Returning Player getting "Overwhelmed"

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Wasn't wotlk the expansion where you needed to farm 2 months boring af dailies for the enchants? Just a random example.

No, only enchanters needed the rep for the weapon enchants. Everyone else just got their enchants from the AH or by knowing an enchanter with the recipe.

The shoulder enchants iirc only required about a weeks worth of dailies for the lower version (the dailies for that faction took a whopping 5-15 minutes per day), and the higher version provided only about 30% more stats relative to the lower reputation shoulder enchant. You'd typically gain less than 1% output from having the better shoulder enchant; failing to socket two gems was a bigger stat loss than not having the shoulder enchant at all.

[gobio]

what's the alternative? getting everything handed to you immediately that took other players months to get and then blasting through the current content, 2 weeks later saying there's nothing to do?

You are assuming and projecting.
You get overwhelmed when you are thrown systems upon systems in your face.

Please note this has NOTHING to do with welfare. You can do this mess in 1 day and that can still be a mess. You can be made extremely clear what you need to do to catch up (thus not a mess) but it can still take weeks or months

This BFA system is a mess, this is a known fact. Having catch up system doesn't mean it is not a mess. Why assume people are asking for welfare?

[Laughingjack]

You mean like people doing normal bosses solo? Or mythic being done with all tanks?
No it's not illusion.

Just because handful of people can do it, doesn't mean all other players will be able as well.

And certainly not at the beginning of the patch where pug can now clear entire heroic raid first week.

Believe what you will but the past you claim isn't the one that happened.

[Clozer]

You are assuming and projecting.
You get overwhelmed when you are thrown systems upon systems in your face.

Please note this has NOTHING to do with welfare. You can do this mess in 1 day and that can still be a mess. You can be made extremely clear what you need to do to catch up (thus not a mess) but it can still take weeks or months

This BFA system is a mess, this is a known fact. Having catch up system doesn't mean it is not a mess. Why assume people are asking for welfare?

What you mean? People like op know exactly what they have to do to get the essences they want and if they don't know - they most likely don't care anyway. He didn't play for a year and is behind this is why he's mad and is saying: "MAN I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING SUPER EZ FOR 3 WEEKS TO GET MY NEEDED UPGRADES?!?!?! CHANGE THAT RIGHT NOW!"

[Laughingjack]

huh... rpg, being so competitive that you MUST minmax i news to me.

I'm a dirty casual. good enough is my personal mantra. its really "I do not care, nor could i be bothered, to grind through content I do not enjoy just to eck out a tiny bit of performance improvement, when much lower effort and time investment gets me to the point where I can play through content i AM interested in without much trouble"

rpg is about building your character, your role. its NOT "minmaxing required" its actualy quite the opposite a lot of the time, if the role you are interested in play, goes a long with sub optimal combat ability.

I find this a really odd position to take but then again I played these old rpgs with permanent choices and yes they where mostly about mind maxing... you didn't have a warrior using every type of weapon or they usually hit a brick wall and died.

I don't understand how keeping people out of content they enjoy via time and grind gates is a benefit for anyone beyond those who really need to protect their ego.

[scvd]

"Time is money, friend" as they say

and it's disgusting how they use it

[Twi501]

Now there is an additional grind on top of all this: echoes of nyalotha so you can purchase the corruptions you need.
And you have to farm about a million HVisions to rank up your cloak as well.
Of cource access to HV is time gated behind daily quests because why it wouldn't be

Up until (and including) Cataclysm there were no such bullshit systems in place. There were legendary questlines that took a long time to finish but it was for one player in the guild. Not for EVERYONE having to take such a monumental grind. I hit level 85, farmed some valor points, purchased some starter gear, then joined my guild farm raid and got boosted (since most of us didn't needed the drops at this point) and there ya go, character ready for progression. Now this isn't very possible. Even if you unlock your essences you need MONTHS of grinding to max out cloak and obtain strong corruptions.

A million visions to level up your cloak? Months long grind to max cloak? Your aware they just cut the cloak grind by 2/3 right? I got my cloak from rank 6 to 15 this week... solo I might add. And with the corruption vendor they just put in you can have solid corruptions in 2-3 weeks.

