World of Warcraft: Nerflands

[Hubbl3]

I was never hyped for Shadowlands to be honest. But whatever.

I'll play it and if I don't like it, I'll stop. Simple as that

I've never seen less hype for a wow expansion in my guild than for shadowlands. :X

[Grimbold21]

Nerflands?

Dude, shamans can now cast WW while in ghost wolf form. What you on about?

[Archmage Xaxxas]

As much as you want it to be, it's not the same. Sylvanas isn't a raid boss.

She was, until Saurfang 'Leeroy'ed' her and blew the weekly CD. Encounter must be bugged now, she hasn't respawned after resetting.

[oblakoff]

You can all thank the "muh 1% dps difference" crowd

[Rawrajishxc]

Nerflands?

Dude, shamans can now cast WW while in ghost wolf form. What you on about?

Yet the class still sucks lol.

[Cosmic Janitor]

You can all thank the "muh 1% dps difference" crowd

Why? Because they pointed out that Blizzard failed and they had dps deltas of upwards of 40%? Your 1% meme shows that you have no clue.

[ketsui]

Im not saying some of these werent positive, I can understand how hunters appreciate the change to the Mark, although I liked it before, and I can also see how the vault is way better than the chest we had in BFA, dont even mind them removing the bonus rolls. However I am worried that without any luck protection there may go weeks without any new loot from dungeons or raids in a form of drops. Which still feels much better then grabbing item from vendor or a vault (basically the same).

The points is, all those things I listed added some flavour, lets call it fun factor. And they nerfed the fun factor by a mile now. Tuning Legendaries so they do a bit more % stuff wont help if all the cool stuff from them gets removed in the first place, thats why I called them stat sticks.

And nope, never gonna convince me that disabling covenant abilities outside Shadowlands was a positive change. Thats absolutely contrary to everything I experienced in the game for the past 10+ years.

These changes are mostly good but the title of this thread implies nothing is good, be more specific

[Eurhetemec]

I'm gonna be honest with you. A lot of these were positive changes, with 10 years experience, I would think you would understand the game you play by now

Yup.

A lot of people don't actually want WoW to be a good, or balanced game, or one that functions well, it's pretty clear. People are complaining and calling this sort of change "horrible", when in fact virtually all these changes are extremely sensible.

Some of this stuff is just fiction, too, like XP gains in older content being nerfed. That's not even true. And "loot gains" is probably just normal balancing.

Honestly, most of the people complaining about this stuff shouldn't be allowed to participate in or even know about alphas and betas, because they just can't handle balancing or comprehend how this sort of stuff works.

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I've never seen less hype for a wow expansion in my guild than for shadowlands. :X

Welcome to "comments that have been made about every expansion", Episode #1544.

I mean jesus wept dude, seriously?

I heard "nobody is hyped about Burning Crusade" back in the day. Seriously. And every expansion since some genius is here to report on the exciting and totally relevant and important news that someone they know isn't hyped about the expansion. Not a single expansion has escaped it.

Hell, I don't think any raid tier has even escape some stunning report that "My guild isn't hyped". Like, wow, thanks, awesome, super-informative and totally useful and valid. God I'm flashing back to people telling me Zul'Gurub was pointless content designed to waste our time now.

- - - Updated - - -

Im not saying some of these werent positive, I can understand how hunters appreciate the change to the Mark, although I liked it before, and I can also see how the vault is way better than the chest we had in BFA, dont even mind them removing the bonus rolls. However I am worried that without any luck protection there may go weeks without any new loot from dungeons or raids in a form of drops. Which still feels much better then grabbing item from vendor or a vault (basically the same).

The points is, all those things I listed added some flavour, lets call it fun factor. And they nerfed the fun factor by a mile now. Tuning Legendaries so they do a bit more % stuff wont help if all the cool stuff from them gets removed in the first place, thats why I called them stat sticks.

