9.0 General Discussion

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I wouldn't use Dark Souls as any indacator of feeling good. Most of the time I felt plenty frustration and a lot of "Well thats bullshit." It has less emphasis on fun and more on "Show us devs what you can do" And the challenges weren't FUN, they just made me wonder "ok how the hell am I supposed to this along with the other..time killer things going on).

WoW doesn't really need to look at Dark Souls for anything gameplay wise. Maybe in terms of making certain factions of enemies that are scary(Seee the Old Gods and such). Otherwise.. I think Dark Souls needs to stay where it is and not try to be this all can be video game.

[Alanar]

Corruption system isn't continuing forward into 9.0. It's just for 8.3 in the sense that this isn't some new form of rng loot drops that we're going to see dropping from shadowlands content.

They already confirmed we will get this in a differnt form, but they replaced it with titanforging.. this IS the setup they will use with differnt effects etc, but I see them toning down the rng stuff with that fer sure.

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Can you name any specific bugs? I remember the one with the titan artifacts in Uldum, and a few quests where the droprate was bugged and N'zoth being bugged, but that hardly seems like the kind of comprehensive list of bugs that would make or break a patch. 7.3 had the same amount of bugs and people claim to like that patch.

Also, saying you just don't like BfA is only a good argument for why you are not playing the expansion in general, not why 8.3 is a bad patch.

Wanna talk about how many vessels we lost at the start, or when the portal room was completely blocked with instance failure for a full day on patch day or when we had random d/cs In vissions.
Dude this isn't something new.. this has been discussed and complaint for alot already and we are past that right now. Idk if you are out of the loop atm, but bfa was all over the place with their stories.. many of where I disliked the outcome. I can make a whole listof things which I already done and don't feel like repeating myself.

I am 1 of those that dislike 8.3 because I have been following the story of the expansion and played it. I dislike the allied race choices, story and features which were all faillures, islands, warfront any one?

I just don't think this would need an essay in words to discribe my dissapointment in bfa and 8.3.

[FlubberPuddy]

They already confirmed we will get this in a differnt form, but they replaced it with titanforging.. this IS the setup they will use with differnt effects etc, but I see them toning down the rng stuff with that fer sure.

Can you link to where they said that? I only ever heard it as "corruption is a system for 8.3 that replaces wf/tf and aims to preserve ilvl mattering" (or something along those lines).

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I wouldn't use Dark Souls as any indacator of feeling good. Most of the time I felt plenty frustration and a lot of "Well thats bullshit." It has less emphasis on fun and more on "Show us devs what you can do" And the challenges weren't FUN, they just made me wonder "ok how the hell am I supposed to this along with the other..time killer things going on).

WoW doesn't really need to look at Dark Souls for anything gameplay wise. Maybe in terms of making certain factions of enemies that are scary(Seee the Old Gods and such). Otherwise.. I think Dark Souls needs to stay where it is and not try to be this all can be video game.

Well that's the whole point of what Sondrelk is saying. Some players may find Heroic difficulty raids laughable. Others will require a whole tier length to beat it. More the point is people who consider mythic raiding itself to be piss easy are frankly a stark minority that can never be sated no matter what Blizzard would decide to throw at them. And there isn't a way for Blizzard to balance the difficulty of these raids in the sense that a Heroic is brutally challenging for these players but also complete-able for those normally spending a whole tier length finishing it.

Although with how the tower of Torghast sounds it may be the infinitely scaling that can these players can find challenging enough as I mean eventually (if it is infinitely scalable I forget if it is or isn't) you're getting to hit a wall no matter how good your group of 5 (4 or less etc) are.

[Dracullus]

Alpha (not test, just build) could pop any day without any hints, right? I remember two years ago I just saw datamining from BfA one morning, but it may be just my faulty memory.