As for gear catch up. My resto druid dinged 120 on saturday and was ilvl 445 and ready for heroic raiding come Tuesday.

[Witchblade77]

Even with this mentality, every expansion before legion yielded you closer to max (bis, gearscore, measure it as you want). It was simplier, cleaner, deterministic. "I want this so I'm gonna go and get it in reasonable time". You could do it. Now? Pfff...

not arguing with that. even with rep boost and doing nearly every world quest I could find, every single emissary and nearly every single faction assault, the only rep I was able to max out on a new toon within that month was 7th legion (I think I also could have managed rustbolt, but as I already did mechagnome requirements horde side and they apparently counted for my ally toon, i decided not to bother past introductory quests). I got pretty close on everything else, but not exalted. with rep buff and playing her every day. not all day, but every day for at least an hour (rest of the time was spent on my horde main)

even with catch up mechanics, the grind is.... not awesome and time gates are annoying. I'm guessing because the expac is months away, due to being delayed, so they are trying to extend it as much as possible? ah well.

I just mean generaly, there are a LOT of people (I'm not a special unique snowflake that plays this way) that couldn't care less about minmaxing if their tried. some play for collecting, some role play, andas janky as they can get sometimes - i genuinely enjoy questing and its my primary gameplay in every rpg I play - MMO, or single player. if it can get pretty bad even for minmaxer, you can imagine how much worse it can get for someone who likes to do other stuff. which is part of the reason I'm even less motivated to catch up on gear than i was in any other expac to date. the time investment is just ... too much.

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For me wow is a game where you do challenging group content. And when I'm in a group, I want to be a plus contributor. I want to be a guy who's helping push the group over the top.

The way the game works right now, there are a lot of small things you can do that add up to a huge difference. If you do none of them, you're going to be very weak.

I don't get the rpg aspect of the game at all... never felt that and would have no idea that some people view the game that way without going on forums. Pretty much every guild I've ever been in has been full of people trying to make their character more powerful.

well you are an exact opposite of me, because 90% of the time I play solo and the other 10% is groupfinder for dungeons prerequisites to continue otherwise solo quest chains. I don't slack in groupfinder, but I'm not going to go all out for 10% or less of my time in game - either.

[shuubu]

Hold out until Shadowlands, thats when the new player experience(At least IMO) will not be as well "Going up a mountain."

That's kind of impossible to tell yet.

[SkagenRora]

Catching up for alts is easy. For everyone else your pretty much stuck for over a month in the essence,azerite,corruption farm

Getting the stuff should be harder, not easier if you decided to slack.. Laziness should be punished, not rewarded.

[Lei]

Getting the stuff should be harder, not easier if you decided to slack.. Laziness should be punished, not rewarded.

Lol, and then anyone wonders why the mythic raiding scene is getting smaller and smaller? (Funny thing is that usually not the real creme of the creme who says things like this...)

[Tronski]

what's the alternative? getting everything handed to you immediately that took other players months to get and then blasting through the current content, 2 weeks later saying there's nothing to do?

The alternative is to not overwhelm the players with grindy content in an attempt to satisfy the 2% of the playerbase that has nothing else going on in their lives but WoW.

I was playing since bfa launched and I gave up because I couldn't even keep up with the current grind. I can't imagine the workload required to catch up. Had it not been for Classic, I would not still be a monthly paying customer.

Less is actually more sometimes. Let's see if they actually listened when Shadowlands arrives.

[Nikeyla]

So i came back a Week ago after i took a break Shortly before the Eternal Palace Patch (8.2 - 8.2.5 i think)

And i totally got overwhelmed with all the stuff i have to do to get back into the Game (cleared BoD on Mythic aswell as pushed ~20keys)

Ranking up Essences takes so fucking long (5 Weeks for Conflict and Strive if your Arena rating is under 1600 and i cant manage to break the 1600 and it would still take 3 Weeks, yeah i suck at PvP, but never had that much trouble getting to 1600)

I'm kinda lucky i have a friend that carried me through my 15+ Key for the Weekly Chest aswell as Nya'Lotha HC with his Guild, but still since 1 1/2 Weeks i'm doing nothing else than Dailys (Yay Lucid Dreams is pretty much mandatory for Fire).

