Will WoW still be Diablo-ified next expansion?

[Alvito]

My biggest concern is they confuse participation for popularity and over look the rewards things gave or the time spent to hit a task.

[Lazuli]

Gear means jack shit in the game anymore and that isn't changing because casuals, what they really need to fix is the classes. Legion prune and all the changes destroyed many specs because these D3 rejects are fucking retarded. All the old devs are gone from Blizz or working on another of their projects. We will see if dev team B or C, whoever they are, are capable of learning from mistakes or will just continue with the cancerous RNG, horrendous wpvp, boring instanced pvp and classes. Or if they'll man up and revert a lot of stuff but the chances of that happening are very low.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

My biggest concern is they confuse participation for popularity and over look the rewards things gave or the time spent to hit a task.

I actually made a video on this topic a few months back, but this is clearly what they want.
You can trace it back to WoD when everyone said there was nothing to do in the game.

They have essentially done everything in their power to make this a flat out falsehood now, and I think that is both a great and a horrible thing for this game.

Anyone who flat out dislikes it should try to understand why its a good thing too. Say the prior versions of the game had 10 million people playing, but many of them were afking with out meaninful ways to progress their character daily. Now, the game has a fraction of that number, but a much higher percentage of them are out playing the game.

This leads Blizzard to be able to say things like "40 million dungeons done in legion, up from 10m in WoD" etc.
Essentially nonsense comparisons that both PROVE the game is being played more actively but also confuse what's really important about engagement.

One way or another, Legion has silenced all the critics saying WoW delivers no content, and I think that is, on average, a win for Blizzard.

For half a decade the biggest complaint was that the game was "too easy" and had "no content" but now people are essentially complaining its too hard and too time consuming for them.

Sounds like an ideal situation for the development right?

- - - Updated - - -

Gear means jack shit in the game anymore and that isn't changing because casuals, what they really need to fix is the classes. Legion prune and all the changes destroyed many specs because these D3 rejects are fucking retarded. All the old devs are gone from Blizz or working on another of their projects. We will see if dev team B or C, whoever they are, are capable of learning from mistakes or will just continue with the cancerous RNG, horrendous wpvp, boring instanced pvp and classes. Or if they'll man up and revert a lot of stuff but the chances of that happening are very low.

Not sure what the rest of your points are, but just so we are clear, gear has never meant MORE in this game's history than now. You can CLEARLY see this via any ranking site like Warcraft Logs. The difference many people confuse is that there is a baseline of gear that is handed out very easily to a large majority of players, but getting the BEST gear is nearly impossible right now, but with it you will be doing CONSIDERABLY better than others.

Its a brilliant yet sleazy way to funnel people into playing more regularly and competing naturally.
One good thing is it weeds out the casuals much quicker than previous expansions.

[Paperfox]

I'm not sure why everybody hates the casuals so much. If it weren't for them, the WoW development team would be much smaller. A game with 500K players cannot support the same development team as one with 3M players.

[Lazuli]

I actually made a video on this topic a few months back, but this is clearly what they want.
You can trace it back to WoD when everyone said there was nothing to do in the game.

They have essentially done everything in their power to make this a flat out falsehood now, and I think that is both a great and a horrible thing for this game.

Anyone who flat out dislikes it should try to understand why its a good thing too. Say the prior versions of the game had 10 million people playing, but many of them were afking with out meaninful ways to progress their character daily. Now, the game has a fraction of that number, but a much higher percentage of them are out playing the game.

This leads Blizzard to be able to say things like "40 million dungeons done in legion, up from 10m in WoD" etc.
Essentially nonsense comparisons that both PROVE the game is being played more actively but also confuse what's really important about engagement.

One way or another, Legion has silenced all the critics saying WoW delivers no content, and I think that is, on average, a win for Blizzard.

For half a decade the biggest complaint was that the game was "too easy" and had "no content" but now people are essentially complaining its too hard and too time consuming for them.

Sounds like an ideal situation for the development right?

- - - Updated - - -



Not sure what the rest of your points are, but just so we are clear, gear has never meant MORE in this game's history than now. You can CLEARLY see this via any ranking site like Warcraft Logs. The difference many people confuse is that there is a baseline of gear that is handed out very easily to a large majority of players, but getting the BEST gear is nearly impossible right now, but with it you will be doing CONSIDERABLY better than others.

Its a brilliant yet sleazy way to funnel people into playing more regularly and competing naturally.
One good thing is it weeds out the casuals much quicker than previous expansions.

Yeah it's so hard to farm normal and heroic for forged items.. or even M+ every week.

There isn't even a point to mythic raiding considering what little you get for so much effort put in, then that gear is outdated like the rest in next tier. When you can get an alt to 930 in a few weeks I dunno I have a hard time believing gear has never meant MORE in the game lol. I think you meant to say it has never meant LESS?

[Ryzek]

Eh, I'm fine with it. We will see this weekend.

[Deleted]

Yeah it's so hard to farm normal and heroic for forged items.. or even M+ every week.

