Are people really okay with trivial outdoors?

[oblakoff]

Try leveling in BfA with heirlooms and not Azerite armor. It adds a little bit of fun and challenge.

[Zyrinx]

I can understand this, but i admit, if i had to pick, i rather be kept a bit weaker outdoors so combat stays engaging. Gear can help me in raids and m+ where the challenge is real and failure can happen cuzz mechanics are plentiful. In outdoors, where its at my own pace anyway, i want some modicum of challenge to remain. Just my preference though, i know not all agree.

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You owe me nothing but if you'd deign to, I'd be happy to hear why you prefer it this way. Several have and some of it feels cool to hear, even if i still feel different.

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I didnt remember it being a significant challenge, i wouldn't want that for every mob in wow, this isn't dark souls. But i do rmember it not being a complete faceroll. Ye, you'd still beat every mob, including the tournament dragon (esp as lock, voidwalker aggro and health funnel with dots work wonders). But overpulling was a risk. Single mobs took a bit more then two seconds. You needed to play your class.

I already said - if the outdoors scales infinitely, you get no functional power gain as you progress. As new patch content comes in, that should be somewhat hard at first until you okay that patch.

I prefer to spend more time on the new things than having stuff I did "back then" take just as much time as new things due to scaling. Under that model, you run out of time, because time does not scale.

Ingame right now I can blast thru an emissary in 5 minutes then go do something else. It certainly wasn't the case in 8.1 where the emissary actually was the reward. The only reason to do it now is the rep stacking for paragon gold.

Don't even start on "scaling up old raids!" ( To be fair I don't think you said this). I'm a mount and mog farmer, it's my primary reason for playing the game, and no, I do not want to assemble a group to farm Nighthold for a 1% drop. That's madness.

[Verdugo]

I remember at the start of BFA there was a HUUUGE uproar because mobs were scaling with ilvl so until 8.1 they were non-trivial. There was a lot of complaining everywhere so I guess not a lot of people like that. As it's been said, you want to feel your character grow in power. If it takes 10 seconds to kill a mob in ilvl 350 and takes 10 seconds to kill the same mob in ilvl 450, why even gear up?

Oh no it was even worse. Someone found out that you killed mobs FASTER if you unequiped gear in certain situations.

[Ryzael]

Oh no it was even worse. Someone found out that you killed mobs FASTER if you unequiped gear in certain situations.

ya that's what i remember the problem being with early bfa, you started out 1 shotting everything and as you levelled up the same mobs started getting harder, not just staying the same difficulty, taking 10 seconds to kill something at 120 that took 1 second at 110

[LostLocket]

All outdoor content needs to be trivial because if it isn't players will ignore it. MoP really is the case study for this. Island of giants had a somewhat challenging world boss and wow players reacted by throwing raid after raid at it until the server broke and he could no longer cast his aoe attack on the realm I played on.

Time lost isles elite mob area was ignored by the lion's share of people except when they cut through it to fight a raid boss.

[erifwodahs]

sure dude. Try that on you fresh character. My fresh fire mage dies in seconds on few elites while my 480 DH soloes 10m HP rares

[Zyrinx]

Well to be fair, Timeless Isle had by far and away the worst navigation of any wow zone by orders of magnitude.

Catching an albatross and slow carry around and hope you drop in the exact right spot. Yeah, no.

[Echo of Soul]

The problem is power creep. When content is new it's kinda okay but since we're getting an expansions worth of iLvls in a single tier (compared to how it was back in TBC for example) we outpace the content ridiculously fast.

The only solution is to lessen the iLvl jumps drastically.
Let's say normal gives iLvl200, heroic iLvl210 and Mythic iLvl220.
When a new tier rolls around normal would be bumped up to 210, heroic to 220 and mythic to 230.

The way it has been in later years each tier has increased iLvls by 30 which obviously is way too much. In 3 tiers that's 90 iLvls vs 30 which would've been more reasonable.

The content is also tuned way too low to begin with but more importantly it's uniform across the board. It's perfectly fine to have easier areas and harder ones instead of one size fits all.

[Cerus]

I think you have a poor memory. WotLK and WoD were completely trivial in the open world with some decent heroic dungeon gear.

