Garrisons are NOT the main problem of WoD

[Wyattbw09]

Patch 2.2

That is my response to that statement.

Fair enough, but look what 2.2 was in between the Black Temple and The Gods of Zul’Aman.

WoD took FOREVER to make, cost 60 bucks, and they have pretty much are not doing anything sense it's release.

[PrairieChicken]

The main problem is that any content that isn't raiding drops shit that you might as well not exist. It is a problem of rewards, the amount of content matter but it is not as big as the problem of reward structure.

So basically everything has rewards stripped, garrison stuffs are more decent but the gameplay is horrible (click stuff and wait for n hours to get loot mailed)

[kunah]

Respectfully OP,,, garrisons and profs is why I unsubbed after reaching only level 95 on my main. They need to be wiped from the game and profs needs to be restored to pre-WOD style. I know this won't happen,, so I guess I am out permanently.

Edit: But let's face it and cut the crap. It's over. We all loved the game for years and years. After experiencing TI,,I really was excited about WOD. But it's over.

[mvaliz]

I'm glad you made this post OP - as i feel the exact same way.

People aren't leaving their garrisons and going into Draenor due to "being able to do everything there" - they're not leaving because there's really nothing worthwhile to do outside of it.

Although I can agree with the mining/herbalism complaints. Those you can do in your garrison and never really need to mine/herb outside of it. :P

[Avlivar]

Your post is exactly why Garrisons are the problem. They pulled people from every team to work on Garrisons, and all the content get forced into some shitty single-player experience.

[Alopex Major]

Maybe not the main problem, but certainly a major one for me, at least. I can't be the only one who really dislikes them.

If they'd been actually optional, like pet battles, and/or actually customizable, they would have been a lot more palatable. But they are neither, add in the repetition factor with alts and it's a deal breaker for me.

Edit -- Also, I never asked to be a "commander". My character isn't a commander, never has been, never will be. To force people into that role might work for some, but it certainly doesn't for people whose story doesn't go that way.

[Barnabas]

Respectfully OP,,, garrisons and profs is why I unsubbed after reaching only level 95 on my main. They need to be wiped from the game and profs needs to be restored to pre-WOD style. I know this won't happen,, so I guess I am out permanently.

Edit: But let's face it and cut the crap. It's over. We all loved the game for years and years. After experiencing TI,,I really was excited about WOD. But it's over.

It's over if they keep making expansions like this. They have enough addicted players to keep the game going after WoD. If they make another WoD then they lose another third of the playerbase or more. It's up to the developers to change the direction of the game. They just can't depend on sparkle pony revenue to float them when more people are bailing that won't buy one.

[Height]

I've stopped logging into WoW except on Saturdays when my group of friends raid. Same goes for my brother. If we break up as a group I'm done and unsubbing. Nothing else is keeping me here. Honestly, I don't want anything else to keep me here. I don't want to have to log in to do stuff in order to raid. I just want to raid. :P

[Gen4Glock21]

Garrisons as the only reason for WoD failure, of course not. Its a combination of professions sucking, removal of reforging, removal of flying, PVP, PVE outside of raiding, no valor, and so forth.

However denying garrisons as not being part of it is wrong, just as wrong as saying flying has not had an effect. A feature sold in BC as something new and exciting suddenly removed after four expansions seemed odd to me. As far as I can tell Blizzard explained it as too convenient for questing and so forth so they removed it. They did not like being able to drop down kill X mob remount and fly off.

I finally quit after nearly 10 years of WOW and I quit for a laundry list of reasons two of which I mentioned above.

[Madelein]

I unsubbed after nearly 10 years (short by a few months) of playing WoW. For a variety of reasons.

Garrisons were up there. There is nothing to do in the game itself aside from raiding and garrisons. And sometimes, the Garrison was giving me better raiding gear than I was getting in raids due to bad drops. And I hated having to have garrisons to even be able to level and progress in the game itself. Too much was tied into it and 3/4 of the time, the quests in some zones were linear and all tied back to the garrison in one way, shape or form. The farm in MoP was bad enough, but this took it to a whole new level. The garrisons became a central theme for everything, even our legendary quest line.

Lack of actual content once leveled. Sure, I went back and sought out all the secret eggs in each zone, I did my garrison dailies every day until I wanted to pull my teeth without medication, but it was the same thing day in and day out. And the end results was currency and nothing else to do with it really. Just bleh.

