Is it me or does wow is getting little more casual/easier each new expansion?

[Eazy]

Old school RPG players realised that mmorpgs are weird some years ago and stopped playing. WoW has to catter to players who simply want to live in some Epic, Second World.

Much better to play games with actual good story.

I kinda agree, but the RPG players also wanted to live in some epic, second world.

Times changes, the community changes.

[Deleted]

The game is becoming more accessible, not easier. Boss/mob mechanics are the most complex and challenging they've ever been to be honest.

[Deleted]

Wow has always been the easy entry 'casual' MMO option, even in Vanilla it was much easier and simpler than its competitors, it's one of the reasons the game flourished.

All they are doing is keeping up with the times, making sure they keep their market dominance.

[Lushious]

I remember WOTLK last patch as the "easiest" WoW has ever been. VERY many full heroic or 11/12 HC pugs, I haven't seen that as widespread since.

[Swalload]

I measured this by looking at pug successes every expansion (anecdotal )
How quickly you can get geard (anecdotal )
How easy are the mobs whlist leveling etc.

Ofcourse pugging in vanilla/tbc was pretty nonexistent, gearing was slow and 2/3 mobs killed you.

As Activision partnerd with Blizzard during wotlk it is then we got some taste of catching up mechanics;

1. Badges
2. Tuned raids for pugs
3. LFD

Turning back to legion, everything is a faceroll. Players assume mythic+15 is hard content, where I see my casual friends running them daily. The gear is very easy to get in Legion, the systems in places are created as everything is a faceroll.
PVP got very easy now too.

Pugging in Legion is soo easy that people don’t bother with normal/heroic guilds no more.


Is it me or wow is getting more casual each expansion/]?

Difficulty and casual are 2 different things.
Casual is about the amount of time player (per week or day for exemple). You could have a very hard game played by casuals, they would just not play it a lot but if they're not bad they'll get through it.
The thing is, hardcore players want to be rewarded for wasting their time in a game that requires less time than what they put in. The game evolved with its player base and the surrounding, games that require a ton of time investment are not well seen at all, being casual is a good thing.

However, about the difficulty, which has nothing to do with the amount of time spent in a game, is in a much better place than in previous xpacks, people now have a way to challenge themselves if they want to with M+, I'm not talking about +15, no one in their right mind sees this as a challenge. There's also mage towers, some harder mythic raid bosses compared to before.

There could be more hard stuff here and there but the problem that this game always had is that it's possible to get help. The whole point of a challenge is to force people to deal with it on their own and never get carried. What used to be challenges in the previous xpacks became completely trivial within a few weeks.

The problem I see with posts like yours (there's like one every month at least) is that it doesn't matter if there's easy content for less talented people in the game. Who gives a shit? Let them to their stuff, go do yours, find your challenges. Don't run your +15 and say "that's easy", push it to 25 stop being a pussy, you want more challenging content, go for it.

Catch up mechanics are irrelevant to difficulty, there's nothing fun in forcing your entire guild to run old content so alts can progress like we did in vanilla, that was terribly boring.

Pugging is easier only if your guild is made of shit. If you have a decent raiding group it's always gonna be smoother and faster than a pug. Go get in a good guild you'll see. Also why mention normal and heroic when both of these difficulty levels were not meant to be hard in the first place? If all you do is mention content that is designed to be easy and complain that it is exactly what it was designed for then the problem is not in the game lol.

Yes WoW has more casual content with every expansion, it's what allowed it to survive with so many players after 13 fucking years. If it stayed as tedious, annoying and time wasting as vanilla it would have died before Pandaria. And not just "there's not many people playing it" I mean straight up servers shutdown, dead.

[Fritters154]

Well resilience/pvp power got removed and everyone in the arena have same stats so that the game is equal, hence making more casual / easier

That logically should make PvP harder, as all characters you are facing have roughly the same ability stat wise as opposed to having much higher resilience/PVP power than the opponent you are facing and steamrolling them.