Or am i Missing something, since if not the New player Experience in BfA is utter Garbage, no Wonder WoW dosnt get any New Players :S

Im in a similar situation as you are, except that I played only the first month of bfa. I must say that this game looks like the new end game are daily quests. I cant stand doing daily quests, I dont consider it as a game content. Its just lame excuse for keeping ppl subbed longer.
If I want to do out of instance content, I need to get flying or I just cant keep up with the group...well hundreads of daily quests in the new locations, awesome. If I want to do instanced content, I still ditch maybe half of the dmg of what essence/corruption ppl do with the same gear-super fun. Doing pvp without days or weeks of farming daily quests and visions which both are terribly boring and annoying, is impossible. I tried to push some rating in arenas. All is fine, the enemy is stupid af, we can win this...oh wait, he just procced some non ability dmg that took 50-75% of my life during my single gcd. Like wtf is this clown fiesta? Raids? Well, outside of the boost you mentioned, you can barely be any useful without the proper daily quest farm.
As a dps without the proper daily quest chore, you are useless, because the non ability stuff deals most of your dmg.
I tried my hpala with some okayish gear. Cant compete in raid at all, didnt expect that anyway. I kinda like running m+ as the only interesting thing in bfa, but I feel like that every mod, every mechanic or extra stuff just makes it harder for healers and nobody else. All these ppl with high corruptions standing in shit, weekly m+ mods or every member fck up. You are the one paying for everything. It makes healing pretty painful I would say. Is it just the hpala that requires the group to play properly because I rly have pretty low healing numbers or every healer is like this? I wanted to play my main priest, but ppl say that its crazy garbo class atm, so I dont have a real updated comparison to my hpala.
Random bgs. Somebody please explain me wtf is going on there. I remember the game to be like ali having no queues, but often lose, while horde had like 8-10 mins queues, but at least they won most of the games. Now its 15m horde queue and I lost like 80%+ of the games because the entire team never even gets to the objectives and dismount to fight and fail miserably the first second they meet the enemy. Are these bots or just pve ppl forced into pvp for essences without having a clue wtf they are doing?
I dunno, but the game looks completely fcked up to me.

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Let's see if they actually listened when Shadowlands arrives.

Its Blizzard we are talking about, dude. If this boring and annoying grind keeps ppl subbed for longer, its their way to go. Your or my feelings about the game arent important. This is why Blizz lost so many dedicated ppl in the past few years. I feel like an idiot every time I become their customer in some very weak moment of super boredom.

[Kalisandra]

In TBC if you were driven I would say it would take you a week to go from a fresh 70 to ssc/tk ready of you had good luck on drops. Ever since then the grind has slowly creeped in and gotten longer and longer.

Especially if you were a clothie and had kept your tailoring up.

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Yep this is kinda amusing how people have garbage memory.

Back in my days...
Bullshit, back in the days you had to get carried thru normal and heroic raid good couple of times before you could actually do anything.
That includes PvP players as well as good chunk of pvp gear came from PvE.
God forbid if you didn't have enough gold/money to buy boost or guild to boost you.

In a fair number of expansions the fast but grindy way of gearing was to chain-run BGs for the basic PvP gear. If that didn't get a weapon you got a crafted one or run 5-mans for one (the only PvE required), and then did arena as soon as you had enough basic PvP gear to not be a complete liability. Then you could gear off arenas, which was slow once you hit the cap but if you came in mid-season when the cap was good and high it was only a matter of how many hours in the day you could spare.

If you were allergic to PvP, then you did your 5-mans, got some good crafted gear, and then you were good for farm nights. A few of those and you were good to go.

Nowadays there's all the m+ runs for gear, plus the cloak runs and the essence farming. It's better than it was at 8.3's launch, but it's still a fair grind for a returning or new player that doesn't have any essences they can just buy, and doesn't have flight.

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in every single expansion before Legion I used to have multiple well geared raiding alts with legendary cloak, then the ring. Anything with and after Legion? Nothing. They are in benthic gear. ilevel 385 in the 470 era, with a level 5 necklace. They have like 170 k hp (90k freshly dinged) while people with raid gear have 500k. Yeah, amazing game design.

