WoW is pulling a HotS

[RobertMugabe]

And was first cleared with T6 sets mostly btw. The thing about wotlk was just that health pools were very small compared to the dmg we dealt/received/could heal. I remember very well that Lava Burst for shaman, was dealing more damage than what it dealt in BfA. And a T10 guys healthpool was around 30-35k for nontanks, greater por pvp gear but you get the idea. Health bars jumped a lot, but were not really difficult to fill again with a couple swift heals, even from almost dead. It was perhaps harder than usual for dps because they had a shorter timeframe to get out of bad stuff. But for tanks and healers, technique/throughput-wise, quite the same. There came a point as healer that the only thing you did was spam the biggest heal you had, because gear and talents allowed you to regen more by actively casting than resting.

Yeah, they've only addressed this issue in cata when they massively buffed everyone's health pools (and again in MoP)

[Soon-TM]

Yeah, they've only addressed this issue in cata when they massively buffed everyone's health pools (and again in MoP)

Yep, they buffed everyone's HP by like 200% and nerfed healing by like 75%, so healing in Cata, especially the early part, sucked big time for anybody who wasn't a paladin (DP and Cata's tuning for LoD were OP af).

Imo one of the problems of the current game is that they've tried too hard to cater to the very hardcore AND to the very casual, leaving everybody else out in the cold.

[alturic]

I think what people (at least my view) mean about LK being better than anything since was the gameplay, the systems, there's honestly a reason* that numbers have been going down since then.

Well, coupled with arguably one of the best raid tiers, and difficulty systems.

*The only non-game-related reason could be, was LK around the time of the rise of current generation, instant gratification etc?

[Bibliomaniac]

This ENTIRE thing falls apart when you realize the most casual friendly expansion Wrath that people glorify these days was HYPER casual friendly and had over 11 million subs.

It pretty much had that sub count by the end of BC, stagnated for a bit, had an alright influx by the end and then the philosophy really cemented by cata which you can then see the rapid decline. Also leveling in Wrath 0-80 was still basically the same as it was in the previous 2 expansions with some slightly heavier xp gains. So this idea that because Wrath started the "HYPER casual friendly" mentality while having a high player count completely ignores years and years of player build up and retention among other things like remaining mechanics from the games legacy that still kept much of it rewarding in a long run leveling kind of experience. Wrath didn't go from 0 to 11 million all by its own as if the previous 2 versions never existed, so don't act like it did. People who defend live this way seem to never grasp 99% of the nuance of the situation, acting like Wrath is the equivalent the next 8 years of game development and philosophy while ignoring everything that came before it.

[Exquis]

We're currently at 1612 guilds that have beaten Mythic G'huun; compare that to previous tiers: Ulduar itself had 1566 guilds clear Alone in the Darkness (Yogg +0) which is actually incredibly comparable. Unfortunately since the merge we're unable to track who was in 10 or 25m groups. 2527 guilds completed heroic Anub in ToGC, with 1282 of them completing it without a single death in 25m. Counting 10m, 36280 kills on heroic and 19013 Insanity runs done. That doesn't look like an incredibly difficult raid tier. 1101 guilds completed Heroic LK in 25 man groups and 5664 completed it in 10 man, again all fairly comparable to current raid content numbers for completion. For Tier 11 we'll go with Sinestra, the most difficult/least killed end raid boss, and 2147 guilds finished her off as well. 1374 in 10 man and 685 in 25 man for Sinestra; if you go by Nefarian we're in the 3k+ range for guilds killing him on heroic.

Heroic Rag was a joke compared to other raid tiers. 6666 guilds in 10 man but only 491 in 25 man; the raid was incredibly unbalanced and skewed toward 10 man groups. The same thing was the case in Dragon Soul with 9059 kills in 10 man and only 1191 kills in 25 man, but 1191 in 25m is still quite comparable to the 1612 of Mythic G'huun. You're comparing up to 29775 players completing Dragon Soul up to 32240 players completing G'huun. MoP? Heroic Sha of Fear: 1491 in 10m, only 303 in 25m. Again, an expansion with a very unbalanced setup toward 10m groups. Throne? 4750 Ra-den 10m kills, 368 in 25m. This is the reason that flex mode was implemented during this expansion; they found it impossible to properly balance between such drastic differences in group sizes. 2861 10m Garrosh kills, 1026 25m Garrosh kills. These are all using heroic mode, which is the equivalent to current Mythic content that you seem to think everyone is completing.

