Shadowlands Development Update - October

[dojichan]

It's this guy btw:

I'm not too sure why you imagined a worm.

Nice looking mount!

[FelPlague]

It's this guy btw:

I'm not too sure why you imagined a worm.

The name is the exact same as a hearthstone card, thats likely why they thought it was a worm, they googled the name and found the hearthstone card.

- - - Updated - - -

So abilities are completely different, if you had half a braid you’d realize this.

Back in WotLK the only CDs like this were raid and crafting CDs. CDs like the covenants trash exist to increase metrics. Put two and two together.

I mean not true at all.


Raiding
Heroic dungeons
Crafting CD's
Dailies
Weeklies
Daily badge gains
Weekly talent respec gold reduction.

[Gurahk]

Whoa, at some point they actually thought The Maw is good for release in this state?

Well, they wanted a place that no one wanted to go to, and they got it right.

[iindigo]

…I will definitely do the Maw absolutely minimum until/unless mounts are available.

If I'm understanding correctly, that's kind of the intention. Blizz doesn't want players spending extended periods of time in The Maw, trips are meant to be short-lived targeted excursions, not unlike minor visions in BfA (except much more dangerous).

[Laqweeta]

The name is the exact same as a hearthstone card, thats likely why they thought it was a worm, they googled the name and found the hearthstone card.

- - - Updated - - -



I mean not true at all.


Raiding
Heroic dungeons
Crafting CD's
Dailies
Weeklies
Daily badge gains
Weekly talent respec gold reduction.

And tell me, how much of an affect did they have on character/character progression? NONE. NOTTA. ZILCH. Dungeons were irrelevant throughout most of WotLK, crafting was okay but you were fine without it. Raids were always a weekly lockout with the exception of 3 day Kara lockout.

Now what about covenants and that garbage? TONS.

TIME PLAYED METRICS

[Kralljin]

I'm not too sure why you imagined a worm.

There's a Torghast Anima power called Corridor creeper and the icon of said buff is a worm.

[Nobleshield]

I really hope that they can keep these things being actual choices and not cave in to the people who want to be able to hot swap everything so they can always be the best at everything they do. They can make it more forgiving without making it just another thing you change constantly.

[dunkl]

darn, I was looking forward to the lore and zone of the maw being desolate an unforgiving and scary. we need a zone like that - with little to no direction, and whatever we uncover while there is because we were there, not because of outside help in the form of in game or out of game, sigh

when announced and described I thought the maw's concept was too good to be true and would be changed to be just like most every zone already existing

would have been cool and unique to keep a truly menacing land..menacing. a land worthy of it's reputation and warning. like getting nearer mordor..almost impossible to fathom going there, nor penetrate.

sigh

while feedback can be appreciated, this is one topic where the voices just wanted to be heard, no matter what they were saying..and it changed a formidable concept into something forgettable. feedback in itself isn't always correct and should be scrutinized and retuned with feedback

[Codah]

darn, I was looking forward to the lore and zone of the maw being desolate an unforgiving and scary. we need a zone like that - with little to no direction, and whatever we uncover while there is because we were there, not because of outside help in the form of in game or out of game, sigh

when announced and described I thought the maw's concept was too good to be true and would be changed to be just like most every zone already existing

would have been cool and unique to keep a truly menacing land..menacing. a land worthy of it's reputation and warning. like getting nearer mordor..almost impossible to fathom going there, nor penetrate.

sigh

Yeah I agree with this. I'm gonna be super bummed if the Maw just ends up being Argus 2.0. The entirety of the Shadowlands already trivializes death, can we at least not trivialize the literal Hell?

[taishar68]

Look at the forums and the Wow Dev Twitter...the feedback is unanimous; drop the restrictions. It's only a matter of time. I totally get the desire of the devs to provide friction to choice to make meaningful decisions, but experienced players don't want it, and I get the feeling new and casual players won't understand it. When the feedback is that overwhelming it should be obvious what needs to be done. That said, when everyone and their pet iguana was clamoring for freely swapping in covenants, it was a rather long time before we found out you can swap them pretty easily.