Perhaps more casual in the sense you no longer have to grind for days to accumulate good gear or maintain a raid and PVP set to do both; however, easier is definitely not the case.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

You haven't played legion clearly. Before legion I'd agree.

[Trickname]

Really depends on what you mean by 'easier'
Easier to get more epics? yes
Easier to kill top difficulty raid bosses? no (yea yea I know about Naxx)

It's also hard to compare as the systems/ design philosophy have changed so much.


I suppose the one clear thing which is easier is levelling. But it would suck taking 2 years to get from 1-110

...all opinion

[Fumu]

WoW was the goo-goo gaa-gaa baby casual MMO game from day 1. MMOS before it generally had either an extremely vague map or no map at all, so few quests that grinding was a given, group or die even to the level 5 rat outside your starting zone, no overworld taxis, MUCH harsher death penalties, world PVP where you could lose nearly everything when you got ganked, etc.
The game being insanely successful shows that it's apparently what the market wanted, so it's unsurprising that it continued this trend and any efforts to dial it back were met with huge backlash.

There's nothing wrong with a more casual MMO, of course. But "hardcore" on a fundamental level just isn't WoW, and it never was.

[Rudkobing]

It's just you.

[Daedius]

You're just noticing this?

[msdos]

More casual, no. Back then you couldn't fall behind on AOTC, there was no "rush". Also now, if you want to rank up in M+, you have stay active and be dedicated to pushing keys, otherwise your rank will drop over time and if you have a low score and try to be casual, your score will never really rise, you need to continuously be doing more and more difficult content.
Casual alts are also more under-geared than non casual. A day after hitting 110 I'm already collecting 900+ loot from M+. You have a huge advantage if you can handle all the content already. Back then you couldn't tier up with LFR, to normal, to M+, to heroic, you simply had to wait until next Tuesday. You have the choice of being less casual if you want, back then it was just "wait til next Tuesday".

Easier? I'm not so sure. KJ was a very difficult and demanding boss. Also Cenarius/Xavius were kinda not a joke when the xpac launched, mostly because of class design, but still.
I think the game is becoming more predictable for raiders.

I would like to see Blizzard do a design pass on boss encounters. It's about time we were able to use actual abilities on bosses. Slow, stuns, CC. I want to see Blizzard move towards "true" encounters. Ramp up the burst bosses can do, bring back threat and force players to use their abilities again, force people to make decisions.
Now we're baked into predictable routines, "oh the boss is cleaving, please turn him, oh adds are coming, please pick them up, omg, don't stand in front of the boss, zomg, stand with this group, omg stand by yourself, omg stack, omg spread" How many encounters can you have just doing those same things?

I miss encounters like Thorim gauntlet, TOCG alliance vs horde, Hardmode Freya. Fights with real decision making and execution, not, "stand here for 5 seconds and soak this stupid 1 shot mechanic"

[xxcloud417xx]

There's more casual content, sure. However, as someone who has been raiding Mythic all expac, the content that isn't for casuals is definitely there for players like me and it's pretty good too. Hell, it may have been too hard in ToS. We wasted a ton of time on Mythic Avatar.

Mythic+ system gives dungeoneers something challenging to do as well without making dungeons too hard for everyone else. I think Blizzard really nailed the casual vs. Non-casual content this expac. Neither side is gaining to the detriment of the other one.

[Skayth]

I measured this by looking at pug successes every expansion (anecdotal )
How quickly you can get geard (anecdotal )
How easy are the mobs whlist leveling etc.

Ofcourse pugging in vanilla/tbc was pretty nonexistent, gearing was slow and 2/3 mobs killed you.

As Activision partnerd with Blizzard during wotlk it is then we got some taste of catching up mechanics;

1. Badges
2. Tuned raids for pugs
3. LFD

Turning back to legion, everything is a faceroll. Players assume mythic+15 is hard content, where I see my casual friends running them daily. The gear is very easy to get in Legion, the systems in places are created as everything is a faceroll.
PVP got very easy now too.

Pugging in Legion is soo easy that people don’t bother with normal/heroic guilds no more.


