons heroics (even the nerferd 2.1 versions were harder than +6 current mythic +). Also let me remind you that at the beginning of TBC dungeon gear was actually better than T4 gear, so I don't really know where you pull that stuff requirement in TBC from, as I can guarantee you the farm to attain BiS is way longer in legion.

[Airwaves]

You might want actually read the post to not miss the point.
Hint : the whole post was about 5-man instances mainly.
At least we can notice that the L2R skill hasn't improved since Vanilla, despite supposedly being used constantly, so I can guess it's the same for skills in game.

Please. I was a pally tank. You could just aoe everything down just like today. Even on my warrior I could just aoe everything down by just watching threat meters.

[Airwaves]

The gap is still far smaller than it has ever been, I personally wouldn't say 880 is even that well geared now, which is the point I was making.

880 isn't that geared? 880-892 is the best item level you can get atm. And we aren't even in the first raid tier of legion yet. And the gap is not smaller. Its dam bigger. The dps difference between a new 110 and a raid geared player has never, ever been this large.

[Akka]

Please. I was a pally tank. You could just aoe everything down just like today. Even on my warrior I could just aoe everything down by just watching threat meters.

Typical forum hero bullshit, trying to pass chestbanging as an argument about the game. And failing on both accounts.

[Deleted]

There are more chances you will meet and gauge other players are their skill.
Most players are not good, because good players are not the normal, they are the upper echelon. This is why you will think player skill dropped, but you are just meeting more players that are lower skilled, and thus think the whole general population is more unskilled as a fact.

Logical fallacy my friend.

[Raiju]

Nothing has changed in skill level you are just bad at evaluating ilvl. 880 is not to be unexpected from someone who's never raided right now.

[epLe]

Every expansion Blizzard lowers the difficulties.
This makes skill level of the player base drop proportionally.

Vanilla > TBC = 40m to 25m, huge difference in difficulty
TBC > Wrath = 10m.. So easy none even considered real raiding.
Wrath > Cata = LFR was introduced..
Cata > MoP = Flexible raids.. Lets carry some more...
MoP > WoD = HFC.. The most cleared instance ever....
WoD > Legion = Ability prune, Lets get rid of all the "wrong" buttons some may press.

[Chemii]

880 isn't that geared? 880-892 is the best item level you can get atm. And we aren't even in the first raid tier of legion yet. And the gap is not smaller. Its dam bigger. The dps difference between a new 110 and a raid geared player has never, ever been this large.

Again, missing the point. I'm not interested enough to go through it again, it's a pretty simple concept. Better players, used to have much better gear than bad players. Now item level is not a fair judgement of player skill. It's not rocket science.

[Sengel]

The plural of anecdote is not data

[Akka]

There are more chances you will meet and gauge other players are their skill.
Most players are not good, because good players are not the normal, they are the upper echelon. This is why you will think player skill dropped, but you are just meeting more players that are lower skilled, and thus think the whole general population is more unskilled as a fact.

Logical fallacy my friend.

That makes no sense at all. There isn't even an action-consequence link in your post - you can only encounter "more players" a relative to a previous rate of encounter, which is left completely untouched by your weird postulate.

[lordzed83]

well now im affride to tank anything in M+ pugs below ilvl of 875 Requirement. Had 3 groups in +8 COS that i left due to SHITLOADS OF WIPES !!!! Body pulls everywhere. In one group we wiped 6 times on second boss...... SECOND FUCKING BOSS and that was 870 ilvl minimum with DH RET Warlock as dp[s could not kill adds and keept dying from fucking volcanic WTF is going on !!!!

[Deleted]

ingame groupfinder made pugs much more easily available to any player in WoW. prviously, when you had to use forums/exterrnal resources to find pugs you could be sure that the found people at least had some level of dedication and were ready to put in some effort into the success of the group. With the addition of the two button group finder ingame all these properties vanish.