There isn't even a point to mythic raiding considering what little you get for so much effort put in, then that gear is outdated like the rest in next tier. When you can get an alt to 930 in a few weeks I dunno I have a hard time believing gear has never meant MORE in the game lol. I think you meant to say it has never meant LESS?

there's a big difference between farming normal and heroic for the offchance of a good drop, and farming 3 tiers old content for your bis trinket, where the dropchance of a relevant titanforge is low enough that most people who farm the raid for the entire expansion will never even see it drop.

[Marrilaife]

If you ask me, WoW needs to be more like Diablo in terms of game mechanics.

Gosh, I hope not. I quit Diablo 3 because I was getting carpal tunnel from spamming 1 button. People who complain WOW has "dumbed down classes" with "3 button spam" never played Diablo... Literally most builds were 2 buttons builder / spender or 1 button = spender because your resource built itself from some other sources (like items). Rest of the buttons were some buffs or summons you had to maybe press once a minute or maybe once per entering a map, depending on class and build. And then maybe 1 "get out of jail" button (immunity / mobility). MOBAs had more interesting gameplay even with their limited "buttons to press".

Is it because they wanted to port it to consoles, or is it because the game was always intended to be like that, I don't know. But the game mechanics are quite silly. Take itemization, you get some item or set bonus and suddenly x ability does 100x more damage than before, just because so. This means the build you thought was cool during levelling loses any meaning, the only meaning is "which ability my gear buffs = use it". In WOW you get legendaries or set bonuses adding maybe 10-20% to some ability but not 1000% like Diablo 3. So it's more smooth transition from bad gear to good gear you still mostly use the same rotation. Another thing is some Diablo 3 builds were literally unplayable unless you hit x% in some stat like cooldown reduction, ability cost reduction and so forth. In WOW you might need x% crit to play a firemage but it's never as bad as the cdr requirements in Diablo which is literally "don't have enough cdr to keep mandatory buff 100% uptime, run away and hide when it's down or you insta die". Having to stack 3-4 different "take x% less damage when..." items / buffs to be able to not get 1-shot by everything is not exactly compelling gameplay.

The design of group play in Diablo 3 also sucked horribly last time I played. In WOW you have a m+ group with 1 tank 1 healer 3 dps... In Diablo 3 optimal Greater Rift pushing setup used to be 1 dps 3 "supports"... So most people couldn't even play a dps which is what most people enjoy.

So no, I don't want more Diablo 3 in WOW because of the reasons above.

[Alvito]

I actually made a video on this topic a few months back, but this is clearly what they want.
You can trace it back to WoD when everyone said there was nothing to do in the game.

They have essentially done everything in their power to make this a flat out falsehood now, and I think that is both a great and a horrible thing for this game.

Anyone who flat out dislikes it should try to understand why its a good thing too. Say the prior versions of the game had 10 million people playing, but many of them were afking with out meaninful ways to progress their character daily. Now, the game has a fraction of that number, but a much higher percentage of them are out playing the game.

This leads Blizzard to be able to say things like "40 million dungeons done in legion, up from 10m in WoD" etc.
Essentially nonsense comparisons that both PROVE the game is being played more actively but also confuse what's really important about engagement.

One way or another, Legion has silenced all the critics saying WoW delivers no content, and I think that is, on average, a win for Blizzard.

For half a decade the biggest complaint was that the game was "too easy" and had "no content" but now people are essentially complaining its too hard and too time consuming for them.

Sounds like an ideal situation for the development right?

- - - Updated - - -



Not sure what the rest of your points are, but just so we are clear, gear has never meant MORE in this game's history than now. You can CLEARLY see this via any ranking site like Warcraft Logs. The difference many people confuse is that there is a baseline of gear that is handed out very easily to a large majority of players, but getting the BEST gear is nearly impossible right now, but with it you will be doing CONSIDERABLY better than others.

Its a brilliant yet sleazy way to funnel people into playing more regularly and competing naturally.
One good thing is it weeds out the casuals much quicker than previous expansions.

Invasions are a great example. When they were new ppl did them because of the quick payouts for little work, they were not very fun though. While my circle of friends is only a few dozen people none of them like doing them, but did it for the easy payout.

[Radon]

Aside from gear depending 100% on RNG which is horrible, I honestly hope they Revamp leveling to look like Diablo's leveling. Quickly get your Class whole and Endgame Paragon leveling until eternity.

[Nitros14]

I can't honestly believe you ever played the game seriously if you quit for those reasons, but either way don't bother coming back.
The legendary system sucked at the start but if you actually played the game you would have every one for your class months ago.

The other two things you mention are not real. Titanforging occurs in Mythic raids too, and the AP catch ups allow people to get multiple weapons up extremely quickly.

Ask yourself this. Will you be a winy casual who doesn't want to actually have to PLAY the game to be the best you can be next expansion?

The answer to both questions will be yes, I'd imagine.

