What does a casual wow look like?

[Venziir]

To me it's more or less dungeons and raids that feed into one another without any alternative power system beyond gear.

How about you though?
I hear wow needs to be more casual constantly how does that look like from your perspective?

Super-duper-omega casual here, as in I only have like an 1-2 hours every few days to play. My play schedule would either be some ZM dailies/wqs, maybe some TW dungeons to get gear or level an alt a bit. Maybe do some transmog farming if I want to, but that's about it. Did manage to do an LFR wing at one point.

EDIT: Oh bugger! Misread your question... Yeah answer to your question, something like MoP or Legion I'd say, those were delightful in terms of casualness.

[saixilein]

- Longer/Harder Quests, like the Class Quests back then you have to do for get your Druidforms, your Shamantotems or your Warrior Stances. I mean, yeah, they where kinda annoying, cause you have to WALK through big half of the World, dont have flying points and get killed by high level Mobs, but in the end it was fun, it felt rewarding and RPG like. Or when i think back to Redridge Mountains, where you entering the Orc Castle in the end. Many strong mobs, dieing multiple times, but it was fun. But today its just run/fly from questmarket to questmarker, pull some mobs, cleave them, loot them, done. Its boring.

- Longer/Complex Dungeons, like rockrock spire, mauradon etc. Something where you can be very lost. On one hand its annoying, on the other it was fun to find the right way, explore the dungeon etc. Tazavesh was a good dungeon aswell, could have been a bit more complex.

- More Focus on Professions

- Give us Vendors that actually sell usefull Gear/Items. I Really like it back then to have enough silver/gold to buy a a new weapon from some stormwind NPC and doing more DMG.

- Put more focus on exploring the world again, more group quests to take down some "hard" hitting bosses. Was kinda to fun to group up with people to take down Hogger back then.

- Grind Rep/Actuall System should give just a SMALL amount of power, so i dont feel without that im useless.

- Making legendarys legendary again, so just some will have one.

- More Class/Spec only Content

- Pulling 10 mobs at once and burst them down while you questing shoulndt be the way to go. its fast/comfortable, but it doesnt feel really RPG like.

- For Casual/RPG Like Feel i miss the old Talenttrees. Many of the "everyone is picking up this talents anyway so you get it as a passive"-talents were fun to skill, while you was leveling. It felt rewarding. "Fck yeah, finally i dont lose that much rage when im switching stances!". "Fck Yeah, finally my Shout doesnt costs any rage at all!"

- And Gear shouldnt be that important. Ofc better items should make you stronger, but not on the level it is today.

[WowIsDead64]

To me it's more or less dungeons and raids that feed into one another without any alternative power system beyond gear.

How about you though?
I hear wow needs to be more casual constantly how does that look like from your perspective?

Just 3 letters: WOD. Good quality of leveling. Endgame isn't gated behind leveling, so you don't have to rush to it - Garrisons are available after short into. Minimal FOMO - log in for 10 minutes twice a day to restart missions, optional dailies in Tanaan - from just 1 daily quest to 3 dailies + completing all zones. Grinding other stuff is optional. Smooth progression path: leveling -> Garrison level 3 -> Shipyard -> Tanaan -> Full Baleful via playing for 1 hour a day -> Completing Garrison leveling, while having time to level next alt. Heaven for altoholics. Mandatory stuff isn't that big deal, so it allows playing on alts. Everything being soloable. World of Queuecraft - is one of the biggest anti-casual things. And at the end - at least WOD had clear casual endgame goal. Endgame goal - is answer to question "Why do I level this alt?".

[Shakzor]

Past, present and future WoW will be casual WoW.
It was never hardcore and casual =/= bad.
Even if someone raids mythic, if they don't dedicate their life to it to compete with the top 0.1% for world firsts, it's still casual raiding when doing so 2-3 times a week
Being good doesn't mean you don't play casual. Some struggle with normal, others manage mythic just fine.
In its very core design, the game was made to be THE casual MMO and that never changed

[Progenitor Aquarius]

I am usually fishing, exploring stuff, gathering pets and toys, role playing, trying out variety of feasts and drinks. From time to time I do dungeons and even get into raid. Pretty fun and relaxing.

[Aydinx2]

To me it's more or less dungeons and raids that feed into one another without any alternative power system beyond gear.

How about you though?
I hear wow needs to be more casual constantly how does that look like from your perspective?

It already is casual. The only content you need a non-casual group for are Heroic raids, and those are only needed to gear for Mythic raids which is even less casual.

