Are you happy with the direction WOW is heading?

[In Ogres We Trust]

In terms of game mechanics... yes and no.
In terms of the lore... no.
In terms of class options... yes and no.
In terms of race/class combinations... no.
In terms of racial and cosmetic options... no.

[WowIsDead64]

Their direction of development has been wrong since Cata. Their current direction is the worst one - direction towards Diablo 3 kind of game. Game is no longer RPG, cuz RPG games usually have something beyond endless grind of character power just for the sake of grinding even more character power.

[Aeula]

No. I'm really not.

I've been increasingly uncomfortable with the direction the game is heading since Legion launched. It feels like every time they fix an issue I have with the game they add two things I hate.

[Tradu]

Reward systems and systems in general(AP, legendaries, WF/TF, professions) are going in the opposite direction of what I'd like to see(although 7.2/7.2.5 improved the terrible state they were in before a lot)
Raids/dungeons, quests(including WQs), art and music are good as always, although some of the gimmick mechanics in raids/dungeons get annoying very quickly.
Communication(including patch/hotfix notes) is godawful and getting worse.
Class design is getting worse, and the "class fantasy" excuse lets Blizzard get away with it because people buy it.
Item design is also pretty bad, trinkets are basically irrelevant outside of a few outliers, set bonuses and legendaries are for the most part pretty boring(or QoL things that should be baseline), and looking at the legendaries they added in 7.2.5 they started running out of ideas for new effects, so they just copy/pasted even more versions of the D3 Fan of Knives dagger.

So overall no, I don't agree with the direction, but I still enjoy playing the game(for the most part)

[RoKPaNda]

So far I'm quite happy with it. The only thing I don't like is the RNG nature of legendary items. I do however like Titanforging and I think that's one of the best systems Blizzard has implemented in recent years. I understand that if you're in that top 2% that will push the game to it's limits to get every single tiny leg up that you can that the titanforging system isn't fun, but for everyone else it's fantastic. I like that I can go into a previous raid tier and have a very very slight chance of getting an upgrade. It's nice.

I like the raid content of this expansion, I like Mythic+, and with world quests / invasions the outdoor world feels more alive than it has in a very long time. I get more for my money which is always nice.

[ItachiZaku]

Every expansion has had stuff I haven't liked, but there has always been more I have liked than I have not. And some of the more major issues (legion alts) were cleared up rather quickly.

[Wishblade]

Yep, I'm quite content with what WoW's up to.

Especially with how patches have been handled in Legion so far. Won't mind that pace continuing in the future with the variety of different content included.

Now I'm someone who's typically very slow in coming up with criticism about the things I like so at the time of writing these words I can't think of anything I immediately dislike, but now that I've given it some time I can complain some more about the Warrior class hall and campaign, about how I think they could've come up with something better.

But among the good things there's the variety in patches that I already mentioned, from your standard raids to solo content like Brawler's Guild, even though people can help out there slightly, and the latest example of Deaths of Chromie.

Going a bit further back I've enjoyed how the story progression throughout expansions, how we've had hints and secret clues leading to what's coming next, and just in general how the events of each expansion carries over rather than suddenly Deathwing or the Lich King starts messing with us.

Now can I end this off with something that I feel is somewhat meh about WoW at this moment in time, hoping it won't continue into the future expansions?

I guess I'll go with the overabundance of class content. As awesome as it's been with a variety of stories and content for specific classes, I think I'd rather we stick with an overall storyline that we all participate in and save the class content for the occasional green fire questline or a simple toy or added dialog due to class choice and location of current events.

But overall, yes, I'm quite happy with WoW's direction.

[Queen of Hamsters]

You mean forward?

Of course.

And if Legion's quality and quantity of content will be the norm going forward, then I'm more than happy with that as well.

