How to make Blizzard create more WotLK and Legion like experiences

[Ivarr]

Basically you are asking them to give you ways to actually play the game in full, not just the current patch. Well, we've all been asking for that and for years now, but that feedback seems to fall on deaf ears. REALLY think the only way to go about it now is by, unfortunately, unsubbing.

Yeah exactly. And it might be that Blizzard is holding themselves to too high a standard for them to be willing to commit to this. I don't need entirely unique new world quest content. I'm fine with grinding mobs in these zones I haven't seen for a while. It would be enough if these are the same quests or these grind missions that we once did, but now appearing as world quests.

Blizzard could even just start with including Legion and BfA world quests into the Shadowlands emissary rotation, just to see how it would work with reputation and quest rewards. Make it optional, talk to a NPC to enable / disable this feature. Players shouldn't be forced to do old content if they don't want to.

[Tyrannica]

If people only value raids and it seems the majority of at these forums do, there won't be much difference between expansions and nothing could be improved.

Instanced content and combat design is allready the best in the entire mmo world.

[Jamais]

I still believe people are clouded with nostalgia and yearning for simpler times. In the words of South Park meeeeember?

If Wrath was released today, i think the criticism would be pretty harsh. Back when Wrath was current, WoW was fresh ans a pop cultural phenomenon. Celebrities were staring in the ads. The story was a finale of WC3, which is a game that most people fell in love with Warcraft universe. The game still had a large influx of new players, so you didnt notice people leaving that much.

I am afraid nothing will recreate those memories when we were younger and more carefree.

[TheLucky1]

This is exactly the point of this post. The only way for them to change or innovate is when the sub numbers drop drastically.

They probably do, they've done for a while.
But players still pay for the new expansion every 2 or so years in masses even after a bad expansion like bfa (at least if you believe content creators/streamers.)

Who want's to bet 10.0 will also sell over 3 million copys day one? I'll make it spicy and even go 3.5+

[Ivarr]

I still believe people are clouded with nostalgia and yearning for simpler times. In the words of South Park meeeeember?

Classic is what keeps WoW afloat right now.

[Pheraz]

WoTLK experience? Heaven forbid... expansion with 2 dogshit raids, 1 great one and 1 meh one and nothing new outside in patches besides for the silly 2x4 arena area? At least it did do good on new dungeons, so there's that.

Heck... I don't know what's worse, Naxx reuse or ToTGC a frikkin' 2 room raid with 6 bosses for a tier.

Yeahhhh... nope.

Yeah indeed. No idea why so many people praise wotlk. Horrible horrible expansion except ulduar

[Zantera]

Classic is what keeps WoW afloat right now.

As someone who doesn't care about classic (I played these versions of the game once, accomplished everything I wanted to, no desire to do it again) I still have a huge friendslist of people who did spend a lot of time on Classic at release, now there's maybe 3 who still play it.

I'm curious how many people play it because you can accomplish everything you want to do for the reset in one night.

[Tyrannica]

If anything, your title should swap WotLK for TBC. WotLK was an expansion solely focused on raiding, this time for everyone.

Not a surprise, Ion joined during Wotlk to design raids.

TBC was the first and most innovative exansion, up to date. After it, we got the same ol same instanced content sometimes better sometimes worse,but without fresh innovations that mean something.

They tried some stuff, but it failed, tried to create a sandbox style wpvp content with 1k winter in wotlk allready before it was instanced. Remember the inceased stacks a player got when outnumbered in 1K winter? They tried hard to balance that too lol

Later in WoD devs tried the same with ashran, failed, and made it instanced with ques again.

I wonder if the people in charge of the direction of wow design, like Ion ever played other mmos like new world(sandbox wpvp) or ff14(professions). In just a few hours they would know what to improve to make their game mor fun for a wider audience.

Saving grace for legion was their focus on class design, that was the right direction to go with a rpg and did remind me of BG2: Shadows of Amn when classes got their own place, house or guild just for them. I just do think this should be the standard not an exclusive expansion content.

Instead on expanding on class focused design like legion, the devs of wow focused on their stupid browser game - why is this there in any expansion? Its just waisting mouse clicks and gives no results or ingame expierence of value.

In any case and in short: Push non-instanced stuff and focus on class design remove speczialization and rename it to promotion classes when read a mage has 3 specs that does not sound rpg like at all...the cultpring again could be BG2 or any other good D&D class design of old or Might and Magic 7. Put more rpg into this game and make it feel alive. Focus on wpvp - there are not many mmos out there with a good combat design for that. Stop pushing esports, there are better pvp games suited for this.

[Gaidax]

Yeah indeed. No idea why so many people praise wotlk. Horrible horrible expansion except ulduar

Yeah, the whole thing was carried on bones of W3...

And then they even managed to bloody timegate the raid, like every time I see people bash timegating in one breath and praise WoTLK in another, I literally choke and spit my coffee at the monitor. WoTLK... the expansion where bloody ICC itself was timegated. Thought it's nothing new, after all Sunwell had it too the raid and the area.