WoD: 20 man mythic only. Now we'll see some number changes right? 2026 Blackhand kills, 2850 Archimonde kills. Hmmm, those are both easier to kill than G'huun. Legion maybe? 2003 Gul'dan kills, 892 Kil'jaeden kills, 1748 Argus kills. Overall pretty comparable numbers again other than Kil'jaeden which is a complete bitch of a boss fight to be perfectly honest; I'm not surprised it was under 1k guilds.

So what I'm seeing throughout literally every single tier is completely comparable numbers literally from as far back as Wowprogress can track. You're looking at, in general, between 1000-2000 guilds clearing all current content every single tier, with 10m raids being much higher generally. Outside of the handful of outlying bosses (Ra-den, Kil'jaeden, Sha of Fear) where 25m was incredibly punishing, every single tier has been completed by a very normal amount of players as it always has been. You're pulling your anecdotal evidence right out of your ass when there's hard evidence to go off of on an easy to find website.

Even the part where you talk about raid level gear from badges is incorrect; Isle of Quel'danas with the Sunwell Plateau patch added that with Badges of Justice giving gear equivalent to Black Temple raid gear (very close in ilvl, like 5-10 lower), which was followed up by Emblems of Frost and Valor in Wrath which let you fill in belt/boot/OH slots during Naxx, then more in Ulduar, then more in ToC (even allowing the purchase of low level tier gear) and then more into ICC.

You're pretty much proving my point about Ulduar by saying it has the same amount of guild clears as G'huun despite the playerbase being way larger back then. Oh, and ontop of that, i said THAT FELT more difficult. That being my feelings and my opinion, but nice try friendo.

[Osmeric]

You're pretty much proving my point about Ulduar by saying it has the same amount of guild clears as G'huun despite the playerbase being way larger back then. Oh, and ontop of that, i said THAT FELT more difficult. That being my feelings and my opinion, but nice try friendo.

We don't know whether sub loss since then has been the same across different kinds of players. They could have lost more casual players than hardcores.

[Soon-TM]

We don't know whether sub loss since then has been the same across different kinds of players. They could have lost more casual players than hardcores.

I'd expect it tbh. Not only the casual crowd is bigger in numbers than the hardcore one, but also much more prone to leaving... "Subs are cyclical", as some !#$%&/&/ dev said not long ago.

[Thetruth1400]

And they are wondering why the numbers keep dropping. so expect WoW in "maintenance mode" in a few years.

.

Do you have any actual proof that WoW subs are dropping, let alone dropping to a significant level that "maintenance mode" is just a few years away?

I'm not saying WoW is amazing right now, but you're spouting the same doom and gloom nonsense that has existed since TBC; "This is going to kill WoW" "We're never going to get another expansion because this one is such a flop." "These changes made the game too easy" etc.

Additionally, yeah, I'm not happy with WoW currently nor am I happy with some of the company policy changes that have been creeping in over the years. I'm less happy to see that Blizzard is doubling down on the store and also crowdfunding their WoW esports with offering WoW toys for sale to partially fund the prize pool for their esports prize.

We're paying for a game, paying for the sub, and then they're creating even more content, using that money we've already paid, to create even more content they then, you guess it, make players pay for if they want said item. It's gouging your customers 3 times for the same product; kind of gross if you ask me.

[Osmeric]

I'd expect it tbh. Not only the casual crowd is bigger in numbers than the hardcore one, but also much more prone to leaving... "Subs are cyclical", as some !#$%&/&/ dev said not long ago.

I meant a larger percentage of the causals. If so, the attempts to adapt the game more to casual players, to the extent they've done that, are understandable. Without those casuals the game won't be getting much love from corporate.

[JohnyCge]

Hi all! I'm new here, but friend of mine linked me this thread so here's my perspective(Coming from 1250+ lvl diamond player in hots, and 5/8 casual mythic raider in wow, 4k+ mmr dota2). (This is only true for pvp):

