Uh...we already earned this stuff?

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

MMO game uses gear/currency/power treadmill more at 11!

Ikr? /10 characters

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You apparently, aren't a PvPer. Class progression is 9/10 the content for PvPers.

I do agree that PvP depends more on character abilities. I don't think Blizz has any clear vision for keeping Arena engaging atm. What sense of PvP they have left seems more tuned toward battle fronts and war mode.

[Army Dreamer]

like we are that retarded and can't see it's the same carrot?

Yes, you are.

[Stormcleave]

We've been starting again every time there is an expansion OP... nothing new here.

All those people in Vanilla that threw away their tier sets when they got some greens from mob drops in BC

There is something new here, actually. Have you seen some of the Azurite bonuses? They are direct (flagrant) rip-offs for abilities, legendary items, artifact traits we already earned in Legion. Im not sure how clearly I can state this problem. I earned it already. Deja Vu? Here, grind out Azurite to gain something back you already earned in Legion. This is ok with people paying 50 bucks for a NEW expansion? If BfA is a success what message do we send? Its ok to make us earn the same exact suff over and over and over again?

The D&D comparison was for modules, not versions. You dont remove your players abilities every module, no one would play. But, apparently WoW players will because you dont need any abilities to afk through LFR or to dance naked RPing in Goldshire. Maybe the LFR audience is the end goal for WoW. What if Blizzard is trying to see how much money they'd make and if it would be profitable to target that sort of player. The sort of player that requires near zero effort to retain?

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yeah man... im such a fucking idiot, let me give up my 8 button rotation in vanilla and tbc for that 1 button rotation in legion.


... wait what was that George? i.. i got them backwards? no way, then oplawlz would be lying through his teeth, and why would he ever do that?

I didnt play Vanilla and played Enhancement/Resto Shaman for BC. Want to compare my Enhancement rotation to Legion? Can you imagin today's WoW player being asked to do their rotation AND twist totem buffs every 8 seconds?

[Deleted]

and yet it's been a phenomenal pvp game for the first 6 years.

And yet yours is only one opinion among million others and that doesn't make it a fact.

Anyone intellectually honest can't say that WoW is a phenomenal pvp game, even for your magical 6 years.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

This and similar comments miss the point.

IN general, we have kept capabilities that we earned in the past... talents etc. What we lose is gear but the gear hasn't, prior to Legion had traits. It has power (agi, str, int, whatever). We trade out gear of one power level for more powerful gear with the same stats, just more of them.

Here, we've earned, traits that are in some ways talents and those go away only to come back again; we are getting those same talents back except have to re-earn them. If we lost Trait X but gained Trait Z that would be one thing but it's lazy and annoying to lose Trait X and have to do more work to re-learn Trait X.

If this is what OP meant, you do a better job of stating it than OP - well done.

Idk best answer to this. On one hand, I enjoyed the feeling of continued leveling through much of Legion. It felt like more progression than simply getting bigger numbers on my gear. That was fun.

On other hand, the power up was greater than ever and I don't see how that can continue indefinitely. So a reset was in order.

But you make a good point that losing talents so we can earn them again... Maybe what they're aiming for is us having it all back by when we need it, that is by endgame.

[Highwhale]

yeah man... im such a fucking idiot, let me give up my 8 button rotation in vanilla and tbc for that 1 button rotation in legion.


... wait what was that George? i.. i got them backwards? no way, then oplawlz would be lying through his teeth, and why would he ever do that?

Ever played as warrior tank in vanilla?

[Teri]

We already earned a level 109 times, oh yeah, and soon 119 times!

[Tziva]

It's more than just the usual gear treadmill.

They can't give us a ton of class stuff for every expansion that we keep forever. After awhile, it would become overwhelmingly and especially daunting to anyone who was new or rerolling a class to be coming into a half dozen expansions worth of things. They would have to prune constantly, which aside from being unfun for players, would be really a constant disruption to the class playstyle because things would change too much. They have put themselves in a position where they have to walk back stuff like artifact abilities after the expansion, give us new stuff to earn in BfA, which they will also walkback when that ends. Over and over, just to keep things sensible.