People here rock some serious "Historical Perspective Shifters".

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I enjoy the suggestions but only one thing will get Blizzard to make expansions like this again. Money. Right now it's way to profitable to shit out lame expansions and then lock people into 6 month subs with the lure of a very slight monthly price reduction and the mounts that come with it. As long as a sufficient number of players ride along with that they have zero reason to change. I mean you are seeing the results of that business model working. Profits up. MAUs stable.

What is thier motivation to change honestly? They have enough whales to keep the ship a float and highly profitable. They know millions of people will zombie buy the box every 2 years on expansion release and at the very least give them 1 or 2 months of sub time/money to give them that quarterly bump they needed. Even if all they do is bitch and moan about it.

What's even the point for them to try? It's like asking Taco Bell to increase the quality of its beef. Why? It makes billions, it's cheap, and people buy it anyway..

[Krakan]

I think they need to get out of their own way. If they stopped making system ontop of system to try and force players into content they dont enjoy I think players would engage with the game more.

[Deferionus]

Player

Houses

and

guild

free to build on land for guilds

Player housing and guild housing are two things that can give an immense amount of content. Just doing this gives a ton of replay value:

Change time walking to be a monthly rotating event. Vanilla >BC > Wrath > Cata > MoP > WoD > Legion > BFA. Make a "time walking" difficulty for each raid that is tuned to the end game. Have each raid and dungeon have drops that you can put inside of your home to customize it. In future expansions don't increase the max level, have horizontal leveling instead so you do not have to go back and constantly rework the time walking content. Horizontal leveling probably means you have unique abilities that only work in that expansion's content area. You do not remove these for the next expansion, they remain permanently unique to that area.

By doing this you have rotating raiding of old content that gives players something to do outside of the current expac raids. Also add housing 'drops' from PvP avenues, pet battles, achievements, etc for players with solo play styles. Ensure there are tons of content to do outside of the house so you don't spend forever in them. Make it so players can also randomly visit other people's homes . Houses should be inspired by FF14 and attached to capital cities.

[Capultro]

they can do it easy.just bringing hero classes and epic adventures....warden,gladiators,knights...there are a lot of ways,but bfa or shadiwlands,is lose time and money.empty...

[Doffen]

Not a surprise, Ion joined during Wotlk to design raids.

TBC was the first and most innovative exansion, up to date. After it, we got the same ol same instanced content sometimes better sometimes worse,but without fresh innovations that mean something.


Instead on expanding on class focused design like legion, the devs of wow focused on their stupid browser game - why is this there in any expansion? Its just waisting mouse clicks and gives no results or ingame expierence of value.

Yeah, TBC was way more innovative than WotLK. It brought in a new daily quest system, more innovative repgrinds, Arena etc. It felt way more fresh than WotLK ever did.

I can see why WotLK was such a popular expansion, but if they gave us a WotLK expansion today that would be another story. The casual crowd wouldnt be pleased. Arthas(lets put some emphasis on that)some ability and rotation improvements(as in more evolved, I am sure someone would say it got worse), the zones were more detailed, though we can add that to tech improvement, and that was really it. And the vehicle combat

Agree on the class design/hall part of Legion. To me thats what made Legion special to me. A clear highlight for me personally.

On that note, give us class tier sets already.

[DarkAmbient]

You can't make them do anything like that. Blizzard will never make another Wrath because they already made it and will make serious bank when Wrath Classic is released.

[cozzri]

I feel like the kind of player who has the mentality of "Hey if I do the dungeons once and clear the raid on LFR in the last week, that means I've played the game" either plays the game the wrong way or I'm the odd one out.

To me the point/fun of the game is the weekly raids with guildies, overcoming those bosses together. Doing keys together every week. The 65th time you're running a dungeon isn't any more boring than the 2nd time when you do it with friends and you're cracking jokes over discord and doing it together.

If you play other games whether it's CSGO, Battlefield or League of Legends or whatever it may be, do you also go into that with the mindset "i'll do a game or two in a year - that means i've done the content"?

I use to play all content in WoW excessively like you describe; non-stop dungeon runs, raid progression, pushing arena, etc.. It was fun when I did it, but over time, it loses its appeal. Having so many difficulty levels is tiresome, what use to be progressing 1 raid, turned into progression the same raid 3x on different difficulty levels, the numbers are even more punishing for mythic dungeons. That combined with the infinite power grind systems just puts into light how much of a waste of time it has become, especially knowing that you're progress will be nullified when the next patch or expansion drops. Not having a tangible character end-goal just feeds into the addiction of trying to become the strongest you can:

The stick is too long and the carrot is rotten by the time you get it

So what do you do when you reach this point? You create your own end-goals, because the ones put in place by the developers are literally impossible to achieve. I play 1 month at launch; 1 month before the next expansion to bomb through all the content. No grind, No running head first into the wall on raid bosses, no grinds.
The content just isn't worth being subscribed to for long periods anymore; BIS is a pipedream. Take the time to instead, connect with your friends to experience new games, get connected on discord, etc.. Breaking out of that endless pit of a grind cycle WoW has become will be the best thing you can do for yourself and for the game, they built the reward structure like this for addicts. Go try some new games, have fun, get your friends and family involved. There so much better shit to do with your time than to farm the same raid on 1 higher difficulty for +10ilvl, and then do it on the next higher for another +10; give me a break... This is why classic/tbc has so much appeal, you can actually finish a character then...