[Djuntas]

OP, its already exsisting...TBCC. You do your rep grinds for 5 mans, and voila...Done. Never anything else. Once you grinded your done. Attune quest for raids is also easy enough. Raids are doable/easy tuned as well. Its perfect for casuals. And I love it.

All I do in TBCC now a days is a bit of AH playing for gold maybe, and then log into raid to collect BIS items. I dont do anything else but play to gear really.

[arkanon]

People keep talking about "less competitive content" but seem to fail to understand that competitiveness comes from the players. Almost every activity humans have ever enjoyed has a competitive side.

- - - Updated - - -

It already is casual. The only content you need a non-casual group for are Heroic raids, and those are only needed to gear for Mythic raids which is even less casual.

Heroic is cleared by many pugs within days of releasing. It's really only mythic. Many groups CHOOSE to take it more seriously and have a committed group for heroic as well, so I'm not saying you are wrong, but again, many do extremely casual heroic raids.

[HansOlo]

To me it's more or less dungeons and raids that feed into one another without any alternative power system beyond gear.

How about you though?
I hear wow needs to be more casual constantly how does that look like from your perspective?

Nobody have gear. No systems. We are all naked and riding horses.

And housing - plenty of it. I want to go Minecraft style.

- - - Updated - - -

Past, present and future WoW will be casual WoW.
It was never hardcore and casual =/= bad.
Even if someone raids mythic, if they don't dedicate their life to it to compete with the top 0.1% for world firsts, it's still casual raiding when doing so 2-3 times a week
Being good doesn't mean you don't play casual. Some struggle with normal, others manage mythic just fine.
In its very core design, the game was made to be THE casual MMO and that never changed

That's BS.

You are not competetive because you are in Mythic world race.

Right now 5% of the playerbase cleared the jailer on Heroic. Is this not competing?

Competition is based on players - not on the game. We can just pull of a competetive tmog tournament if you feel like it.

[Zantera]

I would say Wotlk for me was peak casual wow when you barely had to leave Dalaran to accomplish anything and you didn't even have to be in a guild since pugging raids were at their easiest level (long before they added mythic difficulty). Raids in general (aside from like 3 bosses) was super easy, dungeons were the easiest they have ever been and with something like LFD introduced it was just fairly chill all around. Definitely the expansion that turned a lot of people into altoholics because there just wasn't that much to do at max level and getting a new character geared and caught up was pretty quick.

[Hctaz]

Ooooh. I really like this post, and I'd like to respond to many of these pieces.

Everything you do would grant some sort of experience.

Power would be invested in the character, not in gear.

Open-ended progression paths for everyone (based on the above), not just dungeon/raiders.

Let me start here. What kind of "experience" are you referring to? Do you mean like the artifact power system where this experience is completely unlimited, or do you just mean leveling to max? I personally would rather there not be another endlessly grindy system like AP where you need to keep farming and farming and playing or else you fall behind. I think that kind of thing actually detracts from the casual appeal of the game. Like... it might help lessen the gap between a hardcore raider and a casual player, but I believe there could be better ways to do this than having another grindy AP system. I do think you have some good ideas in later sections though for sure.

More co-operative play in PVE for groups of any size (including groups of 2 or 3) and less competitive stuff.

Make the entire world relevant (see GW2 for a good example of this...anywhere you play can work for you).

More generally, there are good elements for casual players in all of the major MMO's these days: FFXIV, ESO, GW2, SWTOR. Developers need to stop listening to high-end raiders or at least only listen to them about specific elements of high-end raids. Non-instanced combat needs to not be subjugated to the needs of high-end dungeons and raids. The biggest change would be to invest more power in players instead of their wardrobe. What you do in the game should matter more than what you wear.

Difficult content would have the same excellent rewards it does now but attainable much more quickly than other content. However, excellent rewards should also be available for less difficult content but take comparatively longer to acquire. That sort of thing can be gauged more easily if progression is based on activity (experience for everything you do).

I really do like the idea of the entire world relevant. I think that was something I enjoyed about Classic WoW. It wasn't done superbly, but I did find it fun that the entire world felt relevant for various things, and gold was more valuable as an overall resource for various aspects. I liked how every play style from casual to hardcore shared the need for gold as a common resource, and that resource was tradeable amongst others. Gold is now too meaningless to really be that same common resource, however. Non-Instanced combat definitely needs to not be focused on the hardcore players.

