How Would You Make WoW Harder?

[Ielenia]

*checks calendar* No-no, it says 2013, not 1993.
No MMO does that anymore. Even RIFT and TERA designers decided against it.

No MMO does that today for the exact, sole reason to make leveling easier and faster for the new players. Since people want a harder leveling experience, that is one thing that could make a comeback.

[CaptainArlong]

No MMO does that today for the exact, sole reason to make leveling easier and faster for the new players. Since people want a harder leveling experience, that is one thing that could make a comeback.

No it couldn't. FF11 had it and no one liked it at all. It will never come back, and it doesn't make the game "harder", it makes it more annoying. So many of you think little gimmicks meant to slow you down equals difficulty, when they don't. It just severs as an annoyance that drives people away from a game.

[MoanaLisa]

I disagree with that last statement. I agree that people in Group 2 want to plow through the content as fast as possible, and honestly I think that they should be able to roll pre-made level 90 characters if that's what they really want. The game in its current form, however, is not engaging for Group 1. The first thing that happens when they hit their first major city is that they get spammed by guilds with invite addons. Upon joining the guild they get a 10% XP buff. When combined with their rested XP this pretty much causes them to outlevel every zone they enter after a handful of quests. The game doesn't invite them to stick around and enjoy the scenery. It rushes them from zone to zone at a breakneck pace, occasionally forcing them to skip zones just to continue progressing their character.

OK, fair enough. I too agree that if I want to clone a horde-side level 90 priest on the same server using my Alliance priest I should be able to do that. I'm a little less enthusiastic about pre-made level 90's for classes that a player doesn't have at end game but will admit that leveling doesn't really teach you much about that either so maybe.

I think I agree with you that new players would probably benefit from their first journey through Azeroth being slowed down some although I don't believe there's any benefit to speak of in making the questing mobs significantly harder during the first two or three dozen levels for those new players. I'd be fine with doing away with guild perks altogether. I don't think that experiment has worked out well. Or at least the unintended side effects were bad enough that it should all be rethought.

I'm very aware that I'm a little bit all over the map on this. I made a post earlier on (probably here) that leveling difficulty (not speed as such) was now pretty much specifically set up for new players. I think that's still true although I wish it didn't have to be that way. Perhaps someday they'll make an option so that you can choose to do 'heroic' (a word that gets tossed around too much but useful as shorthand) versions of the quests just by setting a flag. I might also be fine with rewarding levels based on completing some number of quests and quest chains instead of XP although that gets very messy when you add in dungeons and the like.

So it's messy. But the elements to make it better all exist and the process could be improved by adding some things to separate out new player leveling from veteran player leveling.

Thanks for the post. It made me think. Always a nice thing here.

[Akka]

/facepalm . . .

If you think the game is too easy, please link your 13/13 heroic ToT achiev and prove its too easy. If you cant provide a link, sorry, you cant be taken seriously and shouldnt comment on the subject.

Same idiotic "argument" we've seen since WotLK. As if having one ultra-hard very thin layer made the entire game hard.

This is a much more intelligent analysis :

I'd leave the hardest part of the game as is more or less (heroic raiding, challenge modes, brawler's guild)

And I'd spread the gameplay challenges quite a bit more evenly / progressively in the 99% of content that's left.

Because at the moment the difficulty of the 1% of the game content is just a veil and a easy cop-out for 99% of it being a snorefest.

[Osmeric]

Same idiotic "argument" we've seen since WotLK. As if having one ultra-hard very thin layer made the entire game hard.

Your wording reveals your agenda. You want the entire game hard.

Sorry, you're not going to get that, and if that's not acceptable to you, the devs will sadly wave goodbye and hope you have fun elsewhere.

[klaps_05]

id say make a boss something like a multiple 5man heroic dungeons so you can have people split 12/13 and each group needs to accomplish a certain task that will be different every week and will never repeat - only problem will be guild ranking and casuals whining but we didnt raid X week so we didnt get to see Y part of the fight.

[Akka]

Your wording reveals your agenda. You want the entire game hard.

Actually it just reveals you can't even understand simple english, as it doesn't mean that at all. What it means is that someone claimed that "WoW is hard because you have not killed the last heroic boss", and I called him on the fact that it's false and stupid to claim that the game is hard because there is a single point in it that is hard.

It was made even more clear as the post I endorsed spelled out that the difficulty should be progressive.

The rest is just you trying very hard to put words in the mouth of others because it's easier fighting a strawman than a real argument. You should be ashamed of you, to be honest.

Return to TBC model, raids being harder, heroics being actual heroics and no lfr to begin with.

YES !

I'd leave LFD though.

No.

