I don't really like "modern" class gameplay.

[fazaim]

I wasn't talking about that.


Yeah, after they nerfed the grind, it's no longer grindy.

lmao


Spamming the same dungeons over and over but with slightly higher numbers gets old real fast.


"for once" ? They were worth doing far into the expansion all the way back in 2007/2008 with TBC and its badge system.

You legion defenders are weird, man.

Of course, so the initial product was more grindy than what it became. That's called improved upon. So you can't broad stroak it with how you perceived it at the beginning.

Mythic+ was and is engaging, so yeah, spamming the same dungeons over and over is appreciated by much of the playerbase actually. Too much for my liking, since it's now affecting other parts of the game like PvP in a negative way. I'm still not arguing against its popularity.

Alright, the mythic+ system and TBC heroic system aren't really comparable. The closest we had to M+ before were the challenge mode. WoW suffered from having the most difficult activity drop the best gear and only be of value to that same activity. Mythic+ made it so dungeons are always relevant, the drops are always relevant and obtaining the best gear is relevant outside of the same activity. Heroics eventually became obsolete, like you mention WQ's became in Legion. But you also refer to the endless AP grind, so by that logic they never became obsolete. You illogical people are weird, man.

[AtomR]

Damage/healing comes from sooo many different sources that nothing really feels that powerful. For instance my holy priest, renew in itself does close to nothing on its own, you kinda have to keep it up for 10% increased healing on targets with it up, then there is some heal proc when PoM heals target with renew on and there is another one stat stacks as renew ticks.
Kinda prefrred it when you wanted to cast renew just because it was just a nice HoT on its own. That theme is present all over other classes, not saying that "vanilla style" where you pressed just one or two buttons was ideal, but since wrath pretty much every class had a solid rotation/priority and it still felt really good when you just saw that juicy WW crits on warrior, where now ww is just a tool to activate warriors cleave.

I agree with you. I was recently playing as a moonkin (usually play resto and guardian) and was spamming my attacks and looking at the health bar of the elite i was killing and thought at this rate i'll never kill it and suddenly at 50% he just explodes and dies and it felt like the attacks were just gaining momentum and that feels kinda crap. Because it feels like it's done so that you can't just faceroll mobs. Although the explosion itself was satisfying and felt powerful.

[Eurhetemec]

I agree with you. I was recently playing as a moonkin (usually play resto and guardian) and was spamming my attacks and looking at the health bar of the elite i was killing and thought at this rate i'll never kill it and suddenly at 50% he just explodes and dies and it felt like the attacks were just gaining momentum and that feels kinda crap. Because it feels like it's done so that you can't just faceroll mobs. Although the explosion itself was satisfying and felt powerful.

I think the issue is also that really an awful lot of classes work like this now. Not all, but a lot. Build up a lot of teensy joke damage and then BOOM.

I get that there's some "Omae, wa mou shindeiru" coolness to that some of the time, but an awful lot of the time it's just a bit tedious, and as more and more classes have the same tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap BOOM style of doing damage, it gets kind of conceptually tired as well. We can't all be Fist of the North Star!

It's also happening with the defenses of tanks, I notice, though there it tends to be more integrated into the core gameplay loop rather than extra stuff you need to do (because many tanks don't really have a lot of GCD time to do extra stuff), in the form of various small, conditional bonuses to survival, which all add up, rather than distinctive defensive abilities and powerful cooldowns (which understandably Blizzard don't want to add to, but it is making things pretty predictable).

- - - Updated - - -

Alright, the mythic+ system and TBC heroic system aren't really comparable. The closest we had to M+ before were the challenge mode. WoW suffered from having the most difficult activity drop the best gear and only be of value to that same activity. Mythic+ made it so dungeons are always relevant, the drops are always relevant and obtaining the best gear is relevant outside of the same activity. Heroics eventually became obsolete, like you mention WQ's became in Legion. But you also refer to the endless AP grind, so by that logic they never became obsolete. You illogical people are weird, man.