And I get the reasoning behind some restriction on Covenant choice, but the Soulbind one is weird. They give you a choice of 3, but Soulbinding should be a really impactful choice...I'd rather see it where your character is hard bound to one of the three Soulbinds, and you can swap the conduit and soulbind path for a gold cost or in a rest area, like with talents. Each Soulbind could have a different focus, throughput, toughness or utility, but not to an extreme that makes you feel gimped if you're not doing content where that little extra is needed. That is sort of the way they are now, so iteration might not be that difficult. At least that's what I think, anyway.

[Downertool]

Thanks for the update
2 points:
Class & covenant balance - but they talk ONLY about covenants. The specs will stay broken because all balancing power has to be used to balance this stupid system
Soulbinds - why, why???? are you designing some stupid limiting system that takes programmers time in an already delayed xpac instead of letting us swap them in the citires/rested areas/respec books?
What does this solve? How does "10 conduit energy" help us play offspecs? What if I want to go mythic+ as guardian, but then as resto, but then as feral?
I mean come on, why do you hate us so much Blizzard, jesus.

I think the intent is to have one path for guardian, and another path for resto. With any bottleneck conduits setup as generic.

[Kurve1776]

darn, I was looking forward to the lore and zone of the maw being desolate an unforgiving and scary. we need a zone like that - with little to no direction, and whatever we uncover while there is because we were there, not because of outside help in the form of in game or out of game, sigh

when announced and described I thought the maw's concept was too good to be true and would be changed to be just like most every zone already existing

would have been cool and unique to keep a truly menacing land..menacing. a land worthy of it's reputation and warning. like getting nearer mordor..almost impossible to fathom going there, nor penetrate.

sigh

The problem with the maw isn't the atmosphere, its the fact that there's really nothing engaging to do. You're there and.. well that's it. Like, it's just not compelling in any way gameplay wise. It was boring. Nothing was even really dangerous feeling, it is purely boring in its current state. And this is a huge problem considering we're expected to spend a non-minimal amount of time here.

Isle of giants was more dangerous than literal hell in its current state.

[FelPlague]

And tell me, how much of an affect did they have on character/character progression? NONE. NOTTA. ZILCH. Dungeons were irrelevant throughout most of WotLK, crafting was okay but you were fine without it. Raids were always a weekly lockout with the exception of 3 day Kara lockout.

Now what about covenants and that garbage? TONS.

TIME PLAYED METRICS

How many of that had an effect on charecter progression"
"Notta"

Lol how naive, alright let me fill you in!


First, raiding- Literally the biggest of the big, the best gear came from here, so if you wanted to fully gear it took you months of waiting and waiting for the weekly lockout.

Also "Raids were always weekly lockout with the exception of 3 day kara lockout" not even close to true.
Aq 20, onyxia, and ZG were also 3 day lockouts, aswell but back onto the actual stuff.

Heroic dungeons- very much not irrelevent, cause heroic dungeons held those sweet sweet badges you needed for your teir sets and gear.

Crafting cd's- many of the best peices required lots of crafting mats, gained from these crafting cd's, meaning some peices took weeks to make.

Dailies- lol, the best enchants were locked behind a fair few reps, and many reciepes were too.

weeklies- again, badges, gear, rep, etc

daily badge gains- more badges from random stuff

weekly talent respec- yes this for sure did, you could get pretty expensive if you swapped constantly, so you could for sure need to swap but have not enough gold.


for someone with the #1misswrath you sure do remember little about how much of wraths charecter progression was time locked.

you wanna raid? gotta get kirin tor to exalted for that sweet spellcaster enchant!
And dont forget aswell you need to max out the sons of hodir for that other enchant too!

[dunkl]

The problem with the maw isn't the atmosphere, its the fact that there's really nothing engaging to do. You're there and.. well that's it. Like, it's just not compelling in any way gameplay wise. It was boring. Nothing was even really dangerous feeling, it is purely boring in its current state. And this is a huge problem considering we're expected to spend a non-minimal amount of time here

I know and good insight but I guessed it would be used for something later, while still maintaining it's level of sinistry before and even moreso after.

[Kurve1776]

I know and good insight but I guessed it would be used for something later, while still maintaining it's level of sinistry before and even moreso after.

Yeah that's the issue, it's not really sinister feeling at all. Maybe if it were a bit more dangerous it might feel the part too, but like, the art is there 100% but the rest of the zone is lacking. No mounts? well, there's patrols (pretty abundant btw) that are mounted, kill them, steal their mount for +80% speed for a minute. So that's pretty much negated right out the gate.