Professions.. Dear God.. the changes they made were awful. They made all professions worthless and normalised everything in the game. Gone were the days of finding the right profession for your class and spec, to ink out that little bit extra in your game play. It became boring and people could do just as well not leveling any profession. Some professions were worse to level than others because of the ridiculous mats involved that involved having to do dailies in the Garrison to get or grind mobs mindlessly for drops (no fun at all and not content), for items that were not even worthwhile, it was just to skill up.

Class balance.. Hopeless. It had gotten to the point where I didn't even want to log onto my main at the start. It just wasn't fun, there was no challenge, just pure pain and boredom.

Skill balance.. They removed so many things that made each of our classes fun and playable. For some of us, they were the central themes of our classes and made everything else just meh.

What made WoW popular in the past was having to get out there in the game. You had to interact with others, positively or negatively, there was still interaction. Who remembers the thrill of finding a black lotus in vanilla and rushing towards it like a lunatic to pick it? Now we have workers in our garrisons to do everything for us.

That is what WoD lacked, things to do in the game itself. Having to gather mats for consumables in the past was something we had to do in the game, we had to get out there and farm for it. Now, you can get just about everything in the garrison.

We used to make gold by farming extra and selling it, now professions are so meh, that we can't make anything worth using or worth gold that people cannot simply get in their garrisons.

Once you level in WoD, that's it. In MoP, they made us do Timeless Isle, and grind that with absolute frustration and they are doing the same thing again, only now it is even worse.

By removing the reason for people to go anywhere because people can just camp in the Garrison now, by removing things that made each class unique and fun to play because they required skills to play, by normalising everything, the game is now boring. I haven't played for several months now and the only thing I truly miss are the people I played with in my guild. The game itself has no appeal because it has become same thing different day and has been like that since MoP came out.

I think they need to fix professions and they need to remove the ability to obtain everything from Garrisons to get people out in the game again. They need to stop tying everything in the game to the Garrisons. Put in some great quest chains outside in the game, not tied to Garrisons. As much as I used to detest attunements, even they would be a good addition at this time, because it would get people out there and playing instead of sitting in Garrisons. Just something that isn't Garrison involved.

[TickTickTick]

You mentioned the 'content' there is besides garrison, but remember that the whole leveling process and end game have been designed around it. If they hadn't added garrisons into the game, the world and activities would have looked differently. Blizzard is bad at betting it seems. They chise a wrong horse and niw they are taking the backlash for their mistake.

[Sylreick]

Guess you're right, Garrisons aren't the MAIN issue, but they are definitely a big issue.

I see it as a prime example of why they held off adding player housing for so long. They didn't want to add such a thing if there wasn't much to do there, but then they went and made Garrisons and provided us with a bit too much to do there. So much so, that we really don't see a need to leave. It's sad, but player housing would have been better if it really was a minor thing to work on, in addition to what else was going on in the game.

If it had been a place that we built with parts we scavenged around the world, or built up through professions; a place we piece together and set up basic necessities, like a bank, hearth point, mailbox and similar bits; something we could show to friends and probably sit in while we queued for stuff (it's bound to happen in some spot for the duration of an expansion)... this would be great.

But we can gather all the materials we need for any profession we might want something from, without even needing the gathering profession. We can craft what we like from any profession, by setting up that building. We can gather a hefty load of gold (even more if we have alts working at it as well). We have a portal right to a main hub for an AH, or the world PvP area, or portals to the main cities.

This is in addition to drastically reducing the amount of dailies and rep grinding options. All of this shrank the world considerably.

6.2 does not amount to much more than the same thing we have been doing now. There's a raid we can queue for, or get two meat-heads to summon the rest of the team. More queue options for currently available content and new ways to experience old content. A beautiful new zone, to tour once and grab all the rares/treasures and then probably never see again. Then the random event (I'm assuming the event thing will be like the old battleground weekend deal).

None of that seems bad, but there's nothing truly revolutionary, nothing to get us back out into the world more than the first week.

Honestly, I'd like to see a return to the 25 daily quest cap. Provide us with MoP level daily hubs, but let the cap rail us into choosing which rep(s) to work on earlier than others. Bring back the rep vendors that mixed in random "fun" items, or leveling gear as well as some max level gear to start us off with (and have it be bought with GOLD, not apexis, not badges, not valor or JP). Have a separate vendor that provides gear on level with current tier for currency found within that tier (or equivalent max level 5-man dungeon, like the new mythic mode). Remove bonus roll system (this really kills replay value of the raid, those little bonus stats on items don't really do much to help in that area). The world needs more solo content, that ISN'T put into a single location and doable as a cellphone mini game. As for PvP, I'm not a huge fan of it in it's current state and the most I ever enjoyed of it was during TBC/Wrath. The only solid advice I could give for this would be to make healers solo-able again. Healing should definitely slow things down so that people can come to the assist if done fast enough, but they shouldn't be god-mode with never ending mana while being wailed on by one/two enemies. That just slows things down, and I had much more fun when PvP was the fast paced fight-die-fight-die-fight cycle while working toward the objective of a BG. But Arena's on the other hand; they should probably last a bit longer and require more strategy in dealing with the enemy as there is no real objective beyond killing the enemy.