Just a minor pedantry point but conflating Heroic dungeons in general and TBC Heroics isn't very helpful. TBC's Heroics were both significantly more demanding (relative to the general skill of the playerbase at the time) than pretty much all later Heroics (pre-nerf Cata didn't really require more skill, just a very different approach to WotLK), and also significantly more rewarding, relative to what was generally available in TBC, especially outside of 25-man raids. Further, they never became obsolete, people were running them for gear up to the end of the expansion (for admittedly complex reasons), whereas later versions of Heroics became ever-more-rapidly obsolete, to the point where TWW's Heroics were largely obsolete as soon as S1 started (arguably earlier). I agree that TBC's ones are not really comparable to M+, but they also don't compare well with later Heroic Dungeons in terms of their role.

[NineSpine]

Just a minor pedantry point but conflating Heroic dungeons in general and TBC Heroics isn't very helpful. TBC's Heroics were both significantly more demanding (relative to the general skill of the playerbase at the time) than pretty much all later Heroics (pre-nerf Cata didn't really require more skill, just a very different approach to WotLK), and also significantly more rewarding, relative to what was generally available in TBC, especially outside of 25-man raids. Further, they never became obsolete, people were running them for gear up to the end of the expansion (for admittedly complex reasons), whereas later versions of Heroics became ever-more-rapidly obsolete, to the point where TWW's Heroics were largely obsolete as soon as S1 started (arguably earlier). I agree that TBC's ones are not really comparable to M+, but they also don't compare well with later Heroic Dungeons in terms of their role.

Kind of a side point, but I loved the TBC endgame model. The heroic dungeons felt meaningful and varied in design (even if the aesthetics were too similar between some that resided in the same hub). There was so much advancement to be done without ever stepping into a raid.

[fazaim]

Just a minor pedantry point but conflating Heroic dungeons in general and TBC Heroics isn't very helpful. TBC's Heroics were both significantly more demanding (relative to the general skill of the playerbase at the time) than pretty much all later Heroics (pre-nerf Cata didn't really require more skill, just a very different approach to WotLK), and also significantly more rewarding, relative to what was generally available in TBC, especially outside of 25-man raids. Further, they never became obsolete, people were running them for gear up to the end of the expansion (for admittedly complex reasons), whereas later versions of Heroics became ever-more-rapidly obsolete, to the point where TWW's Heroics were largely obsolete as soon as S1 started (arguably earlier). I agree that TBC's ones are not really comparable to M+, but they also don't compare well with later Heroic Dungeons in terms of their role.

True that Heroics after TBC aren't completely comparable to later versions of it, but it invalidates his argument further, that they were worth doing far into an expansion all the way back in 07/08 AS IF they've continously been so since then. They also might not have become completely obsolete for those "complex reasons" (although I don't remember what those are?) but they for sure weren't even close to as relevant as M+ has been since 2016, nor for as many people who participate in it.

[Eurhetemec]

Kind of a side point, but I loved the TBC endgame model. The heroic dungeons felt meaningful and varied in design (even if the aesthetics were too similar between some that resided in the same hub). There was so much advancement to be done without ever stepping into a raid.

I definitely agree. I had a really good time with them. Good thing too because late Vanilla (esp. Naxx) killed all the fun vibes of raiding MC/BWL/ZG and replaced it with SERIOUS BUSINESS, and the whilst Kara was fun, the 25-man raids in TBC were also SERIOUS BUSINESS vibes, which like, no thanks. So the Heroics actually gave me something to do, which for the time seemed kind of challenging but fun.

[NineSpine]

I definitely agree. I had a really good time with them. Good thing too because late Vanilla (esp. Naxx) killed all the fun vibes of raiding MC/BWL/ZG and replaced it with SERIOUS BUSINESS, and the whilst Kara was fun, the 25-man raids in TBC were also SERIOUS BUSINESS vibes, which like, no thanks. So the Heroics actually gave me something to do, which for the time seemed kind of challenging but fun.

The small 25 man raids were great though. I actually wish the model of WoW was that we had 10 man long raids and 25 man short raids. That first tier of TBC was ideal.