And nope, never gonna convince me that disabling covenant abilities outside Shadowlands was a positive change. Thats absolutely contrary to everything I experienced in the game for the past 10+ years.

Honestly with this attitude, you shouldn't even be allowed to know about alphas/betas, because you're getting extremely upset about the basic function of alphas/betas, which is to test stuff, and yeah, if you're designing well, you usually start powerful and then nerf down (because it's much harder to start weak and buff up, design-wise, and keep things decent). The stuff about Chromietime XP being nerfed isn't even true AFAICT, I don't even know where you came up with that.

[Soulwind]

Oh, but MoP usually reaches the 2nd spot, fighting TBC in polls for the "best" expansion. You know what is usually Nr 1? WotLK. The x-pac that this forum hated with a passion when I joined back in 2008.

Soooo...I really don't know what data forum goers have on what "the playerbase disliked" that devs don't have access to.

Mechanically and thematically it was excellent (BfA wasn't). It still featured a silly HvA plot that obviously couldn't be resolved because of the status quo.

Let's assume that Blizzard writers back then were naïve and didn't expect to run into that wall... okay, but why do it again, when everybody knows those stories go nowhere? "This time it's going to be different", they said, "Sylvanas won't be Garrosh", they said. And either they lied, or they were wrong. And I don't know which is worse.

Vanilla and TBC had drop legendaries and people felt they were unfair. They fixed that with legendary questlines in WotLK, Cataclysm and MoP... and then went back to it in Legion, with strong negative feedback from day one. We had to wait several patches until a currency and a vendor were introduced. And in BfA, they did it again with corruptions.

Covenants in Shadowlands are the third time that they're pushing spec-specific borrowed power. Legion and BfA started with somewhat strict rules that they had to relax, and from all that they've learned... and made the most strict system yet. And now they're nerfing that power because, as everyone but them knew, it's impossible to balance such abilities.

Time and time again, they're tripping over the same stone, and considering they have one of the biggest budgets in the market, and a massive community offering feedback 24/7, they really, shouldn't be.

[Asrialol]

Hopefully the expansion will make sure that the people who make threads like these on MMOC quit the game. Oh, and leave the forums, since for some absurd reason people who stopped playing, hate the game, are still active here.

Are we seriously saying that changing unreleased legendaries are nerfs? So if they made a legendary on day 1 of beta that gives you 10 000% dmg increase, but then later nerf it to 2%, that's ruining the game?

Not to mention the fact that people like the OP spew out whining threads, without actually bothering to read the blue posts properly.

I don't get it. Nobody forces you to play if you dont like what's coming.

But we all know you will.

[arandomuser]

they did say at blizzcon they do plan to significantly reduce the amount power increases over the expansion so they wont have to stat squish for a while

[Swnem]

I challenge the notion that something needs to be overpowered to be fun.

[Toybox]

I challenge the notion that something needs to be overpowered to be fun.

Doesn't have to be overpowered, but it does have to be interesting. If a legendary takes a few weeks of grind to earn & the end result is a very slight DPS increase and no rotational impact then what's the point of the system? (Rhetorical question, I know the answer is to keep people on the treadmill).

I'm aware they're looking to increase the power of legendaries, which should hopefully address one of the two issues if nothing else. As it stands, legendaries are looking potentially less impactful than trinkets, which is ridiculous.

[Krakan]

Doesn't have to be overpowered, but it does have to be interesting. If a legendary takes a few weeks of grind to earn & the end result is a very slight DPS increase and no rotational impact then what's the point of the system? (Rhetorical question, I know the answer is to keep people on the treadmill).

I'm aware they're looking to increase the power of legendaries, which should hopefully address one of the two issues if nothing else. As it stands, legendaries are looking potentially less impactful than trinkets, which is ridiculous.

I don't think you can make items people care about if they are expected to be obtained by every player. Welfare legendary item to my knowledge have never been looked at as rewards but grinds until your character was complete. Same with every ap system.

