Would Hard Mode realms be a cool idea?

[Tesshin20]

Imagine this:

Blizzard made a couple of servers with hardmode. I call hardmode as a placeholder. I think most of you would call it something else. Immersive mode, survival mode etc.

Here are some the following rules that would make playing the game seem more challenging:

You character has lower HP and power. Let's say half.

Amount of gold and loot from corpses and quest rewards reduced by a lot.

More expensive to buy food, wind riders, training, etc.

Less mobs in the world. Lower drop rate of quest items.

No dungeon tool. You make groups by talking to and inspecting people on the server.

No enemy cast bars. You need to watch their animation.

Harder to learn abilities. Must be bought from trainer.

Bosses in dungeons and raids have a lot more HP. Fights last as much as 2 and 3 times long. You get some adrenaline to by fighting against the enrage timer.

Reduced experience gain.

Only 1 bag to carry items. You must plan what to bring with you.

All materials are scarce and harder to obtain.

No cross realm stuff. If you behave like a prick. People will remember you for it.

The rewards would be epic achievements. Giving you a feeling of mastery to get a dungeon achievement. Or completing a quest line etc.

My philosophy is that the more challenging stuff is, you have greater feeling of achievement than if you steamroll it currently.

[Hoofnmouth]

Or just turn on the xp lock, don't equip anything, and don't loot anything.

[DeltrusDisc]

The reduced mobs in areas for quests and reduced quest droprate is kinda meh. I played on a Blizz-like Vanilla realm and as for live, I joined in mid-TBC, so I experienced plenty of this and I honestly think it's not totally necessary. Maybe make stuff drop less, but by a lot? Nah, at one point it becomes tedious and dumb when you are trying to get hooves and for some reason, they have them but you can't take them because loot rules. lol

[The Stormbringer]

One bag sounds terrible. Do you not remember what one bag was like?!

[darklogrus]

Unless Wow institutes a death penalty, Wow will NEVER be hard mode...

[Deleted]

Imagine this:

Blizzard made a couple of servers with hardmode. I call hardmode as a placeholder. I think most of you would call it something else. Immersive mode, survival mode etc.

Here are some the following rules that would make playing the game seem more challenging:

You character has lower HP and power. Let's say half.

Amount of gold and loot from corpses and quest rewards reduced by a lot.

More expensive to buy food, wind riders, training, etc.

Less mobs in the world. Lower drop rate of quest items.

No dungeon tool. You make groups by talking to and inspecting people on the server.

No enemy cast bars. You need to watch their animation.

Harder to learn abilities. Must be bought from trainer.

Bosses in dungeons and raids have a lot more HP. Fights last as much as 2 and 3 times long. You get some adrenaline to by fighting against the enrage timer.

Reduced experience gain.

Only 1 bag to carry items. You must plan what to bring with you.

All materials are scarce and harder to obtain.

No cross realm stuff. If you behave like a prick. People will remember you for it.

The rewards would be epic achievements. Giving you a feeling of mastery to get a dungeon achievement. Or completing a quest line etc.

My philosophy is that the more challenging stuff is, you have greater feeling of achievement than if you steamroll it currently.

I know a name for all this: Vanilla... Wait a few years and we can get angry again for a boar that kill us... in a party of 5

[Cyanu]

well no

there's good difficulty and bad difficulty

when content requires skill to beat (like Mythic raiding) by being demanding on DPS/HPS, positioning,coordination, understanding of mechanics,tactics etc it's good

when you need to do meaningless stuff repeatedly due to low drop rates or bars filling up too slowly it's bad difficulty

when you waste time getting from point A to point B it's bad

when you need to get back everytime to get new skills (or even worse ranks of skills -LOL) it sucks

when you need to farm tons of gold to give it to an NPC it sucks even more

in sort no, your 'hard mode' realms are not cool at all, in fact it's mindless grind

we have L2 the absolute king of grind for that if i liked such things i wouldn't be here

[Tesshin20]

I know a name for all this: Vanilla... Wait a few years and we can get angry again for a boar that kill us... in a party of 5

The difference though is modern features, better graphics etc. Don't want those to ruin vanilla.

[clevin]

Why is this better? Don't just list out stuff... make an argument for why this would be good.

[Jastall]

Most these sound like Tedium Mode rather than Hard Mode. Just one bag? Piss on that. WoW isn't a survival game and let's not turn it into one.

What seems more realistic is a Hard Mode toggle for people who want harder leveling/questing in various ways, toggled on or off just like War Mode.

[Aeula]

No. Oh god please no.

[Thirtyrock]

Most these sound like Tedium Mode rather than Hard Mode. Just one bag? Piss on that. WoW isn't a survival game and let's not turn it into one.

What seems more realistic is a Hard Mode toggle for people who want harder leveling/questing in various ways, toggled on or off just like War Mode.

Right, I wouldn't mind harder fights while leveling, so long as they also awarded more xp/drops. I actually would really enjoy more complicated fights where you have to watch for adds and special abilities, you know, more like a boss fight, but there were commiserate rewards.

Of course, rares offer this already, so there's that. But if you could flip a switch and every world mob hits harder and faster and has a wider aggro range BUT I got more XP/drops for doing it, hell yeah I would, sounds like fun.

The rest of the items on the list to me just seem terribly boring. I already don't like "kill X to find Y" quests when they have low drop rates, making them any lower would be painful.