To add injury to insult, in 8.3 all the WQ azerite was swapped back to having only three rings, so it's all junk. The same with the i410 'catch up' pieces. Given the rarity of WQs that hand out weapons, getting a decent weapon so you can go into m+ runs and not utterly embarrass yourself is a pain (and getting the PvP weapon can be quite painful if your faction refuses to win in PvP and is being farmed in WM).

[erifwodahs]

Alright but why?

This never existed till legion why is it good for the game rather then back in the good old days when only skills were needed to pay the bills not hours?

Oh suuuuure. So delusional... If I wanted to be a new player in tbc/classic I would spend two months leveling alone. Than spend hours and hours of mindless mob grinding in dungeons for reputations. Same in WotLK, only gearing has become easier, all the reps and grind is still there. Grinding badges every day with no skill required to get into "current" bracket for raiding or leveling 400 level of two professions.... that's fun boy. Ever since pandaria getting back into wow has been very easy and a lot of people complain about how easy you catch up to them after not playing because to get here for a new players takes a month, it took 3 months for anyone who done it currently.

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In TBC if you were driven I would say it would take you a week to go from a fresh 70 to ssc/tk ready of you had good luck on drops. Ever since then the grind has slowly creeped in and gotten longer and longer.

We just did 108ilvl to lvl 120 470ilvl for our friend in a week, does that count better than your example or will you find something to deny this argument? bis essences as you have your prep work done (essences on other character) and some luck on the dropping bis bow in raid. "But he had a main which grinded essences" - but you already started at 70, where leveling was considered the main part of the game. If you started below 70... rep grinds, key farm, mount rep farm, not even talking if you wanted to go into pvp.. gl farming those bgs for hundreds of thousands of honor.

[Lei]

Oh suuuuure. So delusional... If I wanted to be a new player in tbc/classic I would spend two months leveling alone. Than spend hours and hours of mindless mob grinding in dungeons for reputations. Same in WotLK, only gearing has become easier, all the reps and grind is still there. Grinding badges every day with no skill required to get into "current" bracket for raiding or leveling 400 level of two professions.... that's fun boy. Ever since pandaria getting back into wow has been very easy and a lot of people complain about how easy you catch up to them after not playing because to get here for a new players takes a month, it took 3 months for anyone who done it currently.

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We just did 108ilvl to lvl 120 470ilvl for our friend in a week, does that count better than your example or will you find something to deny this argument? bis essences as you have your prep work done (essences on other character) and some luck on the dropping bis bow in raid. "But he had a main which grinded essences" - but you already started at 70, where leveling was considered the main part of the game. If you started below 70... rep grinds, key farm, mount rep farm, not even talking if you wanted to go into pvp.. gl farming those bgs for hundreds of thousands of honor.

Hold on. Getting BACK to raiding? I assume you have some experience under your belt, you have a guild, or you're applying to in this hypothetical scenario. A guild, seeing your great application probably takes you into trial runs, shower you with gear. Even if not with BIS, maybe your second option. Any ways, it didn't take 3 months to gear. Especially not with 2-3 tiers of available gear for different currency.
People here are not talking about the fun factor of it. but then how fun it is to run visions and world quests for weeks to no end? Waiting for your preferred corruption? Rolling the rng wheel before that?

[Laughingjack]

Getting the stuff should be harder, not easier if you decided to slack.. Laziness should be punished, not rewarded.

I agree gear should really cap out at 425 outside of group content and there shouldn't be these "events" that hand out powerful gear. People should be doing harder content to gear not simply log in everyday.

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Oh suuuuure. So delusional... If I wanted to be a new player in tbc/classic I would spend two months leveling alone. Than spend hours and hours of mindless mob grinding in dungeons for reputations. Same in WotLK, only gearing has become easier, all the reps and grind is still there. Grinding badges every day with no skill required to get into "current" bracket for raiding or leveling 400 level of two professions.... that's fun boy. Ever since pandaria getting back into wow has been very easy and a lot of people complain about how easy you catch up to them after not playing because to get here for a new players takes a month, it took 3 months for anyone who done it currently.