[Sondrelk]

Well that's the whole point of what Sondrelk is saying. Some players may find Heroic difficulty raids laughable. Others will require a whole tier length to beat it. More the point is people who consider mythic raiding itself to be piss easy are frankly a stark minority that can never be sated no matter what Blizzard would decide to throw at them. And there isn't a way for Blizzard to balance the difficulty of these raids in the sense that a Heroic is brutally challenging for these players but also complete-able for those normally spending a whole tier length finishing it.

Although with how the tower of Torghast sounds it may be the infinitely scaling that can these players can find challenging enough as I mean eventually (if it is infinitely scalable I forget if it is or isn't) you're getting to hit a wall no matter how good your group of 5 (4 or less etc) are.

Specifically what makes Mythic difficult is the knowledge that you need 19 other people to do their job properly. The individual persons job is easy enough, but when you compund the mistakes of others, or the times when you or others got distracted fro a second you end up with a difficult boss fight in an MMO.

Currently my guild is struggling on NM N'zoth, we got to the final phase fairly consistently, but what brought the group down isnt that the final phase is massively difficult to understand for me. The problem is that some in the group might need a couple more attempts to understand it, or a cat walked across the screen of a healer and he died.
And this on the flipside is exactly why Mythics are defeated so quickly by world first guilds. They are almost entirely comprised of people who only need that attempt or two to get all the mechanics down, leaving only faulty hardware or bad luck as consistent reasons for failure.
The only way to make it difficult for them would be to create such a massive ilvl requirement that they would be spending weeks farming and doing split runs before they even attempted the boss. Or create bosses of such staggering complexity that even a single mistake from anyone will lead to a wipe, and then have that happen the entire 7-13 minute fight. Not even Dark Souls difficulty, something more akin to Spectacle fighters like Devil May Cry, or the Kingdom Hearts series, games where boss fights require constant concentration and extremely precise reaction times.

[DemonDays]

Oh come on, RNG was a part of every loot-based MMO so far.
Even in Vanilla, relevant gear was gated behind loot luck, even the famed Dungeon Sets required you to have the base item drop first (and not have it needed by a Hunter)



And in Classic (or for some specs maybe up to today) autohits were the main source of damage. You didn't have control over that, either. Not that random procs weren't a thing, anyway. Certain items or Windfury procs...
With procs, you can at least squeeze out some more dps by overlapping them with CDs, if you're interested in minmaxing anyway.

I just love it when the fanboys go 15 years back to use as a comparison. As if the game shouldn't have improved since then.

Why don't you try comparing current Class Design to Mists of Pandaria? Why not make a fairer comparison?

Are you aware that making Auto attacks a primary source of damage again was a goal in BfA? Or are you just not paying attention?


Since you seem to be so caught up on comparing to Classic. Here's the RNG that was involved in the looting system back 15 years ago.

Did it drop?

YES
NO


Now we have RNG Azerite, RNG Residium, RNG in-game loot boxes, RNG Island drops, RNG titanforging(gone), RNG Corruption with 3 layers of RNG.

I could go on forever. RNG is injected into every god damn system in this game. Which doesn't work - because this isn't Diablo 3 where I can endlessly run the content. There are LOCKOUTS.

Shall we talk about the RNG in class design? How almost every DPS spec is a builder spender with a sprinkle or RNG procs on top?

Then we should talk about the RNG involved in Essences and Azerite? Why is my buff bar lit up with 10-15 random buffs during a boss fight? Buffs I have ZERO control over and just randomly fire. Why are corruption complete RNG?




Why are you people trying to re-write history and ignore the truth?

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Can you link to where they said that? I only ever heard it as "corruption is a system for 8.3 that replaces wf/tf and aims to preserve ilvl mattering" (or something along those lines).

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If you can't work out that Corruption is a test for a Titanforging replacement in Shadowlands then I don't know what to tell you.

It's hilarious too. Since it is 1000 times worse than Titanforging in every way.


"We hear you. You don't like Titanforging and RNG and the way it devalues loot"

Proceeds to invent a system that is worse in every way and provides 20-30% damage boosts on a single item. I'll never take my 420 iLevel Infinite Stars pants off. even though I have a 460 piece sitting in my bags.

