Will the 9th expansion finally be fresh and not Legon 3.0?

[Soon-TM]

if only bfa and shadowlands were legion-like. classes played never better during legion. it was a steady improvement from expansion to expansion, peaking in legion, and then being shit again during bfa and shadowlands

Classes played smoothly in Legion because 1/3 of your skills (including cool passives) were tied to the Artifacts. Once they were removed, they left a gaping hole in most classes/specs' rotations, which was one of the main complaints about BfA gameplay-wise. And while this "unpruning" of SL is a step in the right way, there is still a long way to go until classes play as fluidly as in MoP or even WotLK.

[VinceVega]

For #1, this has been a "problem" with dungeons since TBC in them being linear hallways. It's not really a Shadowlands thing.

Ironically, Legion (Return to Karazhan), BFA (Mechagon), and now Shadowlands (broker dungeon) are the only expansions to introduce a really large scale dungeon.

I do prefer daily hub building/rep style than WQ. I'd prefer both.

True. Dungeons have been quite linear for a long time. Or basically always. Large scale is ok but does not have to be. I would like dungeons like BRD or Mauradon. Huge. But you don't have to do everything. Or even can do everything in one run.

And WQ and hubs would both be fine together also agreed^^

[Fullmetal89]

Borrowed powers is Pandora's Box. You know what they say about her box.

[rhorle]

Borrowed powers is Pandora's Box. You know what they say about her box.

It is a scape goat for people to use? We have always had borrowed power. Gear, Stat weights, etc have always changed with the new expansion. Everything is borrowed.

[huth]

This is what I don’t get: People arguing “you don’t have to do the bad content/systems” like that fixes the problem. If two thirds of the game is bad optional content, that’s really terrible design. I don’t want to raid log, or run 500 M+ a week, or just do arena. That’s boring to me. I want to play an MMO.

Well, WoW is without a doubt an MMO, with thousands of players sharing a single persistent realm. So what you actually want must be something different.

[Soon-TM]

It is a scape goat for people to use? We have always had borrowed power. Gear, Stat weights, etc have always changed with the new expansion. Everything is borrowed.

Gear doesn't magically go away when a new xpac comes out, but e.g. most active skills from the Legion artifacts did. So no, gear isn't borrowed power, unless you want to get really facetious.

[rhorle]

Gear doesn't magically go away when a new xpac comes out, but e.g. most active skills from the Legion artifacts did. So no, gear isn't borrowed power, unless you want to get really facetious.

It's power does though. WotLK was really the last expansion where gear stayed around. Because sunwell gear was used to clear Nax. Since then Blizzard makes sure the power of gear resets at some point. Which is why Legion legendaries turned off at level 115 in BfA. There has always been borrowed power. It has only because an issue now because people look for that buzzword scapegoat to pin their issues on.

[Soon-TM]

It's power does though. WotLK was really the last expansion where gear stayed around. Because sunwell gear was used to clear Nax. Since then Blizzard makes sure the power of gear resets at some point. Which is why Legion legendaries turned off at level 115 in BfA. There has always been borrowed power. It has only because an issue now because people look for that buzzword scapegoat to pin their issues on.

Still that doesn’t change the fact that gear doesn't go away, unlike Artifacts/Azerite armour (at least in SL). Whether it suffices to clear the next xpac raid or not is entirely irrelevant.

[rhorle]

Still that doesn’t change the fact that gear doesn't go away, unlike Artifacts/Azerite armour (at least in SL). Whether it suffices to clear the next xpac raid or not is entirely irrelevant.

It's power does. Which is the same thing as you are talking about because the power the gear provides is the important part. Of course if its power continues into the next expansion is relevant or not. We are talking about borrowed power duh. If the power doesn't continue then it was borrowed for that expansion was it not? That is the problem with the argument you and others make when talking about borrowed power. You apply arbitrary rules for what power qualifies as borrowed just to ignore that power always resets with the expansion.

It also overlooks how trinkets, tier sets, and other "special effect" items wouldn't carry on to the next expansion. Or when they had a niche use Blizzard would disable those effects. Just like Blizzard has baked in both Artifact and Azerite powers into class abilities to carry some forward. It has always been borrowed unless Blizzard decides to carry it forward in some fashion.

[Soon-TM]

It's power does. Which is the same thing as you are talking about because the power the gear provides is the important part. Of course if its power continues into the next expansion is relevant or not. We are talking about borrowed power duh. If the power doesn't continue then it was borrowed for that expansion was it not? That is the problem with the argument you and others make when talking about borrowed power. You apply arbitrary rules for what power qualifies as borrowed just to ignore that power always resets with the expansion.

It also overlooks how trinkets, tier sets, and other "special effect" items wouldn't carry on to the next expansion. Or when they had a niche use Blizzard would disable those effects. Just like Blizzard has baked in both Artifact and Azerite powers into class abilities to carry some forward. It has always been borrowed unless Blizzard decides to carry it forward in some fashion.