I'm not even totally on board with the pruning they've done so far, I can't imagine what kind of massive ones we'd have to go through regularly if we were still hanging onto every little ability or trait or talent or unique system we'd had since BC.

Honestly, I'd rather they not put so much of expansion content into a unique system that only has a short lifespan. It just exaggerates this problem and I'm not sure it's needed. Players will be driven to play the expansion based on new zones, new levels, and new gear treadmill alone.

It's sort of analogous to me to the storyline progression for our characters. We used to be simple adventurerers or mercenaries. But then you have us doing more and more insane and special stuff where we're saving the world at every turn because the story has to keep one-upping the last thing. Once you start down that path it just ends up becoming ridiculous. I think it would have been better to just not go that way in the first place.

But that's just me.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

The D&D comparison was for modules, not versions. You dont remove your players abilities every module, no one would play. But, apparently WoW players will because you dont need any abilities to afk through LFR or to dance naked RPing in Goldshire. Maybe the LFR audience is the end goal for WoW. What if Blizzard is trying to see how much money they'd make and if it would be profitable to target that sort of player. The sort of player that requires near zero effort to retain?

When I played D&D or similar games, for many years growing up, and the players grew too powerful, the GM would confess he was out of ideas for that campaign and we would retire those characters to start new ones. The demi-god characters would not be dead, and might even appear as NPCs on occasion, but they were no longer the focus of the campaign.

Not sure Blizz has that option. So they have to dream up ways to let us feel like we are progressing indefinitely.

[FelPlague]

Ever played as warrior tank in vanilla?

https://i.imgur.com/zoxwoDM.png
bloodrage. shield block, revenge, shield slam, sunder armor. oh and battle shout.

that is pretty fucking complicated bro.
but yeah i remember our super geared tank just spamming battleshout about 90% of the fight.

[GreenJesus]

IIRC, there's 5+ editions of D&D at this point, and they generally cut back to start with every new one... Might not be the best example.

Sometimes you have to go back to be able to move forward.

So... how many more expansions till they start "moving forward" and add abilities again. All they keep doing is moving backward since WoD started. I guess it's okay to remove some and get better ones later (MAYBE), but I'm not seeing that happen.

[oplawlz]

yeah man... im such a fucking idiot, let me give up my 8 button rotation in vanilla and tbc for that 1 button rotation in legion.


... wait what was that George? i.. i got them backwards? no way, then oplawlz would be lying through his teeth, and why would he ever do that?

Nice strawman. I specifically quoted text stating that it peaked in WotLK, not vanilla or tbc. Feel free to cherry pick one stupidly simple spec in WotLK to try and prove your point though. You could go for hunter, maybe.

[GreenJesus]

yeah man... im such a fucking idiot, let me give up my 8 button rotation in vanilla and tbc for that 1 button rotation in legion.


... wait what was that George? i.. i got them backwards? no way, then oplawlz would be lying through his teeth, and why would he ever do that?

Warlock would have had a more complicated rotation if they balanced the abilities properly. It just turned out that shadowbolt did too much damage and debuffs were limited on bosses so you couldn't use them.

[redwolfrain]

Blizzard can't come up with new content, so they reuse old content and slap a new name on it. More news at 11 Alex.

[huth]

So... how many more expansions till they start "moving forward" and add abilities again. All they keep doing is moving backward since WoD started. I guess it's okay to remove some and get better ones later (MAYBE), but I'm not seeing that happen.

They're at a point where they pretty much have to shuffle back and forth repeatedly because they'd run into issues on both sides. Other options would be to just not have you gain anything at all and keep everything static, but i rather doubt you'd be happy with that very long.

[Jngizu]

If this is what OP meant, you do a better job of stating it than OP - well done.