[DesoPL]

Questing - yes
Raids - yes
Dungeons - yes
Loot - No. Please remove titanforging, I shouldn't be disappointed when I get a piece of gear to drop.
Artifacts - yes, alternate player progression is cool
Story - before Legion I would have said hell no, but they're on the right track now
Class fantasy - mostly, theres still a few specs being experimented with
Class balance - mostly, theres still a few garbage specs tuning wise. And everybody knows which ones lmao
Flying - No. Pathfinder has been used as an excuse to not give proper rewards for max level questing & reputation for far too long.
Zone design - No, I vastly prefer huge open flying-focused zones like in Northrend.

Pretty much of this but few things from me.

Grind - Nope. AP grind is needed to do any mythic content or something in raids. I quited this rat race.
Attractions - Kinda yep and no. Mainly i keep myself occupied by world quests everyday, but from time to time i do some weekly events like timewalking.

[ComputerNerd]

I can definitely say that I am not happy with the way profession went.

With a lot of other things, it works still fine for me. Enough that I will continue to play.

I am rather more mixed with professions.
RNG element of high ranks which alone might have been less of an issue if it were not for how ranks work.
Earlier expansions had a lower enchant, and a higher one derived from it.
That is in my opinion how ranks should have worked, offering an additional choice instead of one that nobody on a lower rank can compete with.
I like some of the story progression in them though.

[infinitemeridian]

Lore is terrible this expac, don't know why people think otherwise. WoD was more interesting than this, even if it was disjointed.

World quests are boring and monotonous. There's barely any variety (What happened to the "1000+" different world quests? I feel like I see the exact same ones on the map every day.

Raids and dungeons are good.

Art design and models are great and definitely getting better every expac.

The zones this expansion have been absolutely terrible though - they were cool for a little while, but apart from Stormheim, they're boring and annoying to traverse. There's also not enough of them.

Class design is decent - I think most of the classes have a decent base to improve upon even if the current iteration is not as fun as it could be.

I could case less about rng/titanforging/legendaries, though I would definitely see some tweaks (Can't TF above your difficulty, legendaries are utility only). These cater to the majority of WoW players and only a handful seem to be up in arms over them.

[Tobs92]

Overall, absolutely.
But recently I found myself to be extremely unmotivated to play, because I lost the feeling of progressing my weapon.
Concordance kinda killed the fun I had. Once it's reached it's simply meh.

[tikcol]

Blizzard should just update LFR ilevel to be on par with the other difficulties. LFR isn't easy. It's actually quite hard when push comes to shove. We're dealing with a lot of strangers put together by a random system and we have to immediately coordinate everyone into a proper group in order to complete the raid.

The difficulty of mechanics gets overshadowed by the immediate problem of lack of coordination between players. Which is the real RPG experience. There's no wowhead.com or a raider's journal in a true rpg.

I just think they should stop forcing players into social situations. It's just bad design when I'm forced to deal with people when I don't feel like it but I feel like doing a piece of content. That piece of content should be available to me anyway. Guilds play a huge role in this, that's why moving forward guilds should start being replaced with better systems.

As a whole, WoW has got a lot of problems that have no solution on sight which bothers me. The social problem is one, the LFR rewards and lack of rpg elements to the game bring any love I once held for the game back.

[Sylar Hao]

I have only 3 issues with Legion:

- The artifacts: not only it's an endless grinding. It also makes your character less powerful than anybody with more AP farmed. No matter what, you'll never really catch up. Also, from a "lore" point of view I hate that a weapon is more powerful than my own character, some specs don't even start working properly until you reach certain trait, it's absurd in my eye, I am the one who's wielding the weapon, so I should be much more powerful than the weapon itself. The artifact shouldn't interact with the character spells/abilities at all. I'd like it if it brought a new ability (like now) and then the artifact panel is a talent tree that modifies/enhances that very ability and you get to choose some traits but not al of them.

- RNG everywhere. Legendaries, WQs, raid drops, pvp drops,... everything is RNG based. Even my main spec, Destro, was fully commited and based around RNG based on RNG based on RNG. Some RNG is OK and it's an important part of an MMO, but the way they have approached it this expansion is just too much and overwhelming.