As for the player power situation: I still don't want to have a system where you'd be grinding for AP endlessly, but I can think of a way that this would work. I think the gear should still matter, but I'd like to see a system where Mythic raiders are not forced to grind as much. Maybe something where Mythic raids drop gear that's like... 10 levels lower than the maximum ilvl, and maybe you can upgrade your items with this specific experience you had mentioned previously.
I really don't mind if an LFR player eventually can level their items up to be the same strength as what I'm wearing as a Mythic raider, it would just be nice if I didn't have to farm AP like a madman this time around. Just give each raid difficult a headstart on the cap so that way a Mythic raider can reach the cap faster than a heroic raider, and you also have a bit of bad luck protection if you maybe get a piece of gear to drop on heroic but you never see the piece on Mythic. You can just upgrade your heroic piece to mythic level eventually.

A more casual WoW might flatten the curve on power progression and do away with the mindlessly stupid business of your power shrinking as you level in expansions.

Lastly, once at end game all future content and expansions would be horizontal in nature. Endgame level XX is level XX for the foreseeable future.

That's a wildly different game than WoW is now but a "casual" WoW that pays attention to the needs of most of its customers instead of the few would be pretty different anyway. There's a good business case for something like this. And to be honest, many of the elements have been a part of game at one point or another.

I would add a base-building component to the game instead of traditional housing. Garrisons went maybe 5% of the distance that a good base-building game would entail but I'm guessing that if they could get it right—there's always that isn't there—and started thinking about the entire game as one piece/one world instead of standalone expansions they would re-find some of their former audience. Iterate and expand on features and don't add systems/features that you don't want to support down the line. That's also something that casual MMO's do well: preserve their worlds and treat it (and the lore) with some respect.

I don't expect Blizzard is capable of doing any of this. Maybe if they re-hired Metzen and made him some kind of co-game-director but I think that chance is lost. I have no expectation that WoW is ever going to break out of its 20+ year template. I don't expect it to change and that's why I'm now a $45-$60/year player instead of what I used to do.

The power progression curve is definitely something I'm not a fan of. I don't think there needs to be a large gap in item levels between LFR, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic difficulties. Especially if we're looking at eventually having LFR gear upgrade to Mythic gear. Once again, I really don't mind that the item level is the same or close to the same (maybe 5 levels lower than the cap of the tier above it or something or even squished closer). Just make each difficulty have a bit of cosmetic variety so the rewards are unique.
But the gap between level 1 and level 60 in Classic WoW was actually fairly small compared to 58-70 or 68-80 and so on. Things got even crazier, and you lose so much power leveling up in order to reset you back down to something playable.

I actually don't mind the power curve idea to some degree, but I think it's handled poorly the way it is. Every time you gain a level, you get weaker and weaker. I'd rather see everybody start the new expansion on the same foot just out of the gate a lot weaker in that area. Maybe your gear loses its efficacy outside of the expansion content it was made for, so you are given a new set of greens to help you in the new area. That way you are at least gaining strength as you progress instead of rapidly losing it.

I also think this idea would help solve the horizontal progress. I like the idea of horizontal progress personally. It would be fun to say be able to go back into Legion raids again if you maybe joined late. Having the gear that drops in those expansions only be usable for those expansions would create a situation where you could experience expansions completely separate from each other, and I think this could all tie back in to your base building or player housing idea.

Give each expansion a reason to play it outside of just gaining strength. Cosmetic rewards are nice, and you could tie everything back to building a cool base.

I'm not a game dev, so I don't know how I'd piece it all together, but I think there are some really great ideas that the WoW team could implement to give the game a more overall casual appeal.

I also want to say that I don't think the game is "designed for hardcore players" like so many people suggest. I think the game is designed to RETAIN hardcore players. It's not super fun to grind for AP or Titanforged pieces of gear or random legendary items like you had in Legion, but the systems there really made you feel like you needed to keep playing as a hardcore raider. Gone were the days of getting your BiS and logging out of the game for a few months until the next raid tier, you needed to keep farming Mythic raids in hopes of getting some titanforged pieces of gear to kickstart your journey into the next raid tier. I really, REALLY hated that.

[Caprias]

WoW is good at vertical progression, the treadmills are fun (even though the release cadence was utterly lacking in SL) and the reward system makes logical sense.

But casuals want more horizontal progression, getting good and investing more time and effort =/= fun for everyone.

[Lodreh]

To me it's more or less dungeons and raids that feed into one another without any alternative power system beyond gear.

How about you though?
I hear wow needs to be more casual constantly how does that look like from your perspective?