The very problem with hots was not casualty of game, but rather one different thing. It exist in all Blizzard games and affects wow too. It is very definition of ranked play in eyes of blizzard. In fact, HOTS dev team was most responsible dev team in whole blizzard. Bugs were fixed almost instantly, devs actually listened to community and so on. Heroes design were(is) amazing, team pulled unique playstyles for MOBA game. But!, the most prominent HOTS problem was matchmaking and mmr. Matchmaking were completely bad, pulling things like 3 healers versus fully fledged team. And with that came another biggest problem : Ranked play. Situation with ranked play was almost comical, as picking some heroes could lead you to insta ban of your account( Murky, Pre-rework raynor, Meme-varian, etc.). Placement system were uter garbage. Winning 80% of placement games in team league would still put you in 5 silver league. The other thing is that, ranked and quick game were totally the same thing. There was 0 difference between game modes, and in result of that MOST of population would just play quick mode. You could play anything anyhow. Meme(twin blades) varian was/is/will be insanely op and can nullify whole team(if you don't have enough cc/stuns), but for month/ were considered "pick this and you reported", until some round of hgc where actually nullifying happened. Murky in diamond is instant leave, like 1 second, in fact there were some russian grand master player, that picked murky for infernal shrines on mayor tournament and won, but he told that team/viewers butthurt was so huge, that he almost got kicked out of team. And the hole between ranked population and non ranked population only grew bigger. Basically, toxic "ranked" players drew whole lot of ppl away from ranked. Why would you listen to all that headache when you can just press play and play as you want? The thing is even now where whole "pro" scene left, player participation have not lowered by even 3% judging by /r/heroesofthestorm data.

Another thing is regional management. EU actually got a huge amount of players. Actually, blizzard were able to get slice of dota 2 pie in Russia/Cis countries. The thing is, have you seen tournaments in Russia/Eu? In fact russian community( tavern of heroes, if i remember right) had loooots of tournaments with all kind of ppl. Any skill, any rating, streamer or non streamer. Lots of fun. Even i as non russian speaking person participated in Alterac one. But what were the prizes? In-game loot. That's it. Where was heroes of the dorm EU? Considering the difference of education cost in eu/usa. In fact for 20k+(or more like 50+) usd per year per person in us college, you could afford whole year for whole team in non Germany/GB. Compare this to USA prizes. In time most of eu players just returned to dota, since league is not that popular in europe. I don't think blizz ever got even a smallest slice of league players in US. Why, you would ask? Ads prices are way to lower in cis/eastern europe than in usa. 010 – 045% of USA average cost per click depending on country (CPC). 0,2 for Russia, 0.1 for Ukraine etc even 0.55 for Sweden( which is not eastern europe ofc, but country with lots of pro teams and one of the biggest cyber tournaments(Dreamhack)!

And here comes wow. Exactly the same problem but in different genre. The thing is that there is difference in mindset of people which are called here casuals and non-casuals. People who play for ranked see their chars as tool, but average player plays wow as an rpg. Let me explain better: Lets pick average Mike. He plays wow "casually", 6-9 hours of raid time, 1+ myth+, 2 hours of farm to afford that raiding/myth+. And he decided to play some ranked pvp, but here's a thing, he plays some underdog, like Retribution paladin,. Retribution paladin is considered ok for 3v3, what? for 2v2, and Are you kidding me? in RBG. The thing is that mike plays wow from begining and saw first iteration of pvp system where actually you pvp = get reward. Now system is actually different. There is random battleground, but it's like not real pvp now. There's a ranked bg's, but this class spec is "no go" there. Even if he gets there community puts artificial milestones there. Rating. Myth+? Rating. New players(in pvp or in game) don't have rating. The whole thing is mimicking real world. Get 100+ years of exp b4 getting to basic job. Problem is that any modern pvp game offer simplier thing. You train a bit - you go to real fight. No "casual" pvp, no "world pvp is not real pvp", no "just reroll" etc. You press button - you play balanced pvp. Have you seen rbg participation in wow? Have you seen fall off this season in arena? The thing is competitive person won't listen to git gud and will just pick another game with bigger money reward, personal satisfaction etc. Solution to that? As fellow Savix were asking for years: Solo que. Let automated system pick fair games where can show your skill as character in rpg game. Get proper class balance. Have you seen proper re-balance in arena? RMD, RMP, Arms+holy, are still top specs after 12!!!!! years. Underdogs are still underdogs. First ret to make it to blizzcon finals made it after 10!!!!!!! years of existence of arena.