Idk best answer to this. On one hand, I enjoyed the feeling of continued leveling through much of Legion. It felt like more progression than simply getting bigger numbers on my gear. That was fun.

On other hand, the power up was greater than ever and I don't see how that can continue indefinitely. So a reset was in order.

But you make a good point that losing talents so we can earn them again... Maybe what they're aiming for is us having it all back by when we need it, that is by endgame.

I don't know, I feel like OP's point was pretty clear. Apparently not though, seeing how many people commented about losing gear. But I don't really expect people to read past the title of a thread before commenting.

Like that FelPlague guy that keeps commenting and making a fool of himself like usual by comparing Legion's rotations to Vanilla's. Of course Legion has a lot more. But now, compare Legion to Cataclysm or MoP, and suddenly it's a completely different story. But he won't do that because that would mean he has to admit he's wrong.

[ramayana1423]

Rofl

It's like saying you grinded ICC for the best gear the expansion could provide and then BAM, Cataclysm is out and you can get better gear. FUCK YOU BLIZZ
It's the same fucking thing.

WoW is not for you then. And if you think like this, it never were. This is how MMORPGs work. What's the point of getting to the top during lets say Vanilla and every other expansion you don't need to do anything because you are already on the top.

MMORPG = grind
and it should stay that way

You've basically missed the entire point of the thread. This is the first expansion where we are losing significant amounts of abilities where it doesnt involve reworking every class. There was a prune in WOD but every class was reworked. Most of the classes going into BFA arent gaining a single thing to make up for all the loss of abilities/traits. This has literally nothing to do with gear.

They should've baked, at the very least, every gold trait and artifact ability into the classes, it would've in turn made it feel just like any other expack moving forward. Instead they have taken 90% of them away without compensation and as a result classes feel more awful than ever.

[Goldielocks]

It's really not possible for the progression to scale other than player level. The devs are only human. They can't keep making up new shit over and over again. What keeps people playing is the change in aesthetic and the journey. You play until you get bored of what WoW has to offer. Nothing is really going to change that much.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

No surprise most modern MMOs only last a year before people quit in droves if once you get the best gear in 1.0 you're already finished and no update or expansion is ever expected to add something new to grind for.

[Tradu]

The thing that most people seem to be missing is that in other expansions while there was a power reset to some extent, we also got new things while things from the previous expansion became baseline.
In BfA, they're taking things that have been effectively baseline for 2 years(artifact traits and legendaries) and doing one of 4 things: removing them entirely, making them talents(replacing old talents, because they're not adding a new talent row), reusing them as azerite traits(Prydaz and Executioner's Precision for Arms being examples of this) or making them baseline. And not enough of them are becoming baseline, while too many(read: more than 0) are being reused as talents or azerite traits.
Especially in the case of legendaries it's pretty ridiculous, because legendaries are effectively a pool of ~12 talents which you can pick any 2 of. In BfA they're pushing those choices into talent trees with the same number of options as in Legion, effectively making us lose 2 "talent points".

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It isn't ... it was always that way. That's probably why people keep bringing up that.

Here are some abilities on Mage Tier 3 gear that were lost when BC greens dropped:

(2) Set: Reduces cooldown on your Evocation by 1 minute.
(4) Set: Gives your Mage Armor a chance when struck by a harmful spell to increase resistance against that school of magic by 35 for 30 sec.
(6) Set: Your damage spells have a chance to cause your target to take up to 200 increased damage from subsequent spells.
(8) Set: Your damage spells have a chance to displace you, causing the next spell cast to generate no threat.

In addition - most expansions have dumped some skills and added others.

The difference is that we had classes built with artifacts and legendaries in mind in Legion, in BfA those are going away, in addition to tier sets, and we're losing most of their effects(and the ones we keep we generally have to pick over other talent options, which feels shitty). Most specs are not getting compensated anywhere near enough for the loss of effectively 2 talent points(legendaries) and a big pile of passives + 1 active with varying levels of gameplay impact.
Legion into BfA is very different from previous expansions.