[Ielenia]

No it couldn't. FF11 had it and no one liked it at all. It will never come back, and it doesn't make the game "harder", it makes it more annoying. So many of you think little gimmicks meant to slow you down equals difficulty, when they don't. It just severs as an annoyance that drives people away from a game.

If these, as you put it, 'little gimmicks' slow you down because you actually have to stop and think on what you can do before you rush headlong into a group of mobs with no strategy other than 'whee AoE-fest' with no regard if you can die or not, then these 'little gimmicks' make the game harder.

If they do nothing other than slow down the game for no other reason, then yes, they're there just to provide more annoyances.

Also, of course gimmicks like those are not coming back. Anyone with more than two working brain cells can see that. Games are becoming more accessible to the average and casual players, and curbing their leveling experience is the very last thing an MMO wants. If anything, they want ot speed it up even more.

[Toxigen]

Create 'hard-mode' servers, or whatever name you want to give them.

Flat 150% increase in mob strength
50% + in required experience per level
No LFG or LFR
No crossrealm features of any kind
Weak, slow spawning guards
Flying mounts have a 10 second cast time and require to be out of pvp combat for 2 minutes
No transfer services of any kind, must level up from beginning if start on server
No badges / points / valor of any kind
Raiding is 25 man only

That would be amazing.

I'd like to add some sort of penalty for dying, too.

[melodramocracy]

*checks calendar* No-no, it says 2013, not 1993.
No MMO does that anymore. Even RIFT and TERA designers decided against it.

AC still does this. Eve online has a variation of it.

What does time have to do with it. If good game systems work, then they work, period. If this wasn't the case, then leveling itself wouldn't be used in RPG's, and no one would be playing CoD, because all that ground has been covered from the original Doom game onwards (if not before that).

Meanwhile, there's zero risk involved with dying in this game, which makes it absolutely meaningless. If you actively play at ALL, repair bills aren't even a blip on the radar, not ever. Unimpactful game mechanics don't help a player form any sense of immersion.

Losing chunks of xp isn't the only solution to such a thing, but what's involved now is laughable.

As for the hard vs difficult vs tedious arguments that are going on in this thread, here's 3 questions.

Is leveling mining harder than leveling tailoring?
Is levling fishing harder than leveling enchanting?
Which is more inherently rewarding when you finally max it out?

[RicardoZ]

I still like the idea homeboy back on the first or second page had about removing all the addons.

I can understand all the cosmetic only ones for bars or raidframes and bags and stuff, like if you want your UI to be different, but stuff like Deadly Boss Mods...come on that's practically cheat mode.

I don't understand why guilds feel this great sense of accomplishment after downing a boss they've already sat and watched videos on for months before the patch even came out and then have DBM to hold their hand through the entire fight and tell them what to do, along with their rotation addons that tell them what to cast when.

Come on, you have to admit that's pretty cheap.

[pimpeddakota]

Give mobs vengeance!

Just think about how that would work... you get stacked DPS players and a weak tank and healer then you have to CC!

[DeadmanWalking]

*checks calendar* No-no, it says 2013, not 1993.
No MMO does that anymore. Even RIFT and TERA designers decided against it.

City of Heroes did it but they don't exist anymore.

FFXI took 10% exp away if you died which means you could level after 5 hours of chain killing 1 crab in a 5 man group, die and loose the level and have to spend 25 mins getting the level back. Dying due to another players mistake would usually cause a lot of drama, and a mistake could be anything from a stupid mistake to lag causing a Ninja Tank to miss a blink spell by half a second.

Much like most of these 'ideals' they won't fix the game and will only cause more problems and subscription losses.

FFXI was a hard MMO, but do 12 to 8.5 million players play it? Hell no, because western players hear grind and go running for the hills screaming and rolling their eyes up in their skulls. They want difficult for other people but not for them.

[Z3ROR]

Make the leveling process more of a mystery and more of an "adventure" rather than following a story on a set of rails, for the new players of course.

Veterans will obviously already know where to go and what to do. If there's one thing I loved about WoW, and this goes for all games, it was the very beginning where you didn't know where to go or what to do.

I loved venturing across Eastern Kingdoms to find a suitable location to settle down and do some quests, grind a bit, and move on when I wanted to explore even more. Sure, there's death dragging and the occasional over leveled zone you wander into, but that was part of the experience, and the danger. There is no danger in WoW anymore. No discovery, no mystery of the world. You're on a set of railed with the leveling, and now it tells you the different levels of the zones on the map so you know exactly where to go or where not to go, not to mention the introduction quests you find in the capital cities.

I think that the sense of danger and mystery is very important in what actually makes a game "fun." Not all will agree, but making everything accessible and friendly causes players to bore pretty fast.