- PvP. In my opinion, Legion has brought a certain level of balance between specs, even giving a chance to specs that has never had a chance in PvP. But there are certain issues, the main one is that melees in general make the life of casters a pain, the stupid high burst smashing buttons, hard cc's, low cooldown interrupts, and abilities like Antimagic Shell and Cloak of Shadows used offensively instead of defensively... chaining all of these things together, no caster has literally a chance unless they are super protected by another melee or a dedicated healer.
Also, I hate the honor talent tree. Why is my character more powerful fighting against other players than against the guy who's trying to destroy Azeroth? Why many of these honor talents would be increadibly awesome for PvE but I then the normal talent trees have talents that literally nobody take? Makes no sense to me. I do like the prestige system though.

Everything else has been a blast so far compared to WoD

[Dartz1979]

As long as Jaina Proudmoore and Sylvanas windrunner is never killed off i'm gonna always be very happy with all that blizzard does.

[Toogoodman]

I think people have an idealistic view of what any MMO should be. They think that closed off servers will create a community of players who get to know eachother and work together to do content. In reality, WoW moved away from that closed off design and introduced LFG and eventually LFR allowing people to quickly get into content. I think the primary issue with just relying on your server to do content is that eventually your server may die off. That, or people may not be capable of doing the content.

To be honest, they moved away from "closed off realms" in vanilla when they introduced battle groups, I remember being in the top guild on my server (still am =D in the top guild on my server, little more impressive this time around) and goruping in a group of 10 for WSG premade and 15 for AB premade, we would wait in queue for over an hour to play the top alliance guild premade. That system was awful, while i understand the desire for inclusive communities on servers, it just doesn't work with what the game has become.

Unfortunately, with the way the raid tier system works, were stuck with this M+ system. The reason being is power creep, with 4 levels of difficulty in raids, gear needs 4 different ilvls (with some creep on previous tier with normal/LFR loot). When we have that many difficulties, you see this crazy 40+ ilvl increase each tier, when back in TBC the ilvl creep from heroics to sunwell was 40-50 ilvls for the entire expansion. Why is this a problem you ask? because the base ilvls of heroic dungeons, crafted gear, previous raid tier gear, becomes worthless very fast (hence obliterum & systems akin to it).

While i enjoy the game a good amount, i feel the spread of ilvl is inflating the game to insane proportions. The only way to really stop this would to scrap normal/heroic/mythic, and turn it into 1 difficulty where its between heroic and mythic, but a little closer to mythic in terms of DPS checks. Make the last 2-3 bosses super hard, and the first 7-10 moderate to slightly hard. Make LFR drop heroic dungeon level gear for the entire expansion, with its own sets and gear. This would allow them to make ilvl creep only 40-50 for the entire xpac, make heroic dungeons hard and rewarding again, make crafted gear far more valuable and viable for a longer period of time, keep previous raid tiers gear some what relevant, probably mainly items like trinkets (without praying for TF CoF or BTI), and make grinding out a rep reward for an epic time worth it. We also wouldnt roflmfao stomp every mob in the game 6-9 months in. I solo bosses now ffs, and "5 man elite world quests". Too much bloat, my solution is what can fix it with the current in place LFR and LFD system staying in (because there would be anarchy without them).

- - - Updated - - -

Blizzard should just update LFR ilevel to be on par with the other difficulties. LFR isn't easy. It's actually quite hard when push comes to shove. We're dealing with a lot of strangers put together by a random system and we have to immediately coordinate everyone into a proper group in order to complete the raid.

The difficulty of mechanics gets overshadowed by the immediate problem of lack of coordination between players. Which is the real RPG experience. There's no wowhead.com or a raider's journal in a true rpg.