They are trying to give player the feeling they earned a challenging and meaningful item by doing challengless and meaningless content. I don't think it will ever fulfill that want.

[Inukashi]

So, is there anything fun left in the new expansion? Seems to me like they nerfed everything to the ground, basically killing all the fun.
3 potency conduits -> 2

I like this. So now everything will get balanced around 2 potency conduits. They are boring anyway "X does Y more dmg" ugh.. I hate stuff that just is a flat dmg increase. Two potency conduits are enough to get the interesting stuff and I'm not forced to get three of them now.

ALL legendaries -> nerfed, turned into stat sticks with no flavour

And this fucking sucks. I'm not sure, but didn't they say, they gonna buff them again in a second round?

ALL conduit abilities -> nerfed, wont even work outside Shadowlands

Don't think it's a nerf. It's more a stupid gameplay desicion.

Loot gains -> reduced heavily

This is ok. We don't need 10 versions of the same item anymore with titan forged and corruption stuff. Even though the loot gain is reduced, my character was much faster equipped with my BIS items.

XP gains in older content -> nerfed

11 hours to max lvl isn't that much of a problem I think. It's much faster then life

XP gains in Shadowlands -> nerfed, with problems to even get to max level without running dungeons etc.

I hope they gonna balance this. You should be able to hit maxlevel without running dungeons. Or maybe run every dungeon once, since they usually have story quests?

They also unpruned classes only to prune them again in some cases. Removed GCDs which is good, but also made it so that some fun spells now only work as utility abilites, i.g. Hunter's Mark.

Hunter's Mark was horrible to use. Be happy they are tuning classes!

Worst of all, they are killing all the hype I had for the expansion. Does any1 feel the same? Shadowlands looked really good at the beginning, I've even forgiven them for not making a new class (which makes perfect sense now, sadly), but the more changes they make to the game, the less excited Im getting.

I kinda feel the same, but everytime I log into the beta server and play it for few minutes I realize how much fun this xpac is beside all the negative feedback. They put so many goods ideas in it. Even though they aren't balanced, just playing this xpac is a lot of fun. So yeah, I'm losing the hype, but I'm getting it back fast, even though I can't even do all quests with all the bugs.

[Soulwind]

These are all fair points...but the criticism I read in them come from ppl vocal on forums. As for "a massive community offering feedback 24/7" - well...there is your problem. That community never speaks with one voice. Ask them a "yes or no" question and you still get 50 shades of "maybe" inbetween. My favorite one being a "Flying yes or no" thread here that spanned almost 1000 pages (and a mod telling me it was mostly like 30 posters going back and forth without budging)

24/7 feedback isn't solving problems. Games like Wildstar and Rift can attest to that who claimed to do "what fans wanted". And I don't even need to drag out the corpses of SWtoR or LotRo where franchises with massive fanbases behind them couldn't hold a candle to WoWs success.

I just don't subscribe to the "listen to what players want and all is good" idea. Because half the time players will only tell you what they DON'T want and the other times they want contradicting thins.

Sure. But one would imagine that they once did those changes because they thought it was good feedback, right? So why undo it the expansion immediately after?

And if they themselves say stuff like "we're not repeating X", it's because they belive that enough people disliked it. And yet they did repeat it.

To use your example, they've reached a point with flight that they think it's good enough of a middle ground. There is flight, it's added mid expansion, and it has to be earned, but it's not expensive, and players have to explore the content on foot first.

They've done that for several expansions and it seems like it works. Maybe they could improve it, if they came up with something new. But surely it wouldn't be a good idea to just go back to one of the earlier models, right? Well, that's exactly what they've done with other systems.

There's experimentation, and there's repeating mistakes. Torghast is the former, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Covenants are the latter, it was fairly obvious they wouldn't work.

I don't expect them to know if their new iteration on "procedural" content (Chromie->Expeditions->Visions->Torghast) will be well received, but I do expect them to know that they can't balance 4 different Covenants across 32 specs. And not only think they can, but they're confident enough that they try to sell the system as this "real RPG choice", well, a lot of people saw that failure coming, and I think it's unreasonable that they did not.