I mean... It's expected that e.g. a lvl 60 piece of gear isn't going to be as powerful as a lvl 70 one, that goes without saying, that's called character progression. Now, my mage didn't lose the ability to cast Blizzard going from e.g. BC into WotLK, but he did lose Mark of Aluneth and a bunch of cool passives going from Legion into BfA. And no, in most cases Blizzard didn't bake anything in going forward, and in the few cases they did, they removed something that existed already so the net result was still a loss. Only now with SL they are taking baby steps to revert it, it remains to be seen what will come out of it.

[rhorle]

I mean... It's expected that e.g. a lvl 60 piece of gear isn't going to be as powerful as a lvl 70 one, that goes without saying, that's called character progression. Now, my mage didn't lose the ability to cast Blizzard going from e.g. BC into WotLK, but he did lose Mark of Aluneth and a bunch of cool passives going from Legion into BfA. And no, in most cases Blizzard didn't bake anything in going forward, and in the few cases they did, they removed something that existed already so the net result was still a loss. Only now with SL they are taking baby steps to revert it, it remains to be seen what will come out of it.

But your mage lost his tier set bonuses, his trinkets, etc. There is no difference between "gear progression" and "borrowed power". It is a arbitrary line to define one was acceptable and one as unacceptable. Progression is simply borrowed power for that expansion. We expect it to reset because that is the cycle that WoW has created. As WoW moves into different forms of character power why to shouldn't it reset just like gear?

Every class has had something made baseline. That is not a few cases. It doesn't matter what the net result is because Blizzard always adds or removes stuff from classes with new expansions. Some classes only get a few ability or talent tweaks and others get a complete overhaul. Power, and anything, has always been contained on a per expansion basis. That is why Blizzard has said numerous times that they don't like to do major changes to classes mid-expansion and that somethings have to wait for a new expansion.

[bryroo]

Its about as likely as the threads on mmo champ being fresh and creative

[Doffen]

I mean its only 1% of the player base if you completed the instance... if you only did a few bosses you fall in a much wider population. The fact that no one apparently cared or checked leads me to believe you don't really speak for the more competitive side of the game.

Nah dude, I didin't finish uldir but completed BoD and nyalotha. We were about 700-1000. I simply knew the math. There are way too many low skilled tryhards that instead of trying to master their class thinks, farm irrelevant 0.3% upgrades for hours is "the play". Was in 3 guilds, nobody gave a single flying fuck as long as you weren't considerably lower than others - and that cannot happen if you got the skill.

Don't believe a second what Kaminaris is telling you. He is notoriously claiming raiding at top levels of mythic, while getting CE's a week before they remove it for more than half the raids the last 2 expansions. He is a guild jumper who most likely get in as a social then even get to buy(got proof) or get a last spot just before they remove Cutting Edge for each raid up to Nya'lotha.

For nya'lotha(the easiest mythic end boss in the game) "his" mythic guild couldn't kill Nzoth. So what he did? He jumped ship, joined another that had it on farm. He got his first kill in June 2020, 2 months after they killed it. When did he join them? 1 day after they killed Nzoth the first time. Just an example of what he is lying about.

You know what he doesn't like with SL? He can't farm himself to power. It's so limited, thus his performance is tied to skill this time around, and not deemed worthy. He got no mythic kills in CN.

[rhorle]

It's being forced to play when you don't want to. That's the issue.

You are not forced to play though. Other then the specific renown levels there is nothing you are required to have. It is all optional so it is exactly the same as your previous examples of simply raid logging. The difference between now and then is you for some reason care about all the extras you can earn now versus the extras you did not care about back then.

[panasc]

What's Blizzard's sick form of torture of being so anti getting around the game world quickly?

- Shadowlands flight paths are the worst, always needing to fly to Oribos to get to another SL zone. Really Blizz, you think that's fun and cool?

- And easy on the load screens already. Holy cow it's load screen city in this game lately. And I have a fast gaming rig with 64GB DDR4 with a solid state drive and newest Intel CPU. And I'm sick of the load screens just kills the immersion MMO factor.

- No flight whistle? And why is that?

- Most classes have some form of quick fast walking or floating or whatnot on a cool down. But it's a sick joke, like DK's get Wraith Walk move fast for what several seconds, then wait on the long cool down. It's like Blizzard lives to tease us, ok you can move quickly, but only for a very short time, then back to crawling slow movement.

- The Maw. Who at Blizz thought a whole zone with virtually no mounting wouid be fun? Yeah you can grab that one mount in there, but still. It's basically no riding in The Maw just slow walking. How is that fun?

- Legacy old content, let us frigging mount up in old Raids abd Dungeons, or at least make the cool downs much shorter or last longer for our classes Wraith Walk type spells.

100% this

Although there are some things i like too.
Thanks

[rhorle]

At this point, I haven't played in several months. Doing 20+ renown quests to get back to current level sounds like a grind to me.

