How Would You Make WoW Harder?

[hpgupta]

I think wow has enough hard modes, especially if you include competing against other players.
Heroic Raids
Race to World/region/realm firsts
PvP Ladders
Brawler's guild
Challenge Modes
Challenge Modes Rankings

To be honest, I think most people don't care about the skill cap, but rather about the low skill floor...or the ease at which everyone can attain the same rewards. I don't see it as an issue...but if you really want to solve it, Blizzard can implement a small change:

With the proving grounds feature coming soon, simply add an achievement (that grants the title 'The Invincible' and nothing else). The achievement would require you to defeat a huge amount of waves in endless mode. Make it something that probably nobody would get for an year...perhaps maybe only 2-3 players would manage it before the next expansion launches. Make it brutal, make it insanely hard.
That's it. Whenever someone then says the game is easy, ask them to link their Invincible title. It's a solo mode instance (so no excuses of I need a hardcore guild for it...or that it requires grinding for a thousand hours). Ideally make that particular mode in such a way that it scales your gear.
Let people bash their heads against the wall. Let people realize that there is something that is extremely tough to achieve and something that they can't blame on lack of guild/time/gear. Don't make it award anything that is critical to progression (just a title is enough imo).

What's to lose? A situation where nobody has 100% achievements? Where there is always one elusive achievement that you just can't seem to get?

[FuxieDK]

And eliminate LFR. Lest we forget, in WOTLK, 10m WAS LFR, and it served alts beautifully as well as building community.

WHAT??

WotLK, or atleast ICC, pugs was done on 25man, ALWAYS!!

[Nekovivie]

Make it so you lose EXP for dying. Progression would be awesome with breaks to go leveling

[chrisisvacant]

Simple solution to a problem which many rose glassed folks choose to defend and justify:

Either 25m only, or WOTLK style seperation. And eliminate LFR. Lest we forget, in WOTLK, 10m WAS LFR, and it served alts beautifully as well as building community.

LFR is not going anywhere. You can stop wasting your time now.

[Kamiyomi]

I dont think making leveling harder is a bad thing on the condition that it gets easier and faster the more times you do it. Similarly I don't necessarily think attunements are bad, though we have artificial attunements with ilvl requirements. Attunements, if implemented again should be account wide and should be accomplishable on LFR, or at maximum, Flex. The game is currently the hardest it has ever been, and I LOVE it. There is more challenge to be found than many of you seem to realize. Maybe thats my own doing, eg: not watching a single guide video for any fight, though i do read the dungeon journal (or its equivalent elsewhere), or maybe its because i seek challenges as many others do, see: Raegwyn soloing Sha of Fear i mean JEEZUS that takes time, skill and dedication, though not one of the most impressive solos Ive seen. Its more about making the game what you want it to be more than playing the game. Do I enjoy how easy LFR is, not really, I find the ability to cheese or ignore every mechanic kind of lack luster, but that doesnt mean it's "easy" for everyone. Ive been playing the game for a long time, since about a month after vanilla went on sale. The game is 'easy' for me, or at least aspects are. But my girlfriend just recently hit 90 on her first character and I did LFR with her and she was overwhelmed by the difficulty of it. Trying to focus on all the bars, trying to make sure everyone had full life, trying to manage mana, all while trying not to stand in anything lethal. Its all second nature to us vets, but to new players its HARD.

Things I'd like to see more of in WoW:
1) More Elites/Elite Areas like Tyr's Hand and the new Isle of Giants. these are fun and hard with solid rewards. Rare Spawns are heading this way too and I love it

2) More mob "group mentality" for this i mean things like mobs fleeing if you slaughter them, or banding together to beat you or engaging as groups

3) Random Events: things like getting ambushed on the road by bandits. You could make these incentivize ground travel by making them give some sort or reward kind of like the barrens caravans.

4) More brawler bosses and a Dungeon Journal would be nice for these (and maybe some fights that arent so ranged biased)

5) Proving grounds has so much promise, we'll see

6) I like the idea of attunements but there needs to be easy catch up be it for new players and alts alike. Forced catch up is good (see: too easy catch up of cata era), but grueling catch up blows (see: terrible TBC catch up)

7) Harder 5 man Content. I'd like there to be normal 90 dungeons, which are like current heroics. then for there to be Heroics which would be more like heroic scenarios (lower loot thresholds though, think 489 blues) but for 5 people. These would be closer to the TBC heroics people herald as so amazing. And then the Challenge modes would be top tier of pure awesome with no gear reward. These would be scaled around the Heroic gear not the dungeon gear.

