Everything prior to level 90 sucks balls?

[Krom2040]

I've min/maxxed my garrisons on 11 alts as far as I'm willing to take them, I've gotten 8/8 gold on four characters, and my raiding guild fell apart because getting 20 people to raid mythic content in a game with plummeting subscriber counts and nothing to really do is hard.

Great time to level my monk, right? Get every character in the game to 100!

...except doing so reminds how much everything in this game completely f***ing sucks until level 90.

I don't think I'm alone in saying that running dungeons back in classic WoW created some of my fondest, most memorable gaming experiences. Finding your way through a zone full of things that were itching to kill you with four other people was frankly just awesome.

Those same dungeons are NOTHING like that anymore. It's the same damn map, the same models, the same monsters with the same abilities, but it feels totally different and it's all SUPER GODDAMN BORING. It's impossible to fail. It's frankly unbelievable how they've screwed up so miserably at tuning their old content, including the junk that they even went a re-did as recently as MoP.

You know, I get how everybody has heirlooms and I get how they're supposed to ease the leveling process. I've gotten a buttload of them because I want to maximize my experience gain. Everybody in every LFG dungeon has at least a few of them. Does this justify the state of affairs where every pull is an AoE disintegration of every mob in sight practically before the healer can get a heal off? Does it make sense for a boss to be dead within 10 seconds of a pull without any cooldowns at all? Is that FUN for anybody?

It sure isn't for me. I posit that some people may enjoy doing it once or twice; you get a small bit of amusement at contemplating how powerful you feel relative to the experience ten years ago. But that wears off SUPER quickly, and all you're left with is a tedious grind that isn't entertaining and has no elements that suggest you're even playing a game. Every keystroke is just going through the motions until every enemy healthbar is nuked down to zero, no thought or reaction required. And as fast as leveling is these days relative to yesteryear, you're still looking at dozens of hours of this joyless drudgery to get your character up to 100. It's awful and it should change.

But I don't think it will. Because Timewalking dungeons are basically the same uninteresting nonsense (maybe a hair more difficult), which implies that at some level Blizzard has consciously identified this as an appropriate target difficulty level for modern content.

This drastic over-trivialization of literally everything up to Draenor (and most of that too) can't just bother me... right?

I feel like at some level this represents the overarching trend of the current group of designers misunderstanding their target audience. WoW was brutally difficult in 1.0 and it still saw a meteoric rise in popularity all over the world; it doesn't have to go back to being that difficult again, but that early success should at least demonstrate that people can tolerate some challenge in their gaming experience. I think this trend of trivializing everything is seriously eating into their core gaming demographic and playing into their sub loss bigtime. I think I've just about had it for this expansion and I'll probably throw in the towel until Legion, but I hope they take an opportunity to really think about how people experience their game. It's one thing to make the game more convenient and I'm all for that, but they've tipped the scale in their core gameplay too far towards sleepwalking.

[endur]

I feel like at some level this represents the overarching trend of the current group of designers misunderstanding their target audience. WoW was brutally difficult in 1.0 and it still saw a meteoric rise in popularity all over the world; it doesn't have to go back to being that difficult again, but that early success should at least demonstrate that people can tolerate some challenge in their gaming experience. I think this trend of trivializing everything is seriously eating into their core gaming demographic and playing into their sub loss bigtime.

This is a good point. Dungeons don't need to be as hard as BC heroics were before epics were available via BGs. Nor do heroic dungeons need to be as hard as Cata Heroics were in the first month of Cata. But dungeons should be harder then the current 1-90 leveling experience, and should be harder than the current time walking dungeons.

[Deleted]

I completely agree.

Instead of focusing on challenging exciting game play, Blizzard now focuses on story. However story is irrelevant if game play poses no challenges and requires no thought. Leveling today is boring effortless grind.

In old times when I took a break from WoW, I often simply leveled yet another alt. Slowly, taking several months to level it, enjoying challenge that world gave me. All that leveling content was not new for me because I've leveled many characters, yet I still had a lot of fun.