[Sondrelk]

-snip-

The game has also changed since Vanilla in that you no longer need to do massive amounts of grind all the time. The grind is now almost entirely optional, with the few things that require grind usually requiring a minimum time investment that can almost be entirely consumed by whatever content you desire, like Azerite and raids. Or only requiring a once and done quest that then gives you the option to continue the grind, like the legendary cloak.

In Vanilla the grind was the bread and butter of the game. Blizzard realized that this was an archaic way to design the game, so they removed it, this however meant that the game was very anemic, and since creating enough content to fully satisfy everyone is impossible for a game like this they ensured that players can put in as much time as they want in the game and still find a comfortable niche.



Not sure why you think the RNG is the problem with corruption, if anything you should be angry at the tuning. From what i have sen of it in action it seems like every 30-35 corruption leads to an average of 5% DPS increase. teh 20-30% you mentioned before either comes from the traits before they were tuned. Either that or you have an incredibly weak character who does terrible DPS.

[Makabreska]

Can you link to where they said that? I only ever heard it as "corruption is a system for 8.3 that replaces wf/tf and aims to preserve ilvl mattering" (or something along those lines).

They did say at Blizzcon to Preach, that at that time they did not know how the TF system will look in SL. It would all depend on Corruption performance. But it's safe to say that old school TF wont come back.

[Sondrelk]

They did say at Blizzcon to Preach, that at that time they did not know how the TF system will look in SL. It would all depend on Corruption performance. But it's safe to say that old school TF wont come back.

It might, depending on how confident they are in being able to create a better system at launch. But i do believe that Titanforging is definitely on the way out, corruption is an infinitely more interesting system.

[Makabreska]

Now we have RNG Azerite, RNG Residium, RNG in-game loot boxes, RNG Island drops, RNG titanforging(gone), RNG Corruption with 3 layers of RNG.

Azerite traits on items are predetermined, it's just normal gear drop RNG. Weekly chests will be improved in SL, with choosing different, smaller loot pools. Islands drops are irrelevant. Don't blow RNG issues out of proportion. And what class/spec do you play, if "90% of my damage is passive random shit that I have zero control over"?

[Sondrelk]

Azerite traits on items are predetermined, it's just normal gear drop RNG. Weekly chests will be improved in SL, with choosing different, smaller loot pools. Islands drops are irrelevant. Don't blow RNG out of proportion. And what class/spec do you play, if "90% of my damage is passive random shit that I have zero control over"?

Maybe he plays a homebrew outlaw rogue build that hard rolls to get all the buffs. Let's not judge.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

Spooky scary dancing skeletons for Necrolords?



For Alpha/Beta? Source please?

for the release date of the game we've gotten it in april twice now.
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ne...ives-august-14 BFA
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content...urns-August-30 Legion

[Aeluron Lightsong]

The game has also changed since Vanilla in that you no longer need to do massive amounts of grind all the time. The grind is now almost entirely optional, with the few things that require grind usually requiring a minimum time investment that can almost be entirely consumed by whatever content you desire, like Azerite and raids. Or only requiring a once and done quest that then gives you the option to continue the grind, like the legendary cloak.

In Vanilla the grind was the bread and butter of the game. Blizzard realized that this was an archaic way to design the game, so they removed it, this however meant that the game was very anemic, and since creating enough content to fully satisfy everyone is impossible for a game like this they ensured that players can put in as much time as they want in the game and still find a comfortable niche.



Not sure why you think the RNG is the problem with corruption, if anything you should be angry at the tuning. From what i have sen of it in action it seems like every 30-35 corruption leads to an average of 5% DPS increase. teh 20-30% you mentioned before either comes from the traits before they were tuned. Either that or you have an incredibly weak character who does terrible DPS.

I think the grind in vanilla was and still is absurd but it was just mashed ideas that really weren't good. I mean sure they would keep you occupied and such but is it even fun at all. I don't think so.