[Tojara]

Legion, maybe, but WoTLK, hard pass.

I think WoTLK is probably the most overrated expansion to look back upon and was carried solely by the narrative that a lot of people wanted to see. Without the continuation of the story from WC3:TFT, I doubt it would have had any draw if you took that moment in time and flipped it with a future WoW expansion.

WoTLK didn't really innovate at all, with it's big feature being the group finder at the end, a new class and maybe Wintergrasp? If you want to talk about innovative expansions you start with TBC. TBC introduced arena, daily quest areas (not my cup of tea) and basically flipped how classes in WoW were approached entirely on their head. WoTLK didn't do anything special. This isn't me saying that you should hate WoTLK (although to me, it's easily one of the worst expansion, both at the time and retrospectively for different reasons), it's just that it didn't really revolutionize WoW.

What Blizzard needs is to actually innovate. In my opinion there's only been two big eras for the game as far as innovation goes and that's arena with TBC and Mythic plus. Mythic plus can either be given to MoP as a innovation, or it could be given to Legion, I think either is fair, but they both fundamentally change how the game is played and I think there's enough people who enjoy both of these "innovations" to classify them as really good additions to the game.

Sure there have been minor things added to the game, but I wouldn't really count an ever shifting raid size change, loot philosophy or expansion features as things you really want to bring up. I don't think we need things like island expeditions, scenarios, garrisons, visions, and things like torghast going forward. However, that's kind of the rub. The systems they add to game aren't necessarily bad within the context of the expansion, it's just something that doesn't have enough depth to go forward into the next, and we're also still kind of waiting for the next 'big' thing.

I didn't mind Garrisons in WoD and I distinctly remember people being pretty okay with them for the first couple months. The big issue with them though is barely anything was taken from that massive amount of resources dumped into creating them, and all we were left with was a mission table that has been carried forth since WoD. To me they just spend way too much time developing features that either get dropped completely, or get rehashed and made slightly better/different with each expansion (Argus invasions > Island Expeditions > Torghast is a natural progression).

Whether you like PvP or not, the core systems of arena, dungeons and raids are still pretty good. WoW just hasn't innovated at all, and despite M+ being a good system, this is the third or fifth expansion (depending on whether you count it as a MoP or Legion system) of the last big mainstay feature of WoW being added.

Instanced things in WoW have and always have been good. I'd argue nothing comes remotely close to them. If you're the type of person who enjoys this type of content, I can't see how the game is even remotely bad for you. The problem is everything else. Professions are awful, the world is awful and Blizzard hasn't innovated any big major features for a very long time. I don't necessarily know how to fix it (and I doubt anybody has the perfect idea), but they have a fucking massive world that's barely used and everything gets invalidated every 6 months. Expansion resets are absolutely fine, but we've been operating on a system where .1 patch invalidates the one prior.

[exsanguinate]

the 2 worst expansions?wotlk that started the insane casualisation of the game and legion that started the modern system bloat trend?

id rather play wod classic for all eternity

ye this so much. I don't understand why people who want back the old wow experience pray so much for wotlk and legion. wotlk was the beginning and the decline of wow with the casualisation and pleasing the player. it was still not a bad addon and better than everything we got so far.

[Villager720]

I'm over here just like : Wait. Wrath was fresh?
Besides DKs, what new gameplay did Wrath add? Achievements? It even reused an old raid for it's first tier.

[Powerogue]

Looking back, I don't want another WotLK-like expansion. Namely the extremely grindy dailies that kept me mostly to one zone I didn't like (Icecrown) and the raid that was just two rooms. (edit: and the entirely reused Naxx) If I'd model a new expansion on anything it'd be Legion, but I can see how tryhards pushing mythic raiding as early as possible got burnt out of the artifact power grind. I'm not sure how they could do that better while retaining that all-important sense of slowly empowering your character to take on bigger challenges. I definitely want them to bring back solo challenges rewarding immediately recognizable, not farmable after the expansion cosmetics like the mage tower.

The difficult thing is I'm all but certain Legion managed what it did as far as content due to them cutting WOD short and leaving it half-finished. I want a super-expansion, but I also don't want to wait for it or have it impact the existing content negatively in any way, which is a real "have my cake and eat it too" problem.