I particularly experienced this when tranisitioning from MoP to WoD when doing challenge mode runs: in MoP I found all of my groups through the Bnet forums and was fairly successful (finished gold on all classes). In WoD, however, groups were mostly formed through the group finder and I had a very hard time finding a sufficient amount of people through the forums. The groupfinder groups I tried were, in general, also of much lower quality. I stopped after my third class and luckily blizz made the weapons available account wide through the transmog system at the end of WoD.

tl;dr: accessibility lowers the quality of groups.

[Cannibalus]

Statisticly, the majority of the people on Earth are of average or even below average intelligence. Same thing applies here. It's just statistics, you have let's say 1 good pug out of 5. Skill has increased over the expansions imo, because players have more opportunities to practice vs. let's say in TBC/Vanilla where you didn't have many skills to practice around or content, most people ass-licked their way into good guilds and were hand-held through dungeons and raid bosses till they started to get good.

[Deleted]

Retarded to observe something so wrong.

The fights are getting more complex. Expecting people are getting worse, yet clearing it it in more steady fashion, just tells me another misconception BS thread.

Sorry for wording, but it just makes me rage.

[Cracked]

This thread just about made my day.

No, player skill has been increasing linearly from the launch of WoW to this day. There are dips after each expansion as new systems are implemented and classes change a bit, but that is quickly overcome.

Reasons why you might feel pugs are harder than before can be many fold, bad choice of puggers, content got a lot harder than in the past (sans EN), bad pug leaders, wrong time to pug..

[iperson]

If anything, player skill is getting better overall.

I'm sorry you're having bad luck with PUGs, but the number of organized guilds/groups is high, and oftentimes the people using them are using them precisely because they don't belong to one of those - sometimes for very good reason. But consider what boss encounters were like in previous expansions; Burning Crusade's boss mechanics are a joke compared to even 5 man heroic dungeons from Legion. Players are usually able to complete these encounters without much difficulty, so I would say that overall the player skill is high compared to 10 years ago.

Have to agree. In xpacs past pugging a group for mythic +7,8,9 difficulty would have been out of the question for me because I don't suffer fools well. I'm routinely getting in pugs that 2-3 chest these runs in legion. To the OP, if the only thing in common to all your fail groups is you, then maybe you're just not as good as you think you are...

[Akka]

Retarded to observe something so wrong.

The fights are getting more complex. Expecting people are getting worse, yet clearing it it in more steady fashion, just tells me another misconception BS thread.

Sorry for wording, but it just makes me rage.

Simplistic analysis by a simplistic mind.
What makes a fight hard is not the clutter, it's the tuning. You can put twenty abilities on a boss, if all of them tickle then it's still easier than a single ability which kills you.

Stop being part of the mindless "bosses have more abilities, so they are harder herp derp" crowd, and actually walk the walk and fire up your brain to think.

This thread just about made my day.

No, player skill has been increasing linearly from the launch of WoW to this day.

Seems you people live in Video Game World, where people skills can only increase.
Protip : real world is not Skyrim, you only improve if you practice and are challenged, otherwise skill DEcrease.
Mythic 5-men have nothing challenging in them, M+ up to 10 is still easier than TBC heroics, all classes have tons of "oh shit"-button. There is little reason why the skill of these player would INcrease.

[Deleted]

Simplistic analysis by a simplistic mind.
What makes a fight hard is not the clutter, it's the tuning. You can put twenty abilities on a boss, if all of them tickle then it's still easier than a single ability which kills you.

Stop being part of the mindless "bosses have more abilities, so they are harder herp derp" crowd, and actually walk the walk and fire up your brain to think.

Alright.

Say we think that Rag from MC IS OMFG HARD.

Good, compare him to Ilgynoth.

I swear to God the only thing that dropped is the IQ of this community.

[henningsen]

if you are the maker of the groups, their proving ground accomplishment shuld lightup when you mouseover the player, i judge random players i invite to my group form their performance in there