I consider myself casual. One thing you need to understand is my limited play time takes the form of 4-8 hours on a Saturday or Sunday... not 1-2 hours a day. I tend to play solo or in small groups. I loved Scenarios in Mist; however, I do not like running dungeons or raids more than a handful of times in a given expansion. I like new things to do... that can take the form of outdoor content like gathering treasures in WoD or seeing the story of another class like in Legion or opposite side as in BfA. Unique story experiences keep me invested... Island Expeditions would have been great if they had more consistent rewards and those rewards were useful. I only played the first 3 months of Shadowlands before I was bored senseless. All the time-gating really killed any progression I could see. Being limited to logging in once a week meant that even with more time I could not get additional Renown to see actual progression. That sucks.

[simalina]

Patch 9.2? Very casual patch!

Agree with you)) Really casual patch))

[Lochton]

To me it's more or less dungeons and raids that feed into one another without any alternative power system beyond gear.

How about you though?
I hear wow needs to be more casual constantly how does that look like from your perspective?

A "Casual" WoW to me might not be the same to you. To me, "casual" is about time, you can be a "casual" mythic raider to me, as some only do Mythic once or twice a week, hardly anything else.

To me, a "casual" game would though be something to capture players, features, and features galore. We're talking more investment in the world than in planned content (Raid/PvP/M+).

- Things like puzzles, in the form of treasure hunts, special themed dungeons with tasks to solve, things to prepare for through professions.

- Island expeditions but without the AP, more themes, breadcrumbs for lore.

- Things like housing, actual housing, not just a mono-copy without any actual feats or features within.

- We're talking about a return to PvP bounties all over the world.

- We're talking bounties on special mobs (with Blizzard's AI system, so there's no pathing or figuring it out, the mobs are released on a continent, happy hunting (Could be scarlets, mercs, criminals, scourge packs, whatever).

- Add World Quests to the whole world(s).

- Rewrite and reintroduce archaeology, with its own world content other than digging around, but explore, missions from the Reliquary or Explorer's League.

- Merge mining and herbalism, opening up a 3rd profession slot.

- Portals at the end of dungeons for fixed groups or solo runners, easier to get out (some have you trekking the whole instance back of teleporting).

- More events the runs at certain times of the yeah, of course with rewards befitting them (If you miss them, there's always next year).

- Currency added to random dungeons/LFR only, giving you a chance to achieve a piece of gear, the more points, the better piece (These pieces of gear won't come from the loot table of already planned content).

- Multiple adjustment trees:
- - Class talent trees (Coming)
- - Racial core trees (Add points and achieve the combination of racial you would want).
- - World Utility tree (Make access to tools that make traversing the world more enjoyable (Covenant utility abilities, random teleports, waypoint unlocks).

- Bodyguard system:
- - Hire Tank/Healer/DPS from Alliance or Horde faction.
- - - Hired NPC selection of races, and genders within the factions
- - - Hired NPC can be equipped with gear of your own (BoP), looted (BoE), or purchased.
- - - Hired NPC to be able to be customized with transmog of their own.
- - - Able to hire special bodyguards after achieving a reputation high enough to certain factions.
- - - Hired NPC can carry 1 bag.

- Reputation system to be account-wide after reaching honored with them.

- Cross-faction systems:
- - Cross-faction groups (Coming in 9.2.5)
- - Cross-faction guilds.
- - Cross-faction random content (LFR/Dungeon finder)

- Scenarios returning:
- - Scenarios filled with lore bits we normally miss from books.

- Lorewalker/Storyteller/Researcher briefing:
- - An NPC will stand ready to tell/show you the conclusion of a story already completed.
- - An NPC will stand ready to tell/show you the conclusion of an expansion of old (bring people up to date before a new expansion).
- - An NPC will stand ready to show you all"memories" (All cutscenes and cinematics).


The list could keep on..

[Byleth]

/snip

Congrats. You just described Final Fantasy XIV.

[Lex Icon]

dunno. this game's all about that gear treadmill and so everyone needs to feel they're getting worthwhile loot or there's really no point to playing the game.
and seeing how people want to restrict eachother from getting that loot if it's not coming from the content they prefer idk.

play the game and ignore the players i guess.

[Lochton]

Congrats. You just described Final Fantasy XIV.

Eh, I described half, maybe less of it? But yeah, Final Fantasy to me, is very casual.

[Mysterymask]

Congrats. You just described Final Fantasy XIV.

Welcome to MMO Champion where half the feedback is " I played X game..what if it was wow"

[Iain]

My ideal casual mode is all the old expansion content being turned into world quests zones and all the old dungeons being turned into mythic plus. Not all available at the same time, that would be a mess. But every week a selection of different dungeons and zones rotation just like they would with emissaries, seems ideal.