I think SL is a good expansion and gives a proper balance between working for your gear, and not being forced to grind something day in and out.
My only grief would be that M+ ilvl drops are kinda low regarding their difficulty and compared to heroic raiding, which you can basically PUG. And then you kinda hit a ceiling, that you can only breach by waiting for a week to upgrade your item once through the vault if you're lucky to get what you need.
Of course you could always try mythic raiding but even there you're out of luck if the item you need doesn't drop there. Like proper crit & haste hands for frost mages.
If they could raise +15 drops to 213 at least, that would be plenty enough to fix basically all problems I have with this expansion.
I don't care if a system is simple or complex. I don't care if there's 1, 2 or 17 systems. I don't care about whether the systems we have are built upon or replaced with every other patch.
All I care about is whether or not the systems are fun. Covenants/Soulbinds/Conduits aren't fun. The Maw isn't fun. Legendaries are laughably unfun. Valor farming isn't fun. At this point, m+ is no longer fun. Even raiding isn't really fun anymore considering how much you have to put into it if you wanna be done with it within less than 4 months. The game is simply less fun than it was a couple of years ago. Not because it's more or less complex, not because it's more or less intricate, not because there's more or fewer systems, solely due to the systems we're having being awfully uninspired, boring, stupidly unbalanced, stupidly unflexible, stupidly gated and simply not fun.
A simple single extra talent row per spec in MoP was more fun than like 90% of the most recent systems we got. Can't wait for 9.1 to give us... another oneshot Torghast power that makes our autohits hit for 30000% more damage. Or the new zone being a random timegated worldquest rep grind. Or the new soulbinds/conduits/legs/whatever there's gonna be all to be nothing but *your attacks have a chance to deal 500 extra damage and increase your vers by 200*. Can't wait.
I don't believe it's a matter of whether or not the systems in a new xpac are complex or simple. The common denominator of the systems in Legion, BFA and Shadowlands is they are all xpac long term synchs. Blizzard designs new xpacs for WOW largely, but not solely based on time synchs. The longer a player is playing WOW, the happier Blizzard is because there's more of a chance they'll purchase a microtransx, continue to pay a sub and it looks better on their quarterly metrics.
You forgot having to be attuned to all of those though (and not just you, everybody in the raid group had to be attuned)... you couldn't even get into a heroic dungeon until you got the keys from the Quartermasters for being revered or exalted (can't remember which). So while it was all there it was rep-gated/timegated. Loot drops were also insanely smaller and raids were either 10(normal) or 25(heroic)... there was no flex. Add all that up together and flying being locked behind max level and you get content that lasts "forever". Look how people cry behind the current "time-gates", could imagine the uproar if they brought back attunements....
I think a new class would be enough of a draw if they said they were going maximum with zones / dungeons / raids. 2 raids at launch, 15 dungeons, 8 leveling zones + 2 endgame zones (one is story-heavy ala nighthold, the other is Maw + Argus + Nazjatar).
PvP gear was not handled smartly. It should have been modeled after WoD’s dynamic scaling system. There only needs to be 2 tiers of gear: honor and conquest. They added 4 tiers of rating-locked gear on top of the base conquest gear and the inflation got extremely out of control.
there's no problem, in legion was okay, we are suppose to be OP and its look like the wow ending with big vilan (Sargeras)
but now, for some reason, they think that after Legion, everything needs to be huge, while I think bfa should have been a much simpler expansion, where we would be weaker after sacrificing so much
and things like war faction, would only work if it was well worked out and had a lot of development time, trying to start and finish one in the same expansion seems very arrogant, 2 years is very little time,
Since they do not want to work faction war, giving the deserved time could at least, leave only for the pvp
In SL they let loot be loot, you'll have to wait til next expansion to let classes be classes.
there was no normal and heroic, it was like vanilla with a single raid size that changed from raid to raid. Then came Wotlk with 10/25 normal and 10/25 heroic. 10 was less forgiving then 25.
edit : actually, i think 10/25 normal and 10/25heroic came with icc, as I cleary remember ulduar having "hard mode" and not heroic.
Last edited by jsrfuture; 2021-04-11 at 04:18 AM.
This one and done way have been Blizzard's MO since Vanilla. I wonder if their developers are capable of creating content that spans expansion after expansion at his point. One reason we do not have housing and may never will. The Blizzard development team may not have the ability to pull it off.
Sure. I can give you a source,
Load up WOW and in the bottom left of the character screen click "menu" and then select "credits". You will see how many specialists they have for every area of the game. Even the artists all have specific areas of the game they are assigned to. Some specifically work on dungeons, others environments, others props. They have seperate individuals f0r sound, animation, seperate game engineers, seperate game engine engineers, systems engineers. There are people who specifically work on dungeon / raid boss encounters (Ion used to be lead encounter designer back in the day).
The list goes on and on.
Omar Gonzalez who recently left Blizzard, one of the senior software engineers that worked on the early prototype of Classic WoW, had no role in deciding where the story was going or how much anima a world quest should give...
Christie Golden didn't help programme the graphics or design the sound for The Maw.
Ion wasn't doing concept art for Vulpera ahead of BFA.
They are all completely different jobs.
I guess that someone like Ion, as game director, has some oversight of many different areas of the game but most others work exclusively on specific and very niche parts of the game.
Last edited by Paulosio; 2021-04-11 at 05:43 AM.
Totally agree, this looked good on paper, but noone realized how gear scaling was going to play out. There's also a weird thing happening with rating deflation where 1800 in 2s is like 2200 or something in BFA. So I think it's just complicated and for whatever reason Blizz can't seem to (or won't) fix it.