I just think they should stop forcing players into social situations. It's just bad design when I'm forced to deal with people when I don't feel like it but I feel like doing a piece of content. That piece of content should be available to me anyway. Guilds play a huge role in this, that's why moving forward guilds should start being replaced with better systems.

As a whole, WoW has got a lot of problems that have no solution on sight which bothers me. The social problem is one, the LFR rewards and lack of rpg elements to the game bring any love I once held for the game back.

Uhm, i hope you're trolling? MMORPGs (which wow is) have always focused on large group, end game content. Not single player interactions with the world, the game is at a point where its the most single player focused its ever been, in previous expansions, you needed to form "social groups" just to get some quests done, that system is totally gone. Also, there is no way, at all, that LFR is "hard" or deserves loot on par even with the current normal raid. LFR is just a system put in place to allow players who either lack skill, lack the ability to commit to raiding in a guild (a social group designed to help players over come hard group content), or simply dont want to raid normal/heroic/mythic the ability to see the bosses (in a very tuned down way) of the raid tier as they come and go.

So, in conclusion, if you dont like the "forced interaction", why are you playing WoW? play skyrim, its got a much better solo player focused style of game play. If you want better gear, pug a normal ffs... literally groups of pugs clearing current normal tiers in like 1-2 hours, if you dont want to do that, then you simply dont deserve a higher level reward.

[Theed]

Very hard to say. There are many good and many bad things that need improvement:

Great: Raids and most other endgame content;
Good but needs improvment: Progression systems like artifacts and honor talents, art style, Class number balance(NOT CLASS DESIGN) with quick and frequent adjustments
Neutral: Zone design - Vanilla, BC and Wotlk had huge plain areas in each zone. It felt much more natural than the clumped zones we have now;
Music - i prefer the atmospheric soundtracks of vanilla, bc and wotlk. Each individual track of the last expansions is good for itself but often has no connection to the environment unlike the earlier expansions.
Bad: It seems the developers take the game less and less serious. Too many listless jokes in every second quest, dumbed down mechanics etc. Atmosphere -> gone.
Very Bad: Class design, Melee vs caster situation in pvp

[Deleted]

Why is my character more powerful fighting against other players than against the guy who's trying to destroy Azeroth?

Take WoW's fighting system as a real life fighting system, for example PvE is Judo and PvP is Karate. Does Judo makes you better at Karate? Yep, but at some extent, being a Karate master doesn't make you a Judo master automaticaly, and vice-versa;but it makes easier for you to learn the other one. On WoW doing PvE doesn't give you PvP skills, but it gives you gear that improves your % of stats on PvP, and doing PvP gives you some gear that can be helpful to start on PvE; but being Gladiator doesn't automatically give you the Curve achvs or the mythic raiding gear, although you learned some things that con help you with. I think the PvP system, having only 50 leves (that you can unlock in less than 1 day play time if you do PvP content) is perfectly fine and also gives a form of PvP progression and rewards.

[satimy]

I don't like the way that pvp and I've are completely decoupled. I don't like how hey feel the need to fundamentally change every spec every expansion. I don't like pathfinder.

[Lime]

No, but my issues with it predate this RNG mess that has come with this expansion.

There's just nothing for me to do after a few hours of pushing high M+ or Raiding. After I do that, I want to play WoW, but I find myself not having anything to do.

Pet battles? Please... It's mediocre solo content where you'll even run out Trainers to fight extremely quickly. So unless you want to make an asinine goal such as "get every pet to 25", you quickly run out of things to do regarding it.

And I don't enjoy PvP anymore, which I suppose is a blessing in disguise considering that horrid things I've heard about these recent seasons.

So yeah, after a night of raiding/M+ running, all I have left to do is some irrelevant achievement hunting that nobody cares about and that I don't particularly enjoy doing.

I've grown to enjoy doing the super casual little things that other MMOs offer after I'm done doing the "difficult content" for the day. Things such as the Gold Saucer in FFXIV or the Dynamic events and JPs in GW2 comes to mind.