They introduced ilvl scaling in legion and doubled down on it in BFA. Try the open world with fresh leveling gear. It won’t be trivial in BFA at all. You cannot use catch up gear as a metric. The point of that gear is to catch you up to other players.

Go to 8.2 zones in blues and greens or 8.3 zones in 8.2 catch up gear. You will be dying a lot and mobs will not just be falling over.

[Zephire]

I'm okay with it being obliterated but I do like it when I can adjust the danger by pulling more. Sometimes mobbs just reset and I'm never able to get really high density. I hope to be able to just push myself a bit while doing booring stuff. Don't think it'll happen but ya know, one can hope

[deenman]

You must be mis-remembering WOTLK. It was during Wrath that outdoor mobs became trivial. From there on each expansion increased the triviality.

not rly,wrath still had some difficult outdoor stuff that you couldnt solo for most people,mop also had those,but they started to add the solo ones in there also,it was in wod when they all became soloable

[Marrilaife]

Reading all the answers I honestly question if anyone is enjoying the game anymore. People in this thread use words like "chores", "get over with", "fighting through content".
You guys should honestly question yourselves why you are doing all those grinds.

I first thought OP had a legitimate question. Now after all the answers I honestly have to ask myself if WoW is the right game for me if everyone seems to be ok with a game being that "tedious" or where you have "to get through".

Call me old-fashioned: But there was a time where people actually enjoyed playing a game by itself and not just to do chores or to get to the "endgame". But maybe WoW isn't for those people anymore.

Because there are people who play wow to do raids / mythic+ / rated pvp and don't care about "the mighty outdoors" that are usually lame and boring, but of course a vocal sub group cried that wow became a "lobby game", "instance simulator" and whatnot so ofc it had to be ruined for everyone.

Remember the time when you could get your reps done by wearing a tabard in a dungeon and you didn't need outdoor grind? These times are gone.

Remember when you could efficiently level up in a new expansion by spamming dungeons? That's also gone, oh, also you have to do "loremaster" or some other crap to unlock "end game" so don't you dare to hope you can skip dreadful questing.

Remember when the only "weekly cap" you needed came from your main activity like pvp or raiding? Well now let's have AP, AP 2.0, Anima and other bullshit that needs to be grinded by mostly "world quests" or some other shitty activity nobody enjoys.

So it's fine when people make QQ threads about how "they're forced to raid" but it's not OK when people QQ about "being forced to do outdoor chores"?

Blizzard did everything to dilute the meaning of raiding meanwhile pushing mandatory outdoor grinds down everyone's throats, like 8.3 invasions to unlock the visions for mandatory cloak upgrades.

[Kaver]

I'm not talking about timeless isle level of mechanic for every mob (though that'd be cool). Im talking about how when i go around doing worldquests, even with catchup gear, mobs just fall over and die in seconds. Forget low risk of dying, I'm never in much risk of even loosing much hp.

It was much more nuanced around wotlk-wod. Classes were powerful, and didn't have large downtime unlike classic. You'd still win dailies without much difficulty, but mobs could still put up some fight, especially if you pulled several. You actually had to be awake and click the proper buttons.
Isn't that what gaming is about? Do people prefer it this way? Isn't combat in this game part of the fun? I'm genuinely curious, feel free to respond even if you're in favor of this godmode, blizz is seemingly on your side. just please help me understand why.

If they made enemies that people couldn’t initially kill then you would get a mob of entitled players crying because they feel that buying the game automatically entitles them to completion of content. And scaling sucks.

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No.

This has always been one of my biggest gripes with the game since it renders a huge portion of the game irrelevant. Ironcially, you can see they took time to give mobs different abilities etc., but then the tuning department destroys that effort since it all pretty much dies by way of aoe or breathing on it as soon as you've hit max level.

Blizz disrespects their own game by trivializing it to the degree that they do, and they insult the iq of the player base by assuming that we all just want to play clicker-heros level difficulty content, unless its instanced.

Now, I know not everyone thinks the same way as me, but a lot of people do. No idea why they don't just launch hard-mode servers with all resource levels reduced and all difficulty cranked up. Hell, I've got almost 30k achievement points, but I'd drop my old toon like butter and restart on a fresh hard-mode server in a blink if they created one.