The whole class balance thing in wow is over the top. In game where most of population prefer melee classes, you put artificial fence in raiding with damn 4-6 melee spots in 20 man raid shared with melee healers. And put no restrictions on how many ranged you can have. The roster boss is hardest boss in BFA, and became last one for many guilds such as mine. In fact at start of bfa i personally saw biggest will to participate in mythic encounters since wod (where i have returned to wow after lich), but zekvos/fetid became huge roadblocks for melee heavy guilds (8+ dps melee players). Halloween/Thanksgiving break actually killed whole casual mythic scene on my realm(Ravencrest-EU, pretty much only EU Alliance realm with good mythic progression). In fact most of 8/8 guilds on server are intensively recruiting atm, when at start of expansion even casual guild judged applicants by logs as stream of applicants to guild that made it to 2/8 or 3/8 early was huge. Uldir is basically TOS, even same class/race stacking(rogues on avatar/zul), belfs/goblins (zul/kiljaden). Yes fixes were made, but when ion made to fetid/mythrax noone cared much.

TLDR;
Blizzard sucks at ranked pvp games( Overwatch is dying outside of "it's-my-job" "pro" scene, hots you know, Rbg in wow is empty town in western movie, wow arena is still alive, but views are ultra low to get profit). Characters in wow should be rpg characters and not tools to rating as they are now(because any modern pvp game offer proper balance without re-rolling). Hots pro scene actually are one of the reasons that killed hots(by abuses of vote system, toxicity to new players, abuse of ranking etc) along with activision.. Wow needs proper class balance and not this joke. And SOLO QUE. Wow have to return to being a proper RPG and make all pvp ranked by default with personal mmr ratings and team mmr ratings as different things. Wow also need proper regional management as all Eu communities are abandoned by devs as this point, even poor Aerythlea(who handled all wow EU communication, even through she did an amazing job) barely posts anything now. All of wow current problems are actually fixable. It's hard to see wow in this state. You can also actually see how community created tournaments such as world first race achieve more views(and more profit,lol) than any kind of official rated translations.

[Neuroticaine]

WOTLK was stupidly hardcore compared to current game. get out.

No, it really wasn't. Hardly anything about WotLK was remotely "hardcore" save for one or two boss fights. The raiding was easier, the dungeons were easier, not nearly the same number of systems in game that the hardcore player was expected to participate in to stay competitively min-maxed, etc...

WotLK was easy. It was extremely popular because everyone was still riding on the Arthas popularity band wagon from Warcraft 3, and it was a well-constructed and polished expansion, but hardcore it was not. Not by a long shot.

[gankhill]

I don't understand at all how HotS is a moba for people that don't like mobas. I've played Dota since 2008 and I fucking love HotS. It's its own beast, a really good one that hasn't been given a fair shake at all by the community

[Neuroticaine]

You forgot OS103D, it was decently challenging with appropriate gear.

Its just too bad 25m baby mode nax dropped better gear and made it trivial...

My casual guild at the time managed to get 3 drakes within a relatively small amount of pulls that are hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers of pulls my experienced heroic guilds had put into certain fights in more recent expansions.

It's been a long time, but from what I remember, it was just a metric fuckton of damage going out.

[Alkizon]

TLDR;
Blizzard sucks at ranked pvp games( Overwatch is dying outside of "it's-my-job" "pro" scene, hots you know, Rbg in wow is empty town in western movie, wow arena is still alive, but views are ultra low to get profit). Characters in wow should be rpg characters and not tools to rating as they are now(because any modern pvp game offer proper balance without re-rolling).

Wow, I'm not a MOBA fan, but it was interesting to read a fairly concise overall impression, summary. Thanks. As for the cited part, I would formulate it somewhat differently (don't think that I disagree, this is also correct, but just to emphasize its main tendency): it’s bad not so much because they can't do it proper, but rather because they continue to insist on priority of this direction development and design for this particular game. They are concerned with what was originally not supposed to be concern, for some reason.

[Brubear]

You needed 1800 rating to buy the basic pvp weapon. Catchup gear was from the previous patch. Try again?



Putting aside that the game as a whole isn't just the raids; I'd love to see a LFR team from legion/WoD/BFA era try heigan the unclean.

LFR KJ, Argus, Coven, Lei Shen, and Garalon when they were current content where are all far worse than 10m Heigan ever was. You'd actually probably see better survival rates on Heigan because mechanically he's a hell of a lot easier than any of those other fights.

I just love hearing people complain about how much easier the game is, when the upper end is just as difficult as it ever was, they just have a sliding scale of difficulty instead of two or three sharp cut-offs for difficulty levels. Dungeons are no easier than they were during Wrath, which is what many people to consider the last time the game was good/difficult.