I also miss very long and intensive attunement quests. I'm not handing out popular opinions here, but I definitely preferred that model so much.

[Eurhetemec]

I also miss very long and intensive attunement quests. I'm not handing out popular opinions here, but I definitely preferred that model so much.

I get the appeal for sure, but the reality is that's a great way to ensure new-to-max level players after the start of the expansion are prevented from raiding with their friends/guildies, and guilds find it harder and harder and harder and harder to find people to replace people who leave (as a lot of people always do, such is life) as the expansion goes on, because fewer and fewer people will be attuned for the later raids, and it burns people out to keep helping with attunement and then see people leave and now you have to help with attunement again and so on. It also screws people over who have to leave for a few months or w/e. It's a big part of why so few people saw the inside of Vanilla Naxx, for example.

It's one of those mechanics which sounds cute and even fun the first time, but which the designers totally failed to think through.

WildStar literally murdered it's entire endgame and completely doomed itself (where it could very easily have been just "hanging around" making surprisingly okay money like SWTOR/ESO/GW2) by indulging in ridiculous attunements modelled on TBC attunements, but like, turned up to 11. They tried to course-correct later on but it was too late - they'd created a situation where if your friend joined the game to play with you, you had to run him through endless content that was largely/entirely irrelevant to you, for weeks and weeks, just to get them attuned to the 20-man raid, then take them through the entire 20-man raid and do potentially weeks more grinding to get them attuned for the 40-man one. Even the people who signed up specifically because of the attunement stuff were sick of it.

With account-bound stuff you could reduce the pain to only doing it once on one account, but can you even imagine the predatory adverts and the sheer amount of gold which would be going through the WoW Token system into the pockets of boosters? Any element of it which could be monetized would be.

[NineSpine]

I get the appeal for sure, but the reality is that's a great way to ensure new-to-max level players after the start of the expansion are prevented from raiding with their friends/guildies, and guilds find it harder and harder and harder and harder to find people to replace people who leave (as a lot of people always do, such is life) as the expansion goes on, because fewer and fewer people will be attuned for the later raids, and it burns people out to keep helping with attunement and then see people leave and now you have to help with attunement again and so on. It also screws people over who have to leave for a few months or w/e.

It's one of those mechanics which sounds cute and even fun the first time, but which the designers totally failed to think through.

WildStar literally murdered it's entire endgame and completely doomed itself (where it could very easily have been just "hanging around" making surprisingly okay money like SWTOR/ESO/GW2) by indulging in ridiculous attunements modelled on TBC attunements, but like, turned up to 11. They tried to course-correct later on but it was too late - they'd created a situation where if your friend joined the game to play with you, you had to run him through endless content that was largely/entirely irrelevant to you, for weeks and weeks, just to get them attuned to the 20-man raid, then take them through the entire 20-man raid and do potentially weeks more grinding to get them attuned for the 40-man one. Even the people who signed up specifically because of the attunement stuff were sick of it.

With account-bound stuff you could reduce the pain to only doing it once on one character, but can you even imagine the predatory adverts and the sheer amount of gold which would be going through the WoW Token system into the pockets of boosters? Any element of it which could be monetized would be.

I don't disagree. That's why I prefer attunements to be outside of raid content, so that catch up is more appropriate. I think attunements are a great use of world and dungeon content. Attunements should be no more intrusive than coming back after a break and having to level because a new expansion is out.

[Jastall]

But the cutting edge groups are *already* spending a great deal of time managing class composition and the average group is not, so this perception issue sounds more like your perception of the community being warped than the community's perception being warped.

Which is why I said to a greater or lesser extent, several times in fact. No, Johnny Casual who makes a Normal raid pug won't only invite Rogues if Liquid beats Mythic Xal'atah with 15 Rogues because they do 40% more damage than anyone else and have enough utility to cover every potential need (which would make them broken in every piece of content in the game from the get go but whatever). But he's sure likely to prioritize Rogues because everyone knows they're OPAF and make things easier. Same for Sarah The Less Casual making her M+6 group knowing that Rogues have boatloads of advantages over other melee DPS so she's a lot more likely to pick them. On the more extreme end, Timmy the Guild Master might ask his DPS to go Rogue because they're just obviously that much better than the competition.