But, it doesn't seem their design team shares my view on what made WoW fun in the past, what brought me in and held me for so long. Miss you dudebro. Might be time to move on *sniff*.

[Kaleredar]

Their solution was 'we gave you normal and LFR' which was not addressing the issue of 'raiding is boring as fuck, give me some fun content with meaningful rewards'. instead we got a rep grind and dumpy raids.

That's all we had in previous expansions outside of raiding.

The only difference now is that we don't have any structure for these events. No daily quests to guide the rep grind. No reason to run the dungeons.


Like, honestly, list the actual content in previous expansions. We had the daily quest grinds, running heroic dungeons for valor points, and then side fluff like the farm or Wintergrasp and that sort of thing.

The only thing WoD is missing that makes it different than any other expansion is those rep grinds and incentive to run dungeons.

And because garrisons have dick-all to do with rep grinds or dungeons, I once again state my opinion that garrisons have literally no effect on the lack of daily quests or valor points, the removal of which was a conscientious decision by Blizzard.


The only way Garrisons play into this equation is that they aren't a substitute for what Blizzard removed following MoP.

[Klingers]

I would've been perfectly fine taking weekly campaign quests from Yrel/Durotan and Khadgar in the populated, serviced hub city of Karabor/Bladespire and then hopping on my nether drake to dedicated level 100 areas to quest.

If I got bored while queuing for LFR or moderately challenging heroic dungeons that reward valor points I could head up and do some fun and engaging dailies with the Drakorium or Frostwolf Rhylak Trainers to raise my own pet Faerie Drake or Rhylak mount over several weeks. There would be 4 or 5 straight gold-costing mounts available at exalted.

By the time I was sick of that 6.1 would drop with the new Shatari defense faction awarding me cool mounts and a set of transmog gear, maybe a competetive epic ring, trinket or neckpiece as a reward for completing the daily story-driven campaign to re-take Shattrath from the Shadow Council.

Before that got too old, Tanaan Jungle would drop in 6.2 with the Hellfire Citadel raid. Blizzard would begin prototyping their new Assassin's Creed IV-style naval combat tech in preparation for the upcoming South Seas expansion and players would have a blast with new instanced naval combat arenas accessible from your Clipper Ship accessible from the Karabor Docks.

6.3 would have a bunch of new three and five-man naval combat arena missions as well as a temporal fissure in Nagrand leading back to the Caverns of Time on Azeroth. The Infinite Dragonflight under the auspices of Wrathion and a twisted shade of Kairoz would be slowing working to unravel the fabric of time itself. The Timewalkers, a mortal faction that has championed the protection of the timeways since the fall of the dragonflights is calling upon you for aid. Follow an engaging story-driven questline to head back into the past and ensure critical events in Azeroth's history play out as expected. Form groups of friends and venture back into a large selection of favorite dungeons from WoW, BC, WOTLK and Cataclysm with players of appropriate level.

In 6.4 after being MIA for several months, the remnants of Gul'Dan and his Shadow Council surface once again in the Fields of Faralohn. With Draenor threatening to break apart from a new Faralohn Dark Portal, you must travel to Faralohn via your ship to aid the time-displaced Archmage Vargoth and a cadre of neutral local Draenei to ensure the horror of Netherstorm never again comes to pass. Enjoy 3 new dungeons, maybe a raid. Who knows. Either way you won't be bothered because there'll be engaging story content and you won't have to wait 10-14 months for a new raid tier.

TLDR; Imagine what we could've had if those resources weren't thrown at Garrisons this expansion.

[Deleted]

Where to start... Well, I unsubbed recently for the first time in almost 9 years. Mostly because I just can't be bothered with raiding any more. I'd wake in the morning, and whilst at work think 'almost home time, then I can sit on my PC and be a vegetable' nope, jk, raid.
Doing BRF for the umpteenth time is not new content. The new boss abilities are not new content. It's boring. It's not worth my £10.00 a month.