Farming for resist gear? Yeah uhh no thanks....

Making sure your defense weapon skill are up to par? Yeah.... ummm seems like a waste of time, more so after max level.


I could go on but there are ways to keep content lively but World Quests aren't necessarily doing that. Cause once you're done with them you're done for the day.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

We will know when Shadowlands releases in April. Imo, the very end of April.

[Sondrelk]

I think the grind in vanilla was and still is absurd but it was just mashed ideas that really weren't good. I mean sure they would keep you occupied and such but is it even fun at all. I don't think so.

Farming for resist gear? Yeah uhh no thanks....

Making sure your defense weapon skill are up to par? Yeah.... ummm seems like a waste of time, more so after max level.


I could go on but there are ways to keep content lively but World Quests aren't necessarily doing that. Cause once you're done with them you're done for the day.

I don't really think there is a way to make world quests "fun". What you can do is make the surrounding systems more fun, add interesting movement abilities, random NPCs, and events. As we stand we have to accept that world quests and dailies will at some level be tedious.

[FlubberPuddy]

If you can't work out that Corruption is a test for a Titanforging replacement in Shadowlands then I don't know what to tell you.

It's hilarious too. Since it is 1000 times worse than Titanforging in every way.


"We hear you. You don't like Titanforging and RNG and the way it devalues loot"

Proceeds to invent a system that is worse in every way and provides 20-30% damage boosts on a single item. I'll never take my 420 iLevel Infinite Stars pants off. even though I have a 460 piece sitting in my bags.

If you look back to my previous post before that one I state that we're not going to see Corruption as is dropping from 9.0 content. I already know they're using it as an experiment for how they want to handle a loot system in Shadowlands where tf/wf will (most likely) not exist.

Using corruption as an experiment =/= we will be using corruption in shadowlands content as the replacement for titanforge. Stop being blinded by rage that you misread what is being said.

[DemonDays]

Azerite traits on items are predetermined, it's just normal gear drop RNG. Weekly chests will be improved in SL, with choosing different, smaller loot pools. Islands drops are irrelevant. Don't blow RNG issues out of proportion. And what class/spec do you play, if "90% of my damage is passive random shit that I have zero control over"?

I play an Unholy DK and my best Essence is Vision of Perfect. Causing Ghouls to randomly spawn. Then the others are a random haste proc(focusing iris) and a random stat buff(lifeblood) and a random burst of damage(deaths).

Then I have a random STR buff and a random mastery buff. Another random haste buff. Another random STR buff. Another random haste buff. Also random chance to spawn a magus ghoul.

Like. You're really going to try and argue that my completely garbage Azerite passive procs aren't RNG?



Azerite traits may be predetermined but there is no reliable way to farm them. The ones in the raid have the wrong traits. Sure I can get residium but all that buys me is a..... RNG lootbox slot machine pull. To get a predetermined piece it takes 10 weeks.

In older expansions I could kill a boss I knew had the set piece I wanted on it. Or I could farm points or tokens to get it anyway.

[FlubberPuddy]

They did say at Blizzcon to Preach, that at that time they did not know how the TF system will look in SL. It would all depend on Corruption performance. But it's safe to say that old school TF wont come back.

Yup agree, and that bit about corruption I knew. I already know it's a sort of experiment for how they want to handle the loot system differently in SL.

Nowhere I've read though or heard has said anything like "Corruption is the system going to be used in Shadowlands content" which some posters here are stating.

[DemonDays]

The game has also changed since Vanilla in that you no longer need to do massive amounts of grind all the time. The grind is now almost entirely optional, with the few things that require grind usually requiring a minimum time investment that can almost be entirely consumed by whatever content you desire, like Azerite and raids. Or only requiring a once and done quest that then gives you the option to continue the grind, like the legendary cloak.

In Vanilla the grind was the bread and butter of the game. Blizzard realized that this was an archaic way to design the game, so they removed it, this however meant that the game was very anemic, and since creating enough content to fully satisfy everyone is impossible for a game like this they ensured that players can put in as much time as they want in the game and still find a comfortable niche.