But somewhere in middle of WoTLK all that fun had disappeared. I remember working on last quests for Loremaster achievement on my level 60 alt when big nerfbat patch hit (one that removed all elite quests and nerfed all NPCs) and ruined most fun. That was last good memory of leveling alts I have from WoW. After that it was worse with every expansion. NPCs got weaker and weaker, players got stronger, dungeons got split into small boring halls. Leveling in both world and dungeons stopped being fun.

[Nitros14]

It's not about focusing on story, it's about trying to lure in mobile gamers who've never played a video game before in their life.

[kamuimac]

I've min/maxxed my garrisons on 11 alts as far as I'm willing to take them, I've gotten 8/8 gold on four characters, and my raiding guild fell apart because getting 20 people to raid mythic content in a game with plummeting subscriber counts and nothing to really do is hard.

Great time to level my monk, right? Get every character in the game to 100!

...except doing so reminds how much everything in this game completely f***ing sucks until level 90.

I don't think I'm alone in saying that running dungeons back in classic WoW created some of my fondest, most memorable gaming experiences. Finding your way through a zone full of things that were itching to kill you with four other people was frankly just awesome.

Those same dungeons are NOTHING like that anymore. It's the same damn map, the same models, the same monsters with the same abilities, but it feels totally different and it's all SUPER GODDAMN BORING. It's impossible to fail. It's frankly unbelievable how they've screwed up so miserably at tuning their old content, including the junk that they even went a re-did as recently as MoP.

You know, I get how everybody has heirlooms and I get how they're supposed to ease the leveling process. I've gotten a buttload of them because I want to maximize my experience gain. Everybody in every LFG dungeon has at least a few of them. Does this justify the state of affairs where every pull is an AoE disintegration of every mob in sight practically before the healer can get a heal off? Does it make sense for a boss to be dead within 10 seconds of a pull without any cooldowns at all? Is that FUN for anybody?

It sure isn't for me. I posit that some people may enjoy doing it once or twice; you get a small bit of amusement at contemplating how powerful you feel relative to the experience ten years ago. But that wears off SUPER quickly, and all you're left with is a tedious grind that isn't entertaining and has no elements that suggest you're even playing a game. Every keystroke is just going through the motions until every enemy healthbar is nuked down to zero, no thought or reaction required. And as fast as leveling is these days relative to yesteryear, you're still looking at dozens of hours of this joyless drudgery to get your character up to 100. It's awful and it should change.

But I don't think it will. Because Timewalking dungeons are basically the same uninteresting nonsense (maybe a hair more difficult), which implies that at some level Blizzard has consciously identified this as an appropriate target difficulty level for modern content.

This drastic over-trivialization of literally everything up to Draenor (and most of that too) can't just bother me... right?

I feel like at some level this represents the overarching trend of the current group of designers misunderstanding their target audience. WoW was brutally difficult in 1.0 and it still saw a meteoric rise in popularity all over the world; it doesn't have to go back to being that difficult again, but that early success should at least demonstrate that people can tolerate some challenge in their gaming experience. I think this trend of trivializing everything is seriously eating into their core gaming demographic and playing into their sub loss bigtime. I think I've just about had it for this expansion and I'll probably throw in the towel until Legion, but I hope they take an opportunity to really think about how people experience their game. It's one thing to make the game more convenient and I'm all for that, but they've tipped the scale in their core gameplay too far towards sleepwalking.

and who the fuck is to blame for this if not exackly the type of players with 11 + alts who whined and begged blizzard for puting in heirlooms/lv up catch up system so that they could lv up faster and more effectively to push to endgame ? - you rip what you sow.

[Tomana]

WoW was brutally difficult in 1.0 and it still saw a meteoric rise in popularity all over the world; it doesn't have to go back to being that difficult again, but that early success should at least demonstrate that people can tolerate some challenge in their gaming experience.