It started ofc with beta. Small things like warlocks animations being bugged (soul fire makes your character do the 'being hit' animation when you cast it, glyph of meta doesn't give green wings WHICH THEY HAVE STATED THEY ARE WORKING ON AND THEN STATED THEY DO NOT PLAN TO WORK ON IT jesus the lack of communication is real), more abilities than required being 'pruned', melee overlords, etc. etc. All things that I have seen brought up to the devs before, and they nonchalantly just shrug their shoulders more or less. 6.0 was extended beta, proved by the fact that NO ONE COULD PLAY FOR THE FIRST 5 DAYS. that was a travesty. I tried defending blizz, i really did, but in the end it was completely out of order. Fast forward 3 weeks of grinding dungeons and doing CMs to hope for a 645 upgrade, getting a 665 drop and being a beast because of it, Highmaul is released. The 5 man content is made USELESS. These 3 weeks were actually really fun IMO, this was a great time in WoW, and I was really, really enjoying WoD.

Fast forward again, killing the same 7 bosses (lacklustre ones at that, IMHO) for what felt like months, and BRF is released. Now it's even harder to re-roll. And this is the deal-breaker for me: The legendary quest. I got bored of raiding and decided that I'd join some alt raids on my rogue, this wasn't so bad as I had the 680 ring. Turns out I wanted to make a druid too. So I get to 100, I take the quest for getting the 640 ring, then I try and do the heroics for the 680 one... I was in a queue for around 40 minutes as DPS. No one is doing the worthless content, and they shouldn't be. I then looked for an apexis farm group for the pit daily. NOPE. no one does that shit any more. So that was that, tbh. I did the other dailies slowly but again that was boring and even a lot of the mobs were bugged.

6.1 releases and beta ends. We have 2 raids that are one tier together, the content for 6.1 is twitter integration and the selfie cam... Enough has been said about this by other people, so I wont go there. Needless to say it was VERY POORLY TIMED BY BLIZZ.

One other thing that made me quit is the constant yoyo that warlocks are on. One minute we're godlike OP, then we're trash tier and not worth bringing at all. It's just boring to not know whether my main is going to be viable or not in a few weeks time, if the devs decide to ninja nerf demonbolt or doomguard or say EVERY SINGLE ABILITY BY 25% rant over about class.

The devs are way too complacent, they come off as arrogant on twitter most of the time. For example, on a Heelvsbabyface video, he was talking about a dev who, when asked about the recent sub loss and if he was going to start communicating with the community more, said 'Yeah, I'll just post more cat pictures'. They have no shame. None whatsoever. The rain of fire ninja nerf at the start of WoD was way too much, and blizz have said 'it might not have been the best time to change the ability' and not 'sorry we were so hamfisted with nerfs, it will be reverted soon'. It's just bullshit after bullshit with Blizz now, when asked about sub loss, it's some PR comment on how 'they saw it coming and the offset the losses by increasing the price' no, YOU MADE A SHIT EXPAC.

Garrisons are fine. They should have more interesting missions and not 'XP XP XP XP XP GOLD MYTHICRAID' imo. Remove the profession buildings already, as that has killed professions entirely. And gathering, I liked being able to say 'I want to buy a mechano hog, time to spend 8 hours farming herbs' and not 'time to log on to garrison once a week with my 15 treasure hunter followers and loot the 10k gold that was waiting for me, then log out'. It was a great idea at the start and now it's the cancer of the whole expac. Way too much emphasis was placed on garrisons as a selling point of WoD. Another thing is we were told we'd have choice on what building to take... well... do you see any one with the mage tower? Do you see any one with the engineering building? Do you see people using stables outside of getting the mounts? no. You see coliseum, dwarven bunker, salvage yard, barracks. They're simply the best. You're gimped if you don't take at least those 4.

6.2 is not looking great. Tanaan is meant to be this 'new and improved timeless isle' we were promised in WoD. It's small than timeless isle for a start... I don't know, maybe they'll make it really fun and rewarding etc. etc. bla bla classic bullshit again, but I won't hold my breath. With how every thing else we were promised turned out, I expect it to be mediocre at best. Probably something not even as fun as the Silverwastes in GW2.

PvP is dead. There's not much else to be said. I feel sorry for die hard pvp fans, because blizz just don't care. I feel like there's a massive lack of PvE content, so I can't imagine how PvPers feel. I did a little as a paladin for the arena gear as it was a high Ilvl, I really did not enjoy it. Even as a ret paladin I hated it and I can't say why... I just feel like any small nuances of skill of a class have been outright removed. Simple things like a priest using shadow word death on an enemy as they cast polymorph so it damages them as poly lands on them, instantly taking them out, frost mages using rank 1 frostbolt on melee that are tunnelling them. Ashran is a travesty. Only been there once, expected some pvp, got steamrolled by some NPCs and other people derping around them. That was fun.