8) I think getting rid of addons is a terrible idea, because I hate the LOOK of the default UI. Also if Addons make the game too "easy" for you, simply don't use them. You set the challenge your self. Make things artificially harder if you want. But the game is not balanced around these existing. the game slowly but surely is assimilating them, making them less useful even.

9) I wish titles did a bit more than they do. Eg: The Savior of Azeroth could make the twilight cultists neutral status or make them attack you viciously, attacking you in cities.

10) A bit more travel time, meaning a bit more forced (or at least encouraged) time on the ground, not flying, be it in cities and around them, maybe with flight paths with very rapid transit to flying areas. I saw an idea of 10s cast time and 2min pvp cd on Flying. I like the long cast (to a degree, maybe let it speed up based on number of interrupted attempts) but the 2min cd would suck.

11) Elite Quests, both at max and while leveling. Make these reward bonus XP, or even better make them scenarios for leveling. At max level i think they are better off being in the world to incite a little pvp. though server imbalance is always a concern.

12) (second Edit) Saw this above me and I loved the idea of making flying dangerous. Its faster, sure, but mobs that dismount you, Maybe providing an "Airwalk" buff that keeps you suspended but unable to move, until it is dead, but dropping you if you don't kill it in time. Though this makes it very dangerous for healers, so maybe give them some slow fall ability if they can "cure the affliction ailing the attacking beast". and then in some zones make it simply dismount you and drop you, forcing players to play on ground level as opposed to flying around too much. I think flying should be about getting from point A to point B, not necessarily about escape, though that can be its use in pvp.

TL;DR: less get rid of easy stuff, more seek the challenge and more enticement to do the harder things

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[Deleted]

The difficulty is fine as it is, if you want hard content you try heroic raiding or high level PVP.

[Rucati]

Explain how top guilds in the world beat Kara in several weeks. Where as Naxx WOTLK was beaten by lvl 74-76 players.

I've never heard of a level 74 doing Naxx in Wrath. That being said, people used to bring level 58s or whatever into Molten Core, same premise. I would find it insanely hard to believe that a group of level 74s cleared Naxx while it was current content.

[Deleted]

If I wanted to make a harder game...

... I'd design a game where if you wanted harder content, you'd have to pay more. And I'd use that vast inflow of extra money from the huge hordes of hardcore gamers to construct that hard content.

We're all assured those hardcore gamers exist in numbers almost beyond the infinite, right? So there's no way this could possibly go wrong!

Why do you hate people so much who do harder content?

[ramaathorn]

LFR is not going anywhere. You can stop wasting your time now.

Love it when the people I indirectly refer to in my posts identify themselves.

[vaticon]

I would up the mechanics of 10man, that shit is ez-mode and was a joke in cata.


you can't fix "it's too easy" problems because players have been playing WoW for years (almost a decade for some) and they have 1000's of hours of conditioning to blizzards mechanics. What you can fix is a problem that plagues all video games which are easy to achieve/easy to get aspects by making certain aspects of the game more challenging again. That's why I choose upping the difficulty of 10man raiding. Going from heroic 25man to heroic 10man is like doing heroic LK at lvl 90. (slightly over exaggerated but you get the point)

That's my belief on the slow death of 25man raiding is that 10man is too easily accessible to the average gamer. Less people required, lower difficulty settings even for heroic mode, quicker progression, etc.

Hagara 10 HC says hi. She was a joke on 25 man. Every boss is different from 10 to 25... Some harder some easier. Also the hard part is getting 25 people, not the mechanics.

[Deleted]

so if you don't have time to do hard modes but still think normals and other stuff is to easy, what do you say to those people?, You can say a game is to easy withouth beating the hard mode.

Please stop being so arrogant, the game is easy, even hard modes.

I'm sorry but what now?

Under what frame of reference is it possible for you to say that?

The only smart thing you could say without trying them is "I don't know".

[Pua]

I think to a certain extent, nothing can happen with “difficulty” until the game itself is redesigned; almost from the ground up.

First of all, though, we need to get something straight:

1) Those who argue the game is easy are NOT disproven by a lack of heroic boss kills.
2) Those who argue the game is hard are NOT disproven by how many hours they play.

Let’s nip these extremes in the bud, all they do is cause arguments and a death of the discussion. For me, I think the entire endgame model is now too bloated and, yes, too difficult. I say that because of the number of players completing even normal mode raiding instances implies it very clearly. I also believe that LFR is far too difficult for the people it’s supposedly aimed at, because I’ve seen what happens when there are no normal raiders in there who are simply chasing that last slot, legendary items or quick valor. Think about it – what other video game asks its players to spend so much time outside of it with playing guides, YouTube videos, gearing websites, macros and simulations just to play the game at a passable level? You need boss mods and VOIP programs if you’re going to be raiding to any reasonable level which, again, is not what the average gamer coming to this genre is going to be expecting.