Is it me or wow is getting more casual each expansion/]?

someone clearly didnt do tos mythic

[Byleth]

someone clearly didnt do tos mythic

I still have nightmares about glaives... *shudder*

[Deleted]

WoW's success in MMO market was that it was casual compared to Everquest or Ultima or korean stuff. I can't believe people still pitch Vanilla or TBC as "hardcore", sheesh.

I mean it's fine if you didn't play it and you're parroting one of those fat guys on twitch, but you're just embarrassing yourself.

People like repeating like parrot... They dont Like Legion cause of big grinding but vanilla and TBC they were more time consuming in end game then Legion with grinding reps

[cparle87]

I still have nightmares about glaives... *shudder*

Dodge the bleepity bleep glaives while also stacking for absorb and/or incorporeal shot! ~ My raid leader so many times.

[Deleted]

I think raid boss mechanics should be simple, as like they were in classic.

Today we have multi phase bosses, even with rng, and with group splitting and 10 things you have to care about.

I mean, sure, people are more skilled today, but OTOH i miss the old simplicitiy where the only thing you had to do was to care for not being the bomb and standing in the raid.

"Ok, guys, phase 37. Everyone jump all 3 seconds and use /y Wooo!"

Yeeez another complain you must be pretty noob in game XD try dummie in sw or og perfekt mechanics for you

[ro9ue]

You have to understand how MMORPGs work. Even if you like the challenges of something like M+, Mage Tower or Mythic Raiding, you still need to populate the world with a ton of players to actually have the game feel alive. 90% of the content in the game is casual content. World Quests, Heroic Dungeons, LFR/Normal, Random BGs, Pet Battles, etc etc etc. Thats for the 90%.

But it's those players that pay the bills for the people in the top ~10% who want to raid Mythic, get Rank 1 in Arena, and all of the other hardcore stuff. Even what some would consider a "hardcore" game like EverQuest, you still had a ton of people that populated the world and they never even hit max level. They just made alts and cleared orc camps. That is good for the health of the game.

One thing is for sure, none of those people doing the highest end challenges would give a shit if it didn't matter to a whole lot of casual players. Look at WildStar. It was made for only the hardcore, with no room for casual players to filter in. The casuals are the ones who pay the bills and are necessary for a healthy MMO - don't ever think otherwise.

[Erolian]

You have to understand how MMORPGs work. Even if you like the challenges of something like M+, Mage Tower or Mythic Raiding, you still need to populate the world with a ton of players to actually have the game feel alive. 90% of the content in the game is casual content. World Quests, Heroic Dungeons, LFR/Normal, Random BGs, Pet Battles, etc etc etc. Thats for the 90%.

But it's those players that pay the bills for the people in the top ~10% who want to raid Mythic, get Rank 1 in Arena, and all of the other hardcore stuff. Even what some would consider a "hardcore" game like EverQuest, you still had a ton of people that populated the world and they never even hit max level. They just made alts and cleared orc camps. That is good for the health of the game.

One thing is for sure, none of those people doing the highest end challenges would give a shit if it didn't matter to a whole lot of casual players. Look at WildStar. It was made for only the hardcore, with no room for casual players to filter in. The casuals are the ones who pay the bills and are necessary for a healthy MMO - don't ever think otherwise.

I think this is subtly wrong. Trying to assign arbitrary values like "90% of content is for the casuals so they can keep the lights on!" is pretty stupid. An MMO benefits from the journey. That does include casual content. Lots of it in fact. Its just not meant to only appease the casual and bad players. Everyone experiences it. The journey that players take from level one until they're clearing the most difficult content in the game or wherever they choose to finally stop is the important part. The next step always has to be there and being able to see that long from now there's a place you could be progressing towards with different content to be consuming and making your character stronger with is what makes the game. If you cut either end off its no longer a compelling journey. Trying to simplify it by saying the casual players are the important part is silly. You just have players that play the game and obviously people that put in above average effort make it further into the game faster but they aren't a different breed or more or less important