Ability pruning was a complete failure, along with removing justice and valor. I did dungeons in MoP to get valor, to upgrade my gear. Same as HC scenarios. THIS WAS FUN AND INTERESTING. I could solo hc dungeons as a lock by the end in a few minutes, heroic scenarios were quick easy and fun with friends. why were they removed? why was justice and valor removed? apparently because it's 'too complicated'. having two currencies in your currency tab is not TOO FUCKING COMPLICATED!!!! Look at Destiny, look at gw2, look at almost any other MMO... It's just blizz trying to pander to the masses, but let's think about that for a second... the pinnacle of wow was WotLK (imo and according to sub numbers), when we had MASSIVE talent trees, able to spec into all 3 at any time to make hybrid builds etc. and a LOT of abilites. Most abilities of each spec being available to all specs. Destro had corruption and bane of doom, frost had fireball and arcane blast, I could go on forever. It was much easier to tell a good player from a bad player too. So during this time of massive, convoluted talent trees, classes with dozens and dozens of abilities that were very niche and some rarely used (which I liked. ice lance in fire spec ftw).

Icicles. The final thing I'd like to add is that Mage was my favourite class. In WotLK, in Cata and then no. They had the right idea for mage before MoP, in Cata is was ok, not great. For a start, frost felt.. frosty. You freeze someone and deliver a massive one two shatter combo on them and take a chunk of their hp, you have to make sure you don't get caught, you have frost barrier which MEANT SOMETHING. Once shatter combos were almost removed from frost mage pvp, I just... I don't know. That along with the annoying shitty pet being permanent and not a really strong cooldown... It just sucks IMO. Fire was amazing in WotLK (quite hard to pvp with, but fun as hell) and very good in Cata. Being able to ice lance totems or ice lance melee for damage instead of scorching and being locked out was great. Oh nah JK let's remove that as IT'S TOO COMPLICATED. I love wotlk mage 4ever.

i cry evertim



TLDR; Blizz are too complacent in their success


edit: spelling and TLDR

[Blur4stuff]

what were you doing at this point in previous expansions that you can't do in WoD?

i keep seeing people say there's lack of content compared to before. what are you referring to specifically?

[Saberstrike]

The problem is Blizzard catering to idiots and thinking everyone in their playerbase is an idiot.

They'll make a good game once they stop with the design idea of treating their player like an idiot every step of the way until mythic raids.

[Zka]

it has nothing to do with the games' age, it has everything to do with the expansion's quality.

Keep lying to yourself, otherwise you'd stop believing

[HuxNeva]

I strongly disagree. They actually are one of the biggest fundamental problems with this expansion.

They absolutely skew effort vs reward systems (which, despite the cries from the smartphone gaming fanbase, absolutely is important) by way of showering a player with all sorts of various items just for logging in.

They promote a percentage of character progression that is entirely disassociated with actions the player takes on his / her own, in terms of follower rewards.

They manage to make an already poor profession system light years worse, by removing any sort of decision factor in choosing secondary professions. They play a part in how stripped down most primary professions are, and how easy access is to many crafted goods, which offers little benefit to the economy.

They also add greatly to the monotony factor of the game, as most players WILL use the garrison on a fairly consistent basis. While it's not "mandatory", it's lucrative enough that you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not using it to the intended extent. Farms in Pandaland struck a far better balance in terms of usefulness without feeling nearly as obligatory as garrisons are.

Well put. It's just chores. It even prevents switching mains, 'cause the gearing tail-wind a full garrison gives is so strong you will have a hard time catching up the 'lost' time.
Blizzard seems to think that people doing stuff in-game means that they like it. It's not.

[Kahmal]

I just want to point out that the whole "not having enough to do outside of instances" Has been a problem with this game damn near since WoTLK. In WoTLK all we really got was the Argent Tournament. However since Northrend was so massive there was a good chance you hadn't cleared much of Icecrown or Stormpeaks and you could do those for additional gold. But Wrath started the problem of streamlining professions thus making gold extremely easy to come by just from playing the AH. Gone were the days of farming for your Lionheart Helmet.

Cataclysm we got that Firelands Quest hub which was pretty damn cool. I didn't play much of MoP but once again if you were fully Heroic raid geared you didn't have much need to venture out.

WoD took this to the freakin extreme though, I mean I have a damn mine at my hub ffs thats simply a chore to clear out. Also Cata and WoTLK did give us new dungeons to keep us busy. 6 months with no content patch, this might be an even bigger blunder then Cataclysm's Troll patch.