Can we stop beating that dead horse, please? WoW 1.0 was MUCH EASIER than its competitors like EQ and UO. Which is one of the reasons it became popular: because it drew from a more casual audience.

Why is it even easier today then? Simple: because there is a more casual competition, like MOBAs.

[Krom2040]

and who the fuck is to blame for this if not exackly the type of players with 11 + alts who whined and begged blizzard for puting in heirlooms/lv up catch up system so that they could lv up faster and more effectively to push to endgame ? - you rip what you sow.

This point doesn't make sense for a wide variety of reasons.

Most importantly, speed of leveling up is only remotely related to challenge of doing so. They could make monsters hit five times harder have five times as much life and the game would get much more "challenging", but if they also made them yield ten times as much experience, then it would also be much faster to level.

It was a given that they had to increase speed of leveling as they added more and more expansions. It was not a given that they had to turn monsters into pushovers.

Your comment was basically one big false implication, but I think that's one aspect of it that's wirty responding to.

[Deleted]

Instead of focusing on challenging exciting game play, Blizzard now focuses on story.

While I agree with what you're saying, these two things are unrelated, it's not one or the other here. It's not like if Blizzard stopped telling a story the gameplay would suddenly become challenging. I think it's definitely possible to do both, however "Challenging and Exciting" is not the goal Blizzard is aiming for right now (which they should imo).

[Krom2040]

Can we stop beating that dead horse, please? WoW 1.0 was MUCH EASIER than its competitors like EQ and UO. Which is one of the reasons it became popular: because it drew from a more casual audience.

Why is it even easier today then? Simple: because there is a more casual competition, like MOBAs.

Those games basically required leveling in groups, and consequently you can definitely say they were harder to level up in. It doesn't mean that WoW 1.0 didn't have its own challenges as a more solo-able MMO. It's all relative.

A point which I tried to make is that attempting to appeal to casual audiences by making the game stupidly easy is that they can very easily lose the interest of casual players and serious players alike. As I mentioned, a considerably steeper difficulty curve didn't stop WoW from becoming phenomenally popular in the first two years of its release. I think people of all stripes enjoy a game that feels like a game, which I would argue is not really the case in the bulk of leveling content right now; when a tank or even DPS can solo everything (and I've been in runs where DPS definitely try!) and the other four players are superfluous, then the game no longer feels like a plausibly dangerous world and thus loses a certain level of appeal with *everybody*. I think WoW's great accomplishment was that it told a good story while also being a great gameplay experience, and there's nobody at all who can claim the leveling process is ANYTHING like "great gameplay" in its current state. Any game must have the looming threat of failure.

[DeicideUH]

During WoD, the stat squish unintentionally made leveling up far harder. You'd often die multiple times before gaining a level, and had to carefully pull one mob of a time to not be destroyed. Leveling dungeons were also a lot harder, with tanks being two-shotted if the healer didn't pay attention. It was not fun, lots of people compalined.

Truth is, they made the leveling experience easier again because most people just don't like dying multiple times to random kobolds or bandits and taking forever to rise up to level 90.

[PaladinBash]

WoW was easier and smoother than Everquest. You know who bitched about it? Not me. I loved how simple it was without the fucking retarded grinding, killstealing and general bullshit of EQ.

See some people bringing up Ultima Online and while that was some good memories. PKing in UO was the best PVP of any game. It was ganking in Diablo 2 on steroids. I loved every second of being a complete wanker in that game.

[kamuimac]

A point which I tried to make is that attempting to appeal to casual audiences by making the game stupidly easy is that they can very easily lose the interest of casual players and serious players alike

exept it didnt - it worked super fine for 10 + years untill suddenly in WoD blizzard decided "fuck the casuals" we give content only to mythic players and screw everybody else - and how it worked ? subs are spiking down like crazy exackly cause of blizzard decision to screw everything they worked so hard for last 10 years in favor to cater to nolifers.

[Bigbazz]

You fucking annihilate everything because you're overgeared for it, you said it yourself you're running heirlooms.. If you want it to be harder then take them off, you've created the problem for yourself, without heirlooms you would be running around with whites and empty slots for a long time.