[Tojara]

It's almost like they delayed the expansion in an attempt to balance most of the things you listed.

I'm not really sure what's accomplished by reading datamined patches or basing the things like leveling experience when it's still being iterated on. If it was being released next week you might have a point, but it's probably at least 4-5 weeks out at this point.

Most legendary items historically are pretty passive and don't really change your class in any meaningful way. It's also better they nerf them then work them back up, then have a dumpster fire on launch with some of them being massively overpowered (we don't need fire mage bracers like in Legion, where they were close to 15% better than alternatives). All of that said, they literally posted about the intention with legendary items immediately after the round of changes yesterday, nerfing them and then bringing them up a higher baseline power.

Not sure how reducing loot is a bad thing, especially in an age where you have a bit more control over what items you can get, and the lack of RnG upgrades in the form of TF/WF. Sockets are still a bonus, but you also add them to gear.

Leveling changes are a weird thing to QQ about. You might not agree with it, but they basically want you to hit max level by doing virtually all of the story quests this time around on your first character. It's off at the moment, but it's not exactly a hard thing to balance in the coming weeks.

As others have pointed out, I'm not sure how you find hunter's mark engaging or fun at all. There's nothing fun about having to constantly use a GCD to apply it, and most hunter's hated having it back. With it simply tracking or seeing people who have entered stealth, it maintains it's "flavor and fun" without the annoyance of determining if it's worth incurring the GCD in PvE combat.

I'll wait for a statement regarding covenants not working outside of Shadowlands. Obviously it was datamined that this is the case and story wise it makes absolute sense, but from a game play perspective, it's a bit weird for them to potentially enforce this. I'm going to assume that arena and BGs (instanced PvP) is excluded from this, which makes sense from a game play perspective, but also contradicts the reasoning as to why you can't bring the expansion features outside of Shadowlands. Lets be serious for a moment though. Nobody really needs the new expansion features to clear old raids or world content that doesn't exist in Shadowlands, and for the majority of players, 95% of your time played is going to be in Shadowlands anyway. You won't get much use out of those new abilities in content that you literally one shot. However, from a game play perspective it feels awful and it's jarring that you virtually lose everything as soon as you leave the Shadowlands area while we're still in the Shadowlands expansion.

All of that said, whether or not they change the systems working outside of Shadowlands doesn't really change too much for the game. That's not me agreeing with that direction if that's how they want to take it though, I just think it makes little difference either way, and they might as well allow you to use them even if it doesn't make sense within the context of the lore. Most of your points are relatively minor, have been brought up, and a lot of them can easily be changed at the flip of a switch or minor value changes. I'm much more concerned about the overall balancing of the product as we arrive closer to the launch.

Seeing massive nerfs during the beta doesn't really bother me. Seeing massive nerfs or balance changes when the game launches is really bad though. We don't need another BFA situation where things like Azerite traits were buffed/nerfed by magnitudes of 100-500% in the first few weeks. Them throwing covenants up randomly to get the functionality working or adjusting soulbinds/legendary items by massive amounts while still in beta doesn't really rustle my jimmies. Yet.

[ReleaseDay]

Nerflands, Systemlands, funny how these mocking names work.

If they're commiting their new time after the delay for these horrible changes I'd rather have them release Shadowlands tomorrow. Because most changes they brought up in the last days were horrible.

"Sylvanas of Sylvanascraft: Sylvanaslands" was the best one I read, iirc youtube comments on the reveal cinematic.

[Crysis]

Well, they reverted the latest change to abilities not working outside SL. Glad they listened to the players on this one. Hopefuly nothing else arises before the release...

[Soon-TM]

You can all thank the "muh 1% dps difference" crowd

If you are going to make disingenuous comments, try with something like 50%, as was the case a few days ago