No, those aren't absolute, set in stone truths. Not every Johnny, Sarah and Timmy are going to behave this way, before you say it. But it's very likely that a lot of them will, given past tendencies where a class outshone everyone else, see Augmentation in M+ for a good chunk of DF seasons 2 and 3. And Augmentation was magnitudes less broken than this theoretical scenario where Rogues fill the entire DPS needs of a top guild, which hasn't happened since Feral filled every spot in Heroic Nefarian if memory serves. But early Cata was a wild time for sure. Community perception matters and Blizzard knowingly designs around them- sometimes too much perhaps, but going to the other extreme and saying fuck it, balance is for nerds and who cares about the consequences, isn't the remedy.

[allegrian]

I think healing is too complicated with too many buttons, as you also need dps ones.

[NineSpine]

Which is why I said to a greater or lesser extent, several times in fact. No, Johnny Casual who makes a Normal raid pug won't only invite Rogues if Liquid beats Mythic Xal'atah with 15 Rogues because they do 40% more damage than anyone else and have enough utility to cover every potential need (which would make them broken in every piece of content in the game from the get go but whatever). But he's sure likely to prioritize Rogues because everyone knows they're OPAF and make things easier. Same for Sarah The Less Casual making her M+6 group knowing that Rogues have boatloads of advantages over other melee DPS so she's a lot more likely to pick them. On the more extreme end, Timmy the Guild Master might ask his DPS to go Rogue because they're just obviously that much better than the competition.

No, those aren't absolute, set in stone truths. Not every Johnny, Sarah and Timmy are going to behave this way, before you say it. But it's very likely that a lot of them will, given past tendencies where a class outshone everyone else, see Augmentation in M+ for a good chunk of DF seasons 2 and 3. And Augmentation was magnitudes less broken than this theoretical scenario where Rogues fill the entire DPS needs of a top guild, which hasn't happened since Feral filled every spot in Heroic Nefarian if memory serves. But early Cata was a wild time for sure. Community perception matters and Blizzard knowingly designs around them- sometimes too much perhaps, but going to the other extreme and saying fuck it, balance is for nerds and who cares about the consequences, isn't the remedy.

Who wasn't allowed to do M+ in seasons 2 or 3 because of Augmentation? Where are these vast swaths of players who didn't get to run dungeons during those seasons? There were not thousands of players sitting around, excluded from groups, while everyone else sat there for hours waiting for an Augmentation player to come online.

I think that what you are describing is just irrational anxiety about being excluded, not something that has practical implications for the average person playing the game. What actually has practical implications for the average player is everything being constantly rebalanced to accommodate 1% of the player base.

[Jastall]

Who wasn't allowed to do M+ in seasons 2 or 3 because of Augmentation? Where are these vast swaths of players who didn't get to run dungeons during those seasons? There were not thousands of players sitting around, excluded from groups, while everyone else sat there for hours waiting for an Augmentation player to come online.

I think that what you are describing is just irrational anxiety about being excluded, not something that has practical implications for the average person playing the game. What actually has practical implications for the average player is everything being constantly rebalanced to accommodate 1% of the player base.

As opposed to the rational and evidence-based argument that only the dreaded 1% cares about balance in a multiplayer game, or that the entire game is constantly redesigned to accommodate said dreaded 1%? I can't possibly be that the design fails to appeal to you and that this is a normal thing that happens in game design.

[Tech614]

I think healing is too complicated with too many buttons, as you also need dps ones.

Most healers have 2 relevant dps buttons. The only healer that is even remotely more complicated dps wise is a resto druid cat weaving but that isn't that hard either compared to actual dps rotations.

DPS add near 0 complexity to healer specs, its the equivalent of filler buttons in a dps rotation.