So, yes, endgame raiding is hard. Brutally hard.

Next, add this to how difficult classes are to play nowadays. Not only do you need to master convoluted encounter mechanics, you also need to master your own in-game avatar to an extent that will beat a hard berserk or even just contribute enough to make that possible. Once more, to play at the highest level, you’re talking about someone who maximises their GCD’s, stacks their cooldowns, uses timers, uses macros, uses a proc HUD, manages their resource properly and utilizes encounter mechanics to buff themselves. Outside of that, class-specific things (like who Fury shoehorns everything into Colossus Smash, or how Destruction saves Chaos Bolt for when all buffs are up) make the game abnormally challenging to play even reasonably well.

At this point, though, we need to look at the easy parts of the game – they’re numerous enough to mention. Levelling is very simple, gearing up is simple, talent and skill selection is easy, introductory gearing is easy, dungeons are unchallenging, random BG’s provide easy currency and heroic dungeons aren’t threatening at all. LFR as it is, with people effectively boosting newbies, is also very easy as are things like scenarios, daily quests, many of the games achievements, or pet battles. So if someone says “the game is easy”, they’re not necessarily wrong because they’re potentially talking about the vast majority of the game outside of raiding.

The problem for me, then, is where the disconnect happens. Where does the game stop being too simple and then become too hard? Personally, I think the difficulty curve is simply shot to bits and that’s too rough to fix without almost rebooting to “World of Warcraft 2.0”. Essentially, the activities in the game either guarantee success (sometimes over a longer period thanks to RNG or grinding) or they almost guarantee failure; there’s no middle ground to be found for what can loosely be described as the skilled casual player base. By that, I generally mean folks that want to play to a decent standard in around 10 hours a week or so, but aren’t willing to put in the silly amount of time required to be really good at the game. These guys and gals could be new to WoW, or even the genre, and can help to foster a better online community while playing, but are being priced out by having content that’s either too easy for them, or simply too demanding on time and/or commitment.

This is where the community has caused the divide in the game, in my opinion. Because WE like to paint everyone as either a “clueless scrub” or an “entitled hardcore”, the developers have (perhaps subconsciously) divided their content into solely those two camps. Activities are either extremely simple to cater for those who are bad at the game, and then get defined as “casual”, or aimed at those who are extraordinarily good at the game who are then defined as “elitists” who want everything built around them.

I would posit, and I’ve no hard evidence for this, that the overwhelming majority of players do not fall into either category. We know how small a percentage of players raid anything beyond LFR; it’s a tiny percentage. So that effectively leaves a swathe of players who are probably looking to be reasonably challenged without masses of grind or time asked of them. That’s who I think Blizzard are failing at the moment, and the problem with things like the Brawler’s Guild or challenge modes is that they’re not developmental and, thus, aren’t particularly interesting. If Blizzard could see the wood for the trees, they’d stop designing all of their best content for their smallest percentage of players, and stop assuming every casual player is an imbecile that can’t manage the simplest of tasks.

Until then, I feel the game is going to continue to bleed its players and the community is going to keep getting worse.

That’s how I see it, anyway.

[Rainec]

Simple. Less bag space.

Bag, bank, and even void management haunts me on a number of levels.

[Kamiyomi]

Simple. Less bag space.

Bag, bank, and even void management haunts me on a number of levels.

If you ever suggest that again, I will find you and I will kill you. 6 Royal Satchels and 8 Illusionary bags and Voidstorage are all full of BoPs and stuff I use regularly.

[BenBos]

If anything WOW is much , much , much too hard for new players.

It is not because you played a game for 5000 hours that you can be the Judge on difficulty settings.

---

That being said: in the leveling department, Blizzard could adapt a "solo leveling challenge" with phasing techniques and Monster Power play like they do with D3.

According to the (phased solo or group), mobs could have different MP levels (in D3 it is 0 to 10) where players gain more experience or loot according to how hard the mobs hit (0 normal - 10 extreme hard).

It is feasable, but is it worth the investment ?

I don't know.

In D3 it works as players set their own difficulty from MP0- to MP10 with better loot and more experience gained. But D3 is a pure dungeon grinder. WOW is an mmorpg where player interaction and adventure is more important.

I KNOW Diablo 3 in hardcore mode is a real adrenaline chaser, but do people who play WOW like to risk everything on extreme hard individual mobs ???

I doubt that: you don't pay subscriptions to die constantly while leveling...