[Tomana]

Those games basically required leveling in groups, and consequently you can definitely say they were harder to level up in. It doesn't mean that WoW 1.0 didn't have its own challenges as a more solo-able MMO. It's all relative.

Of course it's all relative. What WoW managed to do by being more casual relatively to the competition is to tap into an "unused pool" of players.

A point which I tried to make is that attempting to appeal to casual audiences by making the game stupidly easy is that they can very easily lose the interest of casual players and serious players alike. As I mentioned, a considerably steeper difficulty curve didn't stop WoW from becoming phenomenally popular in the first two years of its release.

Again, relatively to the competition, that curve was not steep. Plus, the gamers from 2004 and from 2014 is not even remotely the same population.

[Krom2040]

You fucking annihilate everything because you're overgeared for it, you said it yourself you're running heirlooms.. If you want it to be harder then take them off, you've created the problem for yourself, without heirlooms you would be running around with whites and empty slots for a long time.

(1) it shouldn't matter if I'm using heirlooms, at least not to the degree that it does. *everybody* is using heirlooms, so it's shitty game design of the game isn't any fun with the things that everybody uses.
(2) it is and always a goofy notion to suggest that people de-gear themselves until the game feels right. First, dungeons are a group activity so if I go in there completely naked then everybody else is just going to kill everything for me. Second, it's never the player's job to tune a game for the developers. Third, the primary reason everybody uses heirlooms is for the experience boost, and nobody's going to give that up.
(3) heirlooms aren't that much more powerful than the gear you'd otherwise get, by the time you get past level 60 or so.
(4) is the problem with timewalking dungeons also that people overgear them?

[Tomana]

(1) it shouldn't matter if I'm using heirlooms, at least not to the degree that it does. *everybody* is using heirlooms, so it's shitty game design of the game isn't any fun with the things that everybody uses.

A completely new player does not have heirlooms. So if you make the leveling hard with heirlooms, it will drive away new players who do not have them.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

But somewhere in middle of WoTLK all that fun had disappeared. I remember working on last quests for Loremaster achievement on my level 60 alt when big nerfbat patch hit (one that removed all elite quests and nerfed all NPCs) and ruined most fun. That was last good memory of leveling alts I have from WoW. After that it was worse with every expansion. NPCs got weaker and weaker, players got stronger, dungeons got split into small boring halls. Leveling in both world and dungeons stopped being fun.

That was in TBC, not WotLK, so you still enjoyed playing for quite a while after that patch.

[Deleted]

Well, that's the thing, it was awesome back then because it was new and modern for that day and age. It's like comparing televisions, Black / White TV sets were amazing back in the day, but who would watch one now?

It's the same with everything, hell even relationships are like that. When you meet a girl you're flying in love, but after living with that perfect woman all that passion just drifts away no matter what.

[Shrouded]

I've said it before, but because of this and several other reasons, WoW levelling is pointless and obsolete:

- It's so trivially easy it does nothing to teach new players the class or the game.
- Nothing you gain while levelling has any tangible benefit to your character at max level.
- All levelling content is designed to be done solo or quickly consumed through the LFD tool = no natural way to socialize and meet other players.

What does that leave? The stories? They could as easily be max level quests. No, Blizzard made sure all levelling content is completely pointless, and their "solution" for this problem was to offer expensive level 90 boosts. It's ridiculous.

[Deleted]

You fucking annihilate everything because you're overgeared for it, you said it yourself you're running heirlooms.. If you want it to be harder then take them off, you've created the problem for yourself, without heirlooms you would be running around with whites and empty slots for a long time.

Wow your level of ignorance and misunderstanding is beyond recognition.


To OP: Yes I partly agree and understand your point. An easy fix would be to make the dungeons harder and take longer time to clear (as you mention, make mobs hit harder, larger healthpools etc), but at the same time increase the yielded xp gain to compensate.