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We just did 108ilvl to lvl 120 470ilvl for our friend in a week, does that count better than your example or will you find something to deny this argument? bis essences as you have your prep work done (essences on other character) and some luck on the dropping bis bow in raid. "But he had a main which grinded essences" - but you already started at 70, where leveling was considered the main part of the game. If you started below 70... rep grinds, key farm, mount rep farm, not even talking if you wanted to go into pvp.. gl farming those bgs for hundreds of thousands of honor.

I won't lie beyond a offhand I didn't use badges in tbc till sunwell with the exception of buying potions or gems.

If you have to shift the argument from end game to leveling in order to barely support your argument it is likely a sign you lost and should move on rather then trying to fight a losing battle to save face.

[erifwodahs]

People here are not talking about the fun factor of it. but then how fun it is to run visions and world quests for weeks to no end? Waiting for your preferred corruption? Rolling the rng wheel before that?

That's the game. How different fun factor is from running hc's or doing dalies to no end back in a day or waiting a week because dungeon is on lock out? I can't see much of the difference from "great old days" of WoW besides of how my game style changed. Griding for weeks is not a case for alts at all and if someone skipped 8.2 they will need to catch up with flying anyway. It's no different than skipping a patch back in a day.
I would have agreed on corruptions a week ago as it was an RNG drop and that kinda sucked as the system is good on itself, but the way of getting corruptions was intentionally rng with no targeting. Now? This is 100% same design as arena vendors. Pooling AP for weeks for whatever rating you get and the buying an item later. Pooling dkp for an item drop from a boss until it dropped and then spending it. I can't comprehend how those systems were somehow better than what we have now.
Not all essences are time gated either - people can go ahead and farm that blood of the enemy in few days if they want to like good old back in the day system.

[Witchblade77]

That's the game. How different fun factor is from running hc's or doing dalies to no end back in a day or waiting a week because dungeon is on lock out? I can't see much of the difference from "great old days" of WoW besides of how my game style changed. Griding for weeks is not a case for alts at all and if someone skipped 8.2 they will need to catch up with flying anyway. It's no different than skipping a patch back in a day.
I would have agreed on corruptions a week ago as it was an RNG drop and that kinda sucked as the system is good on itself, but the way of getting corruptions was intentionally rng with no targeting. Now? This is 100% same design as arena vendors. Pooling AP for weeks for whatever rating you get and the buying an item later. Pooling dkp for an item drop from a boss until it dropped and then spending it. I can't comprehend how those systems were somehow better than what we have now.
Not all essences are time gated either - people can go ahead and farm that blood of the enemy in few days if they want to like good old back in the day system.

corruptions are still rng. vendor only has limited stock that changes twice a week and it could be rank 1 corruption, could be rank 2 or 3 and it could be a set of corruptions that is pretty meh so its not a matter of you just gathering enough currency and buying things outright, its STILL time gated via rng of a listing.

[erifwodahs]

I won't lie beyond a offhand I didn't use badges in tbc till sunwell with the exception of buying potions or gems.

If you have to shift the argument from end game to leveling in order to barely support your argument it is likely a sign you lost and should move on rather then trying to fight a losing battle to save face.

So I lost because you claim so? How does that even work? Can I reverse this and tell you that using "you lost" argument implies that you have nothing to retaliate against my argument therefore "you lost" ?
My argument is that "back in the good days" WoW had mirror systems to what we have, except more deterministic ways to get it but slow catch up systems existed and it wasn't I just came back after leaving in 2.1 patch and I came back for sunwell in 2.4 or whatever that was. You still grinded slow stuff. Not even talking about new players. New players were months behind any meaningful endgame content.
If I now decided to join Classic, I would have a megaton of attunements to do before I even can do anything not even talking about 600g for a mount or hours and hours of leveling professions. You would literally just sit and wait for that tedious crafting bar to be complete up to the WotLK where they made it to the "ok speed" and you didn't have to watch full movie before you finished crafting 20 pairs of pants to get those 5 levels of tailoring like you had to in pre-wotlk. Game is way more accessible and catch up friendly than ever before and with the corruption changes recently there is no reason to moan about "I have to do dalies /cry". Collectiong 5000 gold for a flying was way more shit than two weeks of dalies where you would have to do 40mins of questing a day in one of the best zones - mechagon. Nazjatar is case by case.