[Kamiyomi]

At this point, though, we need to look at the easy parts of the game – they’re numerous enough to mention. Levelling is very simple, gearing up is simple, talent and skill selection is easy, introductory gearing is easy, dungeons are unchallenging, random BG’s provide easy currency and heroic dungeons aren’t threatening at all. LFR as it is, with people effectively boosting newbies, is also very easy as are things like scenarios, daily quests, many of the games achievements, or pet battles.

I disagree with this part here. I truly think this is one of those parts thats "easier" but not necessarily "easy". Some aspects are certainly trivialized, especially when someone with good gear and decent amounts of skill comes along. but Ive found its the knowledge of how to THINK is what it is. We have all trained it, but new players havent. I agree with how you speak of all the extra time required, outside of playing. This is the part that bothers me the most. I read forums because i like the discussion not because i seek the best gearing strategy. I find that information because I enjoy those discussions. But many people cant be asked to READ to play a game. Why do you think the booklets in video game cases have disappeared.

[Deleted]

i wouldnt mind a server were leveling was more tricky.

-normal Exp rate's but no BoA too boost it.
-mobs same amount of HP, but got more abilities that use more often that need dodging or interrupting else they're lethal (not 1 shot, but a lot harder then now)
-LFG stays, since sitting in a capitol for an hour just too spam trade for making a group takes forever. however LFG groups are made of people only from 1 server.
-LFR same as LFG
-all Dungeon bosses are stronger in that their abilities hit harder and require proper mitigation/dodging.
-Valor gear is locked away behind requiring too have done all dungeons on heroic (the 5.0/5.1 valor items) 5.2 valor items unlocked when having cleared MSV/HoF/ToES (either LFR/normal/heroic)
-Raiding remains avaible all 3 modes, LFR/10/25 (flex not added on this server, since getting it the right difficulty might be too hard)
- Mounts behave like on normal servers

with these kinds of rules the game would remain the same though slightly harder.
i wouldnt suggest that all servers would become like this, but 1-2 special servers that have these harder requirements too play might be nice for people who enjoy it

[Keoren]

The difficulty is fine as it is, if you want hard content you try heroic raiding or high level PVP.

I do think that it's not a good design if the challenging alternatives are so limited when they could be quite readily integrated to the other areas of the game. They wouldn't even have to negatively affect those who are uninterested.

but Ive found its the knowledge of how to THINK is what it is. We have all trained it, but new players havent.

Everything should not be designed assuming a person has never played the game before. It will lose its longevity.

[Ettan]

Re introduce elite mobs while leveling, at the same time make them harder than before.
Overall beef up of normal mobs & dungeons while leveling.
Re introduce group quests while leveling, made so difficult that 5 players at the appropriate level will struggle on it.
Re introduce harder dungeons @ 90, with fresh dungeons released every major patch scaled to current content and w appropriate rewards.
To balance the pvp experience for leveling players; make the base 65%/(70%?) resi universal and revert any remaining resilience on gear in the game to pvp power.

Lfr now only gives valor/gold/coins no longer gear/tokens, lfr is now purely what it is supposed to be a "display of content".
To get gear you actually have to do the raid.
Dungeons take over for lfr as a catchup mechanic.
Overall make the gearing journey longer , for both pvp and pve.
Example for pvp gearing;
Honor gear, Blue; Scaled so high/close to conquest gear that the honor gear is far superior to all pve gear in every aspect when used for pvp (including world pvp).
Conquest gear, Epic; Scaled only very slightly above honor gear (as to not create pvp issues) ; req 2000 for shoulders/wep.
Elite gear, Legendary; Ever so slightly scaled above conquest gear, difference between honor- elite still minimal; req 2200 rating in 3v3, 5v5, or 2400 rbg (for all parts). Elite gear, in addition to cosmetics also sports their own glow effect similar to challenge mode gear.
Enchants/meta gem; 1500-2700 in 2v2,3v3,5v5 or rbg (new enchants/meta gem at every interval between 1500 and 2700, cosmetic effect only).

[Sithix]

The problem is that they've taken out a lot of parts in the game that were annoying, but worth it. Things that players needed to remember or didn't get to raid or even play the game. This like getting attuned, reagents and different gear stats were things that I miss the most. As well as harder leveling WITH LESS LEVELS, and the best part....

YOU ACTUALLY RAIDED MORE THAN ONE RAID. Nowadays you just run the same raid OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. LFR NORMAL THEN HEROIC. THE GEAR BARELY EVEN CHANGES. THE COLOR AND NUMBERS CHANGE ON THE GEAR. THAT NEEDS TO STOP.

/end rant