Most of the elites are pushovers, they'll be time consuming to kill and maybe slightly challenging to bad solo classes at the beginning (you're not going to take a lot of them on solo anyway at first) but once you get even mediocre gear that challenge is entirely gone.

[Swizzle]

Yeah I agree with this. I'm gonna be super bummed if the Maw just ends up being Argus 2.0. The entirety of the Shadowlands already trivializes death, can we at least not trivialize the literal Hell?

The Maw isn't hard...it's just fucking boring. There's currently NOTHING to do in there, except walk between random mobs and hope they drop stygia. As long as the Maw is the only place to get Stygia, it's going to be required play, and it's currently just dull. There's no danger, the eye of the jailer is nothing more than an inconvenience, and there are no worthwhile events or things to do. Gameplay should come first when considering how to build a zone, everything else second.

[chaoticcrono]

I dont know why they keep wasting their time with stupid restrictions... just remove the damn restrictions and let people play how they want.

Then you can focus on actually making fun content that people might actually want to do, or hell actually make the maw fun...

Blizzturd doesn't want to let go of their control freak tendencies... this expac is gonna be a shit show.

[Kaver]

"The Maw is intended to be the desolate and brutal domain of the Jailer, and not a place any soul in the Warcraft cosmos ever hopes to visit. But this is, after all, a video game, and telling that story can’t come at the expense of creating a fun environment for adventurers."

This made me chuckle, and not in a mocking way, just in the sense that it seemed they were so focused on expressing their art that they lapsed in the goal of making it actually fun to experience. I can think of a few elements of BFA where this memory also lapsed. (And probably not the points that others might mention. I significantly enjoyed Islands and Warfronts :P )

Yeah this is one of Blizzard's modern pitfalls. They often seem to have this "creative proudness" that makes them follow an idea without stopping up to reconsider if what they are creating is actually fun. WoW is still a masterpiece in my mind, but some of the content they make is simply not fun (in my opinion)

[dunkl]

oh well, if we can't get a hard zone in wow's 'hell' I don't know if we ever will. and by hard I mean an entire combination of; difficult to see, navigate, ruthless enemies, personal and lore stakes, risked health/mana, and overall concept and theme in one threatening and foreboding place.

would be cool to have our life or resource drained, or our weapons start to rust/crumble and our armor weaken, while having to have our wits about us and sneak and actually be careful. someday!

[Laqweeta]

How many of that had an effect on charecter progression"
"Notta"

Lol how naive, alright let me fill you in!


First, raiding- Literally the biggest of the big, the best gear came from here, so if you wanted to fully gear it took you months of waiting and waiting for the weekly lockout.

Also "Raids were always weekly lockout with the exception of 3 day kara lockout" not even close to true.
Aq 20, onyxia, and ZG were also 3 day lockouts, aswell but back onto the actual stuff.

Heroic dungeons- very much not irrelevent, cause heroic dungeons held those sweet sweet badges you needed for your teir sets and gear.

Crafting cd's- many of the best peices required lots of crafting mats, gained from these crafting cd's, meaning some peices took weeks to make.

Dailies- lol, the best enchants were locked behind a fair few reps, and many reciepes were too.

weeklies- again, badges, gear, rep, etc

daily badge gains- more badges from random stuff

weekly talent respec- yes this for sure did, you could get pretty expensive if you swapped constantly, so you could for sure need to swap but have not enough gold.


for someone with the #1misswrath you sure do remember little about how much of wraths charecter progression was time locked.

you wanna raid? gotta get kirin tor to exalted for that sweet spellcaster enchant!
And dont forget aswell you need to max out the sons of hodir for that other enchant too!

This guy is such an idiot I can't lmfao.

1. Heroics had no lockout at the tail end of Wrath, you could quite literally spam them - Heroics were very relevant at the START, sure.

2. Raids, as I said, have always had a 1 week lockout (except Kara)

3. Badges.. Okay? You didn't NEED them to progress

4. Reps.. Enchants, sure. They had them so you could at least GET them just by finishing out a zone's quests though - all rep enchants had an HONORED enchant. You sure do forget, don't ya? :3

Let's compare this to BfA say? Yeah, goodluck. Mandatory minimum 8 day grind for a rank 3 essence that's not even your BiS - Very few chances at Azerite Gear and a good month or so before you get the trais you NEED so your class performs.

You're an idiot.