Not sure why you think the RNG is the problem with corruption, if anything you should be angry at the tuning. From what i have sen of it in action it seems like every 30-35 corruption leads to an average of 5% DPS increase. teh 20-30% you mentioned before either comes from the traits before they were tuned. Either that or you have an incredibly weak character who does terrible DPS.

That isn't even remotely true.

Now there is checklist type content that you need to do if you want to contribute well in raids.

Before you just had to get gear and maybe some gold for consumables.

Now?

AP, Azerite with perfect traits, Multiple insane Essence grinds, RNG Corruption traits, Island cap weekly, Mythic+ chest weekly, Conquest weekly, Cloak upgrade in Vision, Dailies for new Essence in Uldum/Vale, Farm Coaslescing Visions.

These are "mandatory" if you want to perform better.

Don't try to argue insane amounts of checklist content hasn't been added to the game.



In WotLK when sub numbers were at their peak?

Just RNG gear drops and a badge currency you could farm to buy deterministic pieces of loot. Seemed to work fine hey?

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If you look back to my previous post before that one I state that we're not going to see Corruption as is dropping from 9.0 content. I already know they're using it as an experiment for how they want to handle a loot system in Shadowlands where tf/wf will (most likely) not exist.

Using corruption as an experiment =/= we will be using corruption in shadowlands content as the replacement for titanforge. Stop being blinded by rage that you misread what is being said.

Their "test" system is worse than the previous system in every conceivable way. They claimed they were listening to feedback and then implemented a far more RNG heavy system in it's place.

They added multiple extra layers of RNG and stupidly powerful items that go directly against what their OWN philosophy is - "You shouldn't be confused about whether an iLevel upgrade is actually an upgrade".

Ion is either a pathological liar or an actual monkey.

You decide.

[FlubberPuddy]

I don't really think there is a way to make world quests "fun". What you can do is make the surrounding systems more fun, add interesting movement abilities, random NPCs, and events. As we stand we have to accept that world quests and dailies will at some level be tedious.

While there's some level of tedium with WQs. I actually look forward to the ones that are actual mini-games not consisting of combat (so the tortollan dailies/jumping jellies/kirin tor puzzles/barrels etc).

I think for a game where we're doing combat for 90% of the time for the vast majority of commonly played combat it is refreshing to get wqs that aren't so heavily combat related.

The thing is I think that certain wqs could just use some tuning, for instance it's super quick to finish the "kill this dude" wqs and Blizzard has acknowledged that's what most players do. Then why not tune the other wqs to require less filling of a bar, or less "kill x/10 dudes, stomp x/20 things, also kill 1 elite dude" things? Lower some of the numbers of the more tedious wqs / make them more rewarding and more people will spread out to do those.

They literally just did such a thing with the 8.3 dailies where they increased the rep and rewards because their data most likely showed not many people were bothering with them (you had media figures like wowhead initially stating no point in doing them for coalescing visions etc).

So since they've admitted which wqs people prefer (kill 1 elite) and I'm sure they know it's because it gets done quickly. Then just make the other wqs done quickly too. Seems like a no-brainer.

My friend said it's weird that the devs feel the need to "trick players" into continuing to play the game for a long time (we're talking about the rng on rng on rng loot drops here) when it feels like the more common sentiment is "ok now that I am done with this activity for the week I can focus on another activity in the game".

Maybe there is a portion of the playerbase that only plays for certain content and then unsubs or quits or whatever, but nothing's going to keep those people around because WoW itself is designed around having a bunch of different activities to do and its the players onus if they wanna do them. They even talked about this before too, where I believe Ion stated they sort of want to reward the players who do all forms of content a little more over those that only stick to one.


Bah, it's just crazy to me how often they let out they know how most of the playerbase is feeling yet continue to make design decisions that appear to not take the common sentiment into account. They have a severe case of monkey-pawing things needlessly.