[Vladilena]

WoW with limited drops, further limited inventory space, increased "optional" gold sinks such as flight paths, monsters with high respawn times who often don't (or very subtly) telegraph abilities... I think the only thing you're missing, OP, is a real punishment for death. Upon each death, you lose experience and can even de-level is you just dinged.

This post reminds me of my first MMO, Ragnarok Online. It also reminds me of all the reasons why I quit that game for WoW 11 years ago. "Epic Achievements" or any other kind of rewardless reward system wouldn't have made me stay any longer.

[Powerogue]

That sounds awful. "You need to watch their animation" ignoring that most casting animations are a loop that keeps going until the cast finishes so there's nothing else telegraphing when it's about to finish.

ONE bag? One slot's already gone with the hearthstone. You already had to run back to a vendor or mailbox every 15 minutes or so in vanilla, this would cut that down to every minute!

Less mobs so that people have to sit around and wait for their respawns? What would that accomplish?

So many ridiculously poorly thought out ideas with the vague notion of them being "hardcore" rather than just "a comically massive pain in the ass."

[Bisso]

Imagine this:

Blizzard made a couple of servers with hardmode. I call hardmode as a placeholder. I think most of you would call it something else. Immersive mode, survival mode etc.

Here are some the following rules that would make playing the game seem more challenging:

You character has lower HP and power. Let's say half.

Amount of gold and loot from corpses and quest rewards reduced by a lot.

More expensive to buy food, wind riders, training, etc.

Less mobs in the world. Lower drop rate of quest items.

No dungeon tool. You make groups by talking to and inspecting people on the server.

No enemy cast bars. You need to watch their animation.

Harder to learn abilities. Must be bought from trainer.

Bosses in dungeons and raids have a lot more HP. Fights last as much as 2 and 3 times long. You get some adrenaline to by fighting against the enrage timer.

Reduced experience gain.

Only 1 bag to carry items. You must plan what to bring with you.

All materials are scarce and harder to obtain.

No cross realm stuff. If you behave like a prick. People will remember you for it.

The rewards would be epic achievements. Giving you a feeling of mastery to get a dungeon achievement. Or completing a quest line etc.

My philosophy is that the more challenging stuff is, you have greater feeling of achievement than if you steamroll it currently.

wait for classic, 90% of what you are asking is in there. Also that's not hard mode, that's tedious mode.

[Tesshin20]

I know a name for all this: Vanilla... Wait a few years and we can get angry again for a boar that kill us... in a party of 5

Vanilla excludes all the expansions and changes after vanilla though.

- - - Updated - - -

well no

there's good difficulty and bad difficulty

when content requires skill to beat (like Mythic raiding) by being demanding on DPS/HPS, positioning,coordination, understanding of mechanics,tactics etc it's good

when you need to do meaningless stuff repeatedly due to low drop rates or bars filling up too slowly it's bad difficulty

when you waste time getting from point A to point B it's bad

when you need to get back everytime to get new skills (or even worse ranks of skills -LOL) it sucks

when you need to farm tons of gold to give it to an NPC it sucks even more

in sort no, your 'hard mode' realms are not cool at all, in fact it's mindless grind

we have L2 the absolute king of grind for that if i liked such things i wouldn't be here

You must have strange concept of boring. All that sounds amazing to me.

- - - Updated - - -

Why is this better? Don't just list out stuff... make an argument for why this would be good.

Sure. Because currently almost everything in wow seems like it is handed to you. Almost everything included character progression is thrown at you. Gold, mounts, materials, all of this is served to you without any sense of achievement. I started a character recently to try all this on Allience and on level 20 I have 100 gold. What's up with that? I am basically rich and can buy all the food I want. No need for my cooking or fishing, or first aid.

When I join a dungeon I feel meh after it was done. No point in the dungeon I was wondering if we could complete it or not. All the mobs had no need for being CCed. Most of the time we just smashed through everything. It feels like a chore and you don't feel good or happy for completing it.

The world doesn't seem like a dangerous world where any struggle is involved. It's a theme park where they celebrate "everybody is a hero day" every day.

[Enfilade]

I'm honestly surprised they haven't done anything like this yet, seeing how they borrow so heavily from Diablo these days.

[Tesshin20]

That sounds awful. "You need to watch their animation" ignoring that most casting animations are a loop that keeps going until the cast finishes so there's nothing else telegraphing when it's about to finish.

ONE bag? One slot's already gone with the hearthstone. You already had to run back to a vendor or mailbox every 15 minutes or so in vanilla, this would cut that down to every minute!

Less mobs so that people have to sit around and wait for their respawns? What would that accomplish?

So many ridiculously poorly thought out ideas with the vague notion of them being "hardcore" rather than just "a comically massive pain in the ass."

Well does it make sense that you can carry 2000 iron ingots. 4 armor sets in your bags? No. You could fit some letters. A quest item. Some potions and some money. And perhaps food.

Well you actually don't need to know when a casts finish. You just want it interrupted. When it would actually finish doesn't even matter.

In a lot of RPG games, people enforce or mod these rules on them selves all the time.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm honestly surprised they haven't done anything like this yet, seeing how they borrow so heavily from Diablo these days.

Interesting. Care to elaborate?

[Sprinky]

I'm all for hard mode servers. Hard doesn't have to mean lower quality of life though. 1 bag etc is just punishment for no reason. Making the game actually challenging and gear hard to come by would be enough.

[Nutrition]

I think some people would enjoy it... I think people who wouldn't enjoy it but rolled on it anyways would eventually ruin it.