You don't need to keep up on renown though. You only need to get enough to unlock all of your soul bind. And even then that isn't much of a requirement if you are not a Hall of Fame level raider. It will help boost you and your raids performance but the content wasn't designed with needing it to clear it. It is perfectly fine to not like that content or like the current game.

But lets not pretend that the player is forced to do anything with the way the system is set up in Shadowlands. It is on the same level as "pre-raid" activities in previous expansions that players were encouraged to do in order to maximize performance. The story quests only provide you with 9 renown. You'll be behind on Renown if you avoid them and only use the catch up mechanics for the content you prefer to do. But it doesn't mean much in the end since it is nothing like Azerite or Artifact power.

[Accendor]

Very good point.

Don't see how people can't admit Legion was a shot in the arm and had tons of great content after the boring WoD expansion. To me it was so full of stuff to do, never bored whatsoever.

BfA I didn't like at first, and was eagerly awaiting the next expansion after BfA, but now in hindsight I don't think BfA was so bad and looking back it was pretty good.

Azerite gear was sort of cool, and with a few tweaks should've stayed in Shadowlands.

Class Halls from Legion should've come back.

Just to be clear, at least for me, BfA was the worst expansion ever made. Mainly because of the story and everything about 8.3, but also because of massively missing quality control throughout the whole expansion. Starting from day 1 it was clear that they decided to take a new direction with the game and abandoned the philosophy of the "Blizzard Polish". I am not talking about design decisions like azerite armor, but just pure technical bugs, many of them even gamebreaking, that went unfixed for months.

I do not like SL very much, but compared to BfA its still the better expansion overall.
... Except for the features they took over from BfA (like M+, WQs and AP), because all of that got worse in SL compared to BfA, but it already got worse going from Legion to BfA.
It just feels like they look at stuff people enjoy and get the completely wrong conclusions about why people enjoy it.

[rhorle]

And you didn't need neck levels in BfA. And you didn't need AP levels in Legion. You only needed enough to unlock your Azerite powers/all the traits on your weapon. Beyond that you certainly didn't need any levels - It was just stamina, the same way Renown currently is. See how this works?

Beyond that is the key words. There is no ever increasing Stamina with Renown. There is no ever increasing "final" rank with Renown yet. Renown is only like Azerite and Artifact power in minor ways. You don't need to get back to current levels if you are not interested in any of the cosmetics. You didn't need to keep on on Azerite and Artifact either which is never something I disputed.

You are the one that keeps trying equate things to Shadowlands that do not exist. You said you do not care about the extra's so there is little that you are required to do outside of raid logging in Shadowlands. You don't need Anima. Renown currently past the point that is require for character power. And that level varies based on which Soulbind is best for your spec.

[Simple Rick]

Don't believe a second what Kaminaris is telling you. He is notoriously claiming raiding at top levels of mythic, while getting CE's a week before they remove it for more than half the raids the last 2 expansions. He is a guild jumper who most likely get in as a social then even get to buy(got proof) or get a last spot just before they remove Cutting Edge for each raid up to Nya'lotha.

For nya'lotha(the easiest mythic end boss in the game) "his" mythic guild couldn't kill Nzoth. So what he did? He jumped ship, joined another that had it on farm. He got his first kill in June 2020, 2 months after they killed it. When did he join them? 1 day after they killed Nzoth the first time. Just an example of what he is lying about.

You know what he doesn't like with SL? He can't farm himself to power. It's so limited, thus his performance is tied to skill this time around, and not deemed worthy. He got no mythic kills in CN.

I mean its rather questionable given the way he responds to the situation...

I am not overly invested in if he does or doesn't I would just like a WoD level of grinding needed to "complete" a toon myself. If SL launched with all relics being 226 ilv by default and the leggo only needing one full clear of torghast i would be sitting happy.

As it stands I just don't care for the busy work and thinking about doing it twice has kept me from rolling an alt.

[Argorwal]

I do not care about the extras.

When I last played, Renown did not magically keep up with you, for every renown level you had to do a story quest, and that story quest took time. (Ignoring that I have no desire to play through the shit story they keep dredging out in front of us.) If they've changed that since I last played, good for them, but considering I'm not even raid logging in Shadowlands, I have no desire to even log in every week to get my Renown level. And considering Renown levels have the exact same benefit as AP levels did in Legion, I struggle to understand how one can say one is different than the other - It's minor stamina gains for every level of Renown, the same way it was minor stamina gains for every level of AP past max.

At this point, I haven't played in several months. Doing 20+ renown quests to get back to current level sounds like a grind to me. That would be forcing me to play when I don't want to, in order to get to the stuff I DO want to. Hence why I choose not to.

Renown actually does magically keep you within 2 of the current max. You get them from doing anything at all as a catchup.

And after unlocking the last conduit slot (renown 31ish?) the rest are cosmetic.

So yeah...not really needed to grind at all.

And you’ll accidentally complete the 1000 anima quest every other week just raid logging from boss AP.