[Daffan]

In Classic and TBC the game grew in popularity. In Wrath it stopped growing. It was also not the "most casual friendly expansion" at all. Do I need to mention it did not have LFR?

Watch out, your destroying his narrative and making him upset

Additionally right when they added tons of welfare in the last tier of WOTLK was when the first content drought came into existence too and it started reversing growth, a trend not even Cata release could stem for long.

[Playintrafic]

Yeah and when it WoTLK was current, it was stupidly easy compared to the TBC and Vanilla. If you don't recall the badge shitstorm - it was faar worse than the current shitstorms - then you simply haven't played it and you should get out.



Mate the badge system was received faaar worse than LFR. LFR grew shitty over time - when LFR was introduced in DS tier it was an extremely lucrative way to get gear.

The badge shit storm was in fucking TBC you rudy git. It happened because you could get gear that was better than raid bloody raid from doing dungeons. It was better than 2 tiers of raiding gear in a world wear you were still expected to do every raid tier because of attunements.

So in wrath they ditched attunements and kept the badge gear but this time as a catchup mechanic and bad look protection. It took at least an entire week to get 1 piece of cheaper badge gear, up to 2.5 (maybe it was even 3) weeks to get the more expensive pieces. You still bloody needed trinkets and weapons from raids.

Been playing this game a bloody while, I'd say its easiest to gear up alts now than it ever had been. Wrath probably had the 2nd least amount of grinding because of rep tabards, and badge gear combined with dungeons your could roflpwn after Ulduar dropped. It had the lowest "skill cap" for the longest time. If LFR had happened in wrath then it would have been a perfect storm of easy mode.

Cata swung too far the other way, dungeons were "too hard" to pug in the first raid tier after we had gotten used to mowing down dungeons with no cc and no mechanics.

Mop was pretty shit easy, but very time consuming at the start so it drove away players. Not as casual friendly because of time sink.

To be casual friendly a game has to have a low barrier to entry on both time and skill. Can't have required rep grinds and such unless you could do them in less than 10 hours a week.

[op3l]

I honestly think WoTLK is the best expansion. Yea it's a bit face rolly but come on, it's a game. The hardcore people are still doing hard core stuff, while the rest of us who didn't necessarily have the best skills or time(mostly time in my case) can still feel powerful doing heroics and what not. Back in WoTLK I mainly only did heroics and while some of the later stuff were harder, it was still pretty easy and I loved it. Call me a noob or casual but it felt good playing the game.

Then MOP, Cata, WoD I didn't play much at max level so can't comment. Legion was good, it had that WoTLK feel and I enjoyed it. Then came this stupid Azerite armor shite and ugh... I've quit wow many times in the past, but it's never from being completely fed up with the game. BfA felt clunky and slow and feels like it was made artificially slow so you wouldn't be able to progress at a fast rate. That killed it for me.

[ldev]

WOTLK was stupidly hardcore compared to current game. get out.

Naxxramas was the easiest raid ever?.. Dungeon finder got introduced too. Attunements were gone.

wotlk was stupidly casual, still the best expansion ever, because Lich King was epic.

[sam86]

In Classic and TBC the game grew in popularity. In Wrath it stopped growing. It was also not the "most casual friendly expansion" at all. Do I need to mention it did not have LFR?

wrath replaced ~ 6 million chineese player with eu/usa market, it grew even more than TBC/vanilla
china ban of wrath was a joke, heck u can even check until today how most wrath mobs/bosses look in china, wrath was released in china after cata talents were out, and china - alone - was half of player base during vanilla/tbc, they were that big that they made blizz add belfs on their request alone, since i'm pretty sure if they asked western market we would ask where the f8ck is the 5th horde race from wow rpg books : the ogers (back then they were still canon)

- - - Updated - - -

Naxxramas was the easiest raid ever?.. Dungeon finder got introduced too. Attunements were gone.

wotlk was stupidly casual, still the best expansion ever, because Lich King was epic.

naxx was easy, but naxx wasn't only t1 raid, Sarathion 3d was quite hard, also u can 'cheat' it with a warlock pet and specific talent, ignoring abusing old talent system, was hard
dungeon finder was introduced in last patch, attunements were removed in later patches too, yes the game did get easier with time but it didn't start like that, not to mention in same patch they introduced lfr they gave us the 2nd hardest raid boss ever without bugs : LK (the 1st is still from wrath too, yogg zero)