[NineSpine]

As opposed to the rational and evidence-based argument that only the dreaded 1% cares about balance in a multiplayer game, or that the entire game is constantly redesigned to accommodate said dreaded 1%? I can't possibly be that the design fails to appeal to you and that this is a normal thing that happens in game design.

Balance for the average and high-end players is not the same. That's not how balance works. You can have a class that is way overpowered for the average player and underpowered at high-end play, or vice versa. People tend to not even realize when things are imbalanced at the average level because how people get informed about imbalance more comes from the kind of media-induced anxiety you are expressing and that media is generally about high-end play. Most players aren't consuming that media. You are taking your irrational anxieties and projecting them on to everyone else, and that is why you are talking about Augmentation in M+ as though nobody else was allowed to do M+ those two seasons, or pretending that we see the average guild engaging in meticulous class stacking just because world first guilds do that. This isn't reality. This is a panic you have induced on yourself, and now you assume everyone else has the same panic.

The type of hyper-fixation on competitive balance that you are describing is extremely abnormal for games that don't have substantial e-sports components.

[prwraith]

Idk with the class gameplay / hero talents that are in now and how bleh they are. TWW really isn't grabbing me...at all. It seemed so good at the start but there's really not much to do outside of the weekly grind and the daily world quests which quickly start to seem like more of a chore. Even the delves are just kinda...why am I doing this lol they remind me of scenarios "oh this is a cool idea" and then 5 weeks in nobody is doing scenarios

[Jastall]

Balance for the average and high-end players is not the same. That's not how balance works. You can have a class that is way overpowered for the average player and underpowered at high-end play, or vice versa. People tend to not even realize when things are imbalanced at the average level because how people get informed about imbalance more comes from the kind of media-induced anxiety you are expressing and that media is generally about high-end play. Most players aren't consuming that media. You are taking your irrational anxieties and projecting them on to everyone else, and that is why you are talking about Augmentation in M+ as though nobody else was allowed to do M+ those two seasons, or pretending that we see the average guild engaging in meticulous class stacking just because world first guilds do that. This isn't reality. This is a panic you have induced on yourself, and now you assume everyone else has the same panic.

The type of hyper-fixation on competitive balance that you are describing is extremely abnormal for games that don't have substantial e-sports components.

The bolded are, quite literally, not what I said and a strawman I knew you'd trot out. You're arguing against an exaggerated version of all of my points, rather than my actual points. I argue about the potentially perverse effect of an extreme lack of balance and you act as if I were some hysterical madman for doing so. Why do this? Address my actual points instead of using them as a springboard for yours.

[Thirtyrock]

This is very rarely the case for the average player, and usually is the result of some short-lived interaction screwups that are corrected quickly. Never forget that what you see at the very highest level of play magnifies differences considerably because of optimization - and that is optimization to a degree that the average player not only would never be capable of performing at, but wouldn't even have the framework to do it in, because all the other people in their group also don't perform at that level.

Without such optimization, the effective differences are much smaller in practice. They still exist, of course - and there are still significant enough differences even at more average levels to warrant some comp considerations and whatnot. But unless you can and do play with high-end optimization, those differences will neither be massive nor will they make or break anything.

That's not to say there aren't perception problems as well as performance problems, of course. Many players at lower skill levels ape comps and strats from higher levels because they think they "have to" or they think it's a much bigger difference than it really is. And that's only exacerbated by the fact that often they're not technically wrong about X being better than Y - it's just that they think X is better than Y by 10% (because that's how it is at the extreme top end) when in reality it'll be more like X being better than Y by like 2% at the skill level these people are at. Which is still better, to be sure, but it not some shattering difference and will not cost them success. Not where they're at.

A LOT of people don't understand these things. I see it on my own team "The Rank 1 M+ team is doing this, we should do this" Ummm, none of us are as good as those players AND we're on different classes/specs, pretty sure if we try to do "THIS" we'll not just do worse than the Rank 1 team, we'll do worse than we're currently doing.

I like to compare it to a sport. I'm a BJJ athlete, but I'm not anything amazing. If I tried to do what the best BJJ athletes in the world do, for even one or two days, I'll end