I mean, serious enough. Nothing super hardcore amazing but US 273 heroic Lich King 25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXNHgP6vLzo ; US 167 heroic Cho'gall 25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-cb9PZOeUo ; US 132 heroic Garrosh 25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSF0dPuU55Q ; US 119 mythic Imperator Mar'gok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f7v30EtIsE ; US 271 Mythic Archimonde https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pOTGezPLEE ; US 181 mythic Helya https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ1En3qr6NI

I've been playing a long time doing the content while it's reasonably current.

Burning Crusade/Wrath/Cataclysm/Pandaria/Warlords were nice because raiding was fun and you didn't have to grind the rest of the game much and the rest of the game is on the whole pretty bad. Then they changed to this massive grindfest. Too bad, after so many expansions in a row which were fun.

[Deleted]

Not sure what the rest of your points are, but just so we are clear, gear has never meant MORE in this game's history than now. You can CLEARLY see this via any ranking site like Warcraft Logs. The difference many people confuse is that there is a baseline of gear that is handed out very easily to a large majority of players, but getting the BEST gear is nearly impossible right now, but with it you will be doing CONSIDERABLY better than others.

Its a brilliant yet sleazy way to funnel people into playing more regularly and competing naturally.
One good thing is it weeds out the casuals much quicker than previous expansions.

I don't think we're even playing the same game. The gear has never meant LESS in the games history. It's literally everywhere and the only thing stopping you from having a full set of titatnforged gear from some random shitty piece is the amount of time you put in to grind for those procs. It doesn't matter if you run LFR, a normal dungeon, buy a token from Argus vendor or mythic raid - they all have the same chance. So gear means fuck all. The time you put in to repeat farming is what matters.

You're trying to tow some kind of "fuck casuals" Internet toughguy line, but really you're whiteknighting pretty hard if you think the TF design is actually good and encourages participation in anything other than grinding the easiest content ad infinitum.

[Crimewave]

It will be even worse with each patch moving forwards.
If you aren't in favor of RNG then you won't be enjoying the game anymore.

[Deleted]

It will be even worse with each patch moving forwards.
If you aren't in favor of RNG then you won't be enjoying the game anymore.

I think we this is pretty good analysis. I’d be very surprised if they turned back the clock. The rng features are here to stay.

[Tradu]

The new expansion isn't announced so we have no idea.

It is likely, I think, that they will overhaul the legendary system given the backlash it has received. At the least I think these RNG legendaries will be restricted to utility bonuses.

They'd also have to all be in the same slot, otherwise people would just be running the head/chest/leg legendaries for the huge amount of stats.

[Nyel]

I hope not. I want to play WoW and not Diablo Online.

[Tradu]

My biggest concern is they confuse participation for popularity and over look the rewards things gave or the time spent to hit a task.

They almost definitely will do that. In their statistics, I'll look as if I fucking love invasion points, simply because I'm doing an absurd amount of them(~100 a day spread across 12-13 characters) in hopes of getting legendaries(and various argunite items). In reality I think they're okay, but nothing particularly special. If anything they're a bit disappointing because there's so few of them, when this is an area where they could've benefitted from going full D3 and made the area/mobs/objectives randomize each time.

[cparle87]

Burning Crusade/Wrath/Cataclysm/Pandaria/Warlords were nice because raiding was fun and you didn't have to grind the rest of the game much and the rest of the game is on the whole pretty bad. Then they changed to this massive grindfest. Too bad, after so many expansions in a row which were fun.

The thing about that was everyone and their dog was screaming "there's nothing to do besides raid" or "raid or die" or "where's my content" and quit in droves during WoD. Do you want stuff to do outside of raid (people complain) or do you want to "not have to grind out the game which isn't so good" (guess what, people complain.) There's literally no winning for Blizzard.

[tankbug]

Hopefully it will. I never enjoyed grinding stuff fruitlessly for weeks for a chance to get that one upgrade. Really takes all the joy out of the game for me.

[WowIsDead64]

I quit WoW in Legion after ten years of raiding because random very strong legendaries caused some people to be 10+% ahead of others on pure RNG and the only way to fix it was months of grinding, titanforging devaluing mythic loot and incentivizing grinding old content (especially mythic+) too much, and artifact power meaning an insane grind to switch specs or play alts.

I haven't looked at news much, will the next expansion still be WoW Diablo? I ask because I might want to come back if all those terrible changes were reverted.

We don't have any data about how successful Legion is, cuz we no longer have any data about sub numbers, but if Legion is more successful, than WOD, then that means, that majority of players actually like Diablo-like game. What Blizzard try to achieve via this approach - is illusion of infinite content. It's all about true MMORPG players, who prefer repeatable content, vs some single-player ones, who want to do every kind of content only once and therefore developers have to either develop content at pace, they consume it, that isn't realistic, or to try to provide some sort of "infinite" content for them, i.e. content, where goal is virtually unreachable. As I'm true MMORPG player, who prefer repeatable content, where goal is reachable within fair period of time - then I also hate Diablo-like game.