This is what would happen if they made hard-mode servers:

1) All good players would move to hard-mode servers.

2) Bad players would start complaining that all the good players moved to hard-mode servers because now there is no one to carry them.

3) Bad players would also move to hard-mode servers to be carried through content by good players.

4) Bad players would start to complain that hard-mode servers are hard.

5) Blizzard would get a headache because of all the entitled bad players crying.

6) Blizzard would nerf hard-mode servers to stop the entitled crying and we would be back to point zero.

[Amariw]

I already said - if the outdoors scales infinitely, you get no functional power gain as you progress. As new patch content comes in, that should be somewhat hard at first until you okay that patch.

I prefer to spend more time on the new things than having stuff I did "back then" take just as much time as new things due to scaling. Under that model, you run out of time, because time does not scale.

Ingame right now I can blast thru an emissary in 5 minutes then go do something else. It certainly wasn't the case in 8.1 where the emissary actually was the reward. The only reason to do it now is the rep stacking for paragon gold.

Don't even start on "scaling up old raids!" ( To be fair I don't think you said this). I'm a mount and mog farmer, it's my primary reason for playing the game, and no, I do not want to assemble a group to farm Nighthold for a 1% drop. That's madness.

I really didnt ask to scale old raids and i respect your mog runs, no worries

But if old patch content reward isnt that important anyway, would it be that bad if it kept at least some challenge? When expac hit it can be made trivial (though i admit, the thought of all the content that's trivial in prior expacs which could have been an engaging activity is sad to me, but at least in past expansions i can accept it).

But if you wanna grind emissaries, and they do actually make you fight and stay awake, nothing majourly threatening but you know, kinda like a 450 char vs 8.3 stuff, would it be that bad?

[Lodreh]

YES! But if you want a challenge... level a new character to max using just quest and then jump in trying to do the World Quest/ last patch dailies.

[Amariw]

Because there are people who play wow to do raids / mythic+ / rated pvp and don't care about "the mighty outdoors" that are usually lame and boring, but of course a vocal sub group cried that wow became a "lobby game", "instance simulator" and whatnot so ofc it had to be ruined for everyone.

Remember the time when you could get your reps done by wearing a tabard in a dungeon and you didn't need outdoor grind? These times are gone.

Remember when you could efficiently level up in a new expansion by spamming dungeons? That's also gone, oh, also you have to do "loremaster" or some other crap to unlock "end game" so don't you dare to hope you can skip dreadful questing.

Remember when the only "weekly cap" you needed came from your main activity like pvp or raiding? Well now let's have AP, AP 2.0, Anima and other bullshit that needs to be grinded by mostly "world quests" or some other shitty activity nobody enjoys.

So it's fine when people make QQ threads about how "they're forced to raid" but it's not OK when people QQ about "being forced to do outdoor chores"?

Blizzard did everything to dilute the meaning of raiding meanwhile pushing mandatory outdoor grinds down everyone's throats, like 8.3 invasions to unlock the visions for mandatory cloak upgrades.

OP here, I'm a raider, i love being able to just do what i want (say just raid log, just arena log, no rental power grinds). I'm not against you.

Im talking about making the outdoors not trivial for those who actually enjoy the outdoors. If you dont, in a decent outdoor design like wotlk (beside hodir giants rep? Been a while), or even late legion, you can raidlog all you want and never bother with other stuff.
But those that love the outdoors can have it be engaging again. Doesn't have to be two opposing perspectives.

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YES! But if you want a challenge... level a new character to max using just quest and then jump in trying to do the World Quest/ last patch dailies.

I did that. It's engaging for a bit, and then you get 440+ gear and do some m+ and its back to square one.
That's too short of a time, if we even assume the world must be made godmode at some point (why though?).
The scaling of gear vs mobs is too much, and that's just talking about 8.3 content. Anything below it and maybe nazjatar elites just dies if you look at it funny.

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If they made enemies that people couldn’t initially kill then you would get a mob of entitled players crying because they feel that buying the game automatically entitles them to completion of content. And scaling sucks.