Also, I'm not saying WoW should go back to Vanilla quests. The Cata quests and storylines are great and tons of fun, it's just the linearity and the safety, no danger whatsoever, that hinders the "journey" or the "adventure" a bit. Did this necessarily make the game "harder"? Not directly. But it was slightly less forgiving, and the difficulty paid for itself as you adventured on your own.

I agree on this. Maybe Blizzard should start by removing that Quest board thing in the capitals, so players need to venture their own way. Then make questhubs in each zone, but don't connect them. Let the players find those hubs again. Some might be relevant and need to stay, but some can be removed as well. The danger can be done when guards of towns and settlements and such are stronger and have a larger aggrorange. I think zones need more patrolling guards as well, even in contested zones. More NPC interaction where the player can suffer from or benefit from.

A few other little points:

As much as I love flying mounts, they really break immersion and make the world seem small. I like how MoP handled them though.

My suggestion is adding a mount stamina system where mounts can get exhausted after little while of flying.

Automatically learning spells as you level up doesn't make sense to me. This ties in to the leveling experience, going to your trainer and learning those shiny new spells was such a special feeling. This goes for talents as well, I don't have anything to look forward to when I level up anymore. I think Blizzard is looking into this though. It would be really cool if they implemented both a talent tree, AND the "skill every 15 levels" talent system. They could make it work.

What if you replace the current spell system with a talent tree aka spell tree system. Then get a spellpoint every 2 or 5 levels or something where you choose spells that matches your play style. This way you create a much creater amount of class builds then the limited 2-4 we know now. That would be challenging and gives the choose 100% back to the player.

I think raids are in a good place. Dungeons should be harder, as many would agree. Somewhere in between 4.1 difficulty and wotlk difficulty would be nice. I thought 3.3 hit the sweet spot with the 3 new dungeons, 4.3 was a good difficulty as well, even if a bit too easy. I love Heroic Scenarios, but I feel like that's the difficulty normal Scenarios should have been.

I agree.

Max level questing/daily questing is good in terms of difficulty, but extremely tedious. The quests in the Cata zones were fun to do and not too easy, but too linear. Again, finding a balance between the two would be a good spot imo.

I would like to see that some daily quests became normal repeatable quests again. For example: the first time you need to kill 8 mogu, the second time 12 mogu (15% reward decrease), the third time 20 mogu (30% reward decrease), the fourth time and up 50 mogu (50% reward decrease). The more you do the quest the smaller the reward gets.

[Mexa]

Remove LFR and dont implement Flex and combine normal mode and HC mode into a progressing difficulty so that as u progress the bosses get harder. Have the second boss be harder than the first boss, and so on, and by the time u hit last boss, its gonna be HC difficulty. And add more bosses to the raid, so that parts of the raid can be on farm while trying to take down the later bosses.

And make HC dungeons harder and Normal mode dungeons more relevant at max lvl. And have the dungeons have lockouts, so u dont have to maniacally farm them all day long.

[DeadmanWalking]

Remove LFR and dont implement Flex and combine normal mode and HC mode into a progressing difficulty so that as u progress the bosses get harder. Have the second boss be harder than the first boss, and so on, and by the time u hit last boss, its gonna be HC difficulty. And add more bosses to the raid, so that parts of the raid can be on farm while trying to take down the later bosses.

And make HC dungeons harder and Normal mode dungeons more relevant at max lvl. And have the dungeons have lockouts, so u dont have to maniacally farm them all day long.

That works for me, because without LFR or Flex Blizz will be too busy making content to keep the 90% non raiders busy that they will only make Raid content once every 12-15 months and it will take that long for you to get through that content. Everyone's happy!

[Akka]

AC still does this. Eve online has a variation of it.

What does time have to do with it. If good game systems work, then they work, period.

You must have missed the memo making it so that if you ever prefer something from a previous iteration of anything, it's only because of "nostalgia" or "rose-tinted glass" ! The rule is that it's impossible that from something newer to be worse. Keep with the times man !

(obviously, that was sarcasm, but as we are on the Net, I feel compelled to point it, you never know)

[Archangel Tyrael]

You must have missed the memo making it so that if you ever prefer something from a previous iteration of anything, it's only because of "nostalgia" or "rose-tinted glass" ! The rule is that it's impossible that from something newer to be worse. Keep with the times man !

(obviously, that was sarcasm, but as we are on the Net, I feel compelled to point it, you never know)

Yeah, getting mighty tired of the morons spouting the ''huuur duuur nostalgiaaa'' crap.

[RicardoZ]

Give mobs vengeance!

Just think about how that would work... you get stacked DPS players and a weak tank and healer then you have to CC!

I'm pretty sure you're joking but that would be pretty fun

[superstarz]

I would make every instance from any level harder..
take away flying mounts..

that will start