You had tougher mobs in Thunder and Timeless Isles in Mists of Pandaria. Not everyone adored it like i did but i think it was well recieved. You didnt have to kill them if you didnt want to, just farming frogs or doing the easier areas was lucrative, more so even, then challenging yourself a bit and going to the ordon areas and caves. But you could.

I think the key is to make mobs in general not fall over in one button, but keep the more challenging ones as optional content, not something critical for gear or progression.

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Seriously the only time I remember You actually had to be awake was in look out for Fel Reavers in HFP. Considering that I leveled several characters through WotLK - WoD (or completely from 1-120) without dying, nah...I never thought any time in WoW outdoor content was dangerous. Maaaybe in Classic, but I also was bigger n00b than (with a crappy internet connection)

Who wants to get dismounted at every corner and slaughtered when you pull 2 mobs? I think one of the FF games tried it in a way where you needed to be in a group even to quest and level. No thank you to that.

Classic creates engaging challenges in other ways then pure mob stats. It also had very slow regen for classes compared to today, and much less self healing. Thats not a bad model, but we have classic for that and its prolly too slow for most players. I like classic, but I'm happy wow moved to more fast paced decision based combat rather then constant efficency and regen concerns.

As for everything being trivial in bc onwards, we define trivial different, i think. I'm not saying i was concerned for my life while leveling or doing icc dailies, which is fine, its dailies. Not even during timeless isle most of the time. But i did needed to click buttons, and mobs survived for more then a couple secs. Now i can pull 20, 30 mobs in some zones,maybe more, and just click Cataclysm on dest lock or frozen orb on frost mage and they'll die, doesnt matter how many there are.

Back before legion, mobs weren't hard, but they had enough presence that you couldn't pull endlessly in most zones. Now its only 8.3 and even that, not for long. I miss having fun outside instances.

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All outdoor content needs to be trivial because if it isn't players will ignore it. MoP really is the case study for this. Island of giants had a somewhat challenging world boss and wow players reacted by throwing raid after raid at it until the server broke and he could no longer cast his aoe attack on the realm I played on.

Time lost isles elite mob area was ignored by the lion's share of people except when they cut through it to fight a raid boss.

I didn't ignore those. Loved to solo the giants. It's fine if most ignored them though, if they don't want the hassle, no need to force it. Whats important is that it exists for those who love it.

[cuafpr]

yes i am... as I got gear and power i should be able to destroy mobs that were a pain when leveling. its also why i hate scaling in RPGs

[Wolfrick]

I agree with you 100%, Npcs in the outdoor world should have more defensive, passive and offensice abitlies.

A first step in the right dirrection is the NPcs in darkshore and arathi Highlands, that they get some extra buffs that changes their gameplay, that is very interesting and cool, since it kinda forces us players to use our brain and not fall asleep... while doing outdoor content.

Something they could do is to implement the Island Npc Tecnology in the open world that would make Npcs less predictable and give us more for a true and alive world, where the Npcs would prove more of a challenge.


PS: to you Raiders that just want a brain dead world where they can kill eveything in seconds and just run back to their raids or dungeons, Blizzard should make it so that you dont need to to the outdoorworld... so that everyone can do the content they like and enjoy the most.

PPS: this way, eveyrone can get the content they like and make it all challenging

[Razion]

The old TB mentality that difficulty equals engagement equals fun isn't inherent untouchable doctrine - Timeless Isle was a great area, but just because you aren't falling asleep because you have to move out of fire plume pillars doesn't mean you're having fun (even if you are) and just because you aren't falling asleep in Stonecore because ogres are jumping all over your face doesn't mean it's fun (even if it *really* isn't). Now obviously there's a bit of an obvious difference in situations like Timeless Isle and Stonecore - you can do something about fire plumes by moving out of the way during the wind-up and by comparison Ogres are going to jump at your face whether you like it or not. What we can probably extrapolate from these situations and a game like Dark Souls is that people like being able to get out of the way of things that they can avoid. Unavoidable damage by comparison sucks. Heck, MMOs like Wildstar and Tera were built on these kinds of premises where telegraphed attacks are the bread and butter of the experience and to their credit I'd say they did these things well. You sure as heck can't call games like Wildstar or Tera "not engaging" because of the action combat - but taste is subjective and I doubt everyone would say these games were both inherently more fun than WoW all the time because again being engaged doesn't always make something more fun. It can be more fun, sometimes, but it's not a catch-all solution or ALL games would be made this way and certainly casual games that are easier wouldn't largely speaking be more successful if there was any merit to the idea that challenge always equaled fun.

[Amariw]

Well..I can pull that many mobs as a tank...but I don't have a high enough geared mage or lock to pull off what you are doing. Is nuking 30 mobs at once something you do while levelling? Guess that is mad skillz then and good for you.

Actually one of the really dangerous areas that always make me chuckle for Blizzard implementing it is in Valley of the four Winds, when you need to gather 10 carrots...and the area is just packed with vicious rabbits and crazy patrols

It is fine occasionally....but it is also why I dislike caves. Especially with fast respawns and you just have to clear the same crap on your way back. In fact in my n00bie times....the Barrow Dens while levelling as a NE rogue from 1-20? Worst place ever. Probably killed more people than anything else

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QFT - (though I am sure ppl here will claim that they just annihilate entire zones in one shot with ilv 250 or so) - But really...yeah...hit 120 in quest gear or heirlooms and do any WQ that you just destroy in even ilv 410 gear and notice how impotent your fresh 120 is. I am always glad for the Benthic and Black Empire gear I have lying around to boost my fresh alts.

I dont kill 30s while leveling lawl, im just your average wow guy. Im talking with catchup gear. Past 440, mobs just die in a single rotational aoe cd. Cataclysm for dest locks, a couple secs of frozen orb for mages, too many things to count for unholy dk, fan of knives for rogues, mobs just insta die. 8.3 still maintains some semblance of threat from mobs where you can't pull infinitely and of course horrific visions with masks also do, but that feels far too little. Rewards can be fast and non chore like even with mobs that can't be dozen-pulled.

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The old TB mentality that difficulty equals engagement equals fun isn't inherent untouchable doctrine - Timeless Isle was a great area, but just because you aren't falling asleep because you have to move out of fire plume pillars doesn't mean you're having fun (even if you are) and just because you aren't falling asleep in Stonecore because ogres are jumping all over your face doesn't mean it's fun (even if it *really* isn't). Now obviously there's a bit of an obvious difference in situations like Timeless Isle and Stonecore - you can do something about fire plumes by moving out of the way during the wind-up and by comparison Ogres are going to jump at your face whether you like it or not. What we can probably extrapolate from these situations and a game like Dark Souls is that people like being able to get out of the way of things that they can avoid. Unavoidable damage by comparison sucks. Heck, MMOs like Wildstar and Tera were built on these kinds of premises where telegraphed attacks are the bread and butter of the experience and to their credit I'd say they did these things well. You sure as heck can't call games like Wildstar or Tera "not engaging" because of the action combat - but taste is subjective and I doubt everyone would say these games were both inherently more fun than WoW all the time because again being engaged doesn't always make something more fun. It can be more fun, sometimes, but it's not a catch-all solution or ALL games would be made this way and certainly casual games that are easier wouldn't largely speaking be more successful if there was any merit to the idea that challenge always equaled fun.

Interesting, didn't hear about wildstar. While i agree telegraphed attacks are one decent way to create engagement, (when not overdone), that's not the only way. Just simple mob stats not being trivialized by gear is enough to make you consider if you should pull 3 or more mobs repeatedly. Pulls with caster (not always) are also another way. I was surprised by how much dmg pulls in horrific visions can do when I'm pulling ranged mobs and dont mind them enough.

There's lots of ways, but at the very least stats have to be checked in. Be it some form of scaling so mobs grow weaker but not exponentially so with your gear, or the huge leaps of gear in wow's tiers need to be lessened. (as others have said, we jumped 200 ilvls since dinging 120 and nyalotha, that's crazy).

Im unsure blizz will have the care or the desire to tackle any of this just for some outdoor maniacs like me, but i believe the game can attract more people if it makes them appreciate their time outside raids and arenas as well (without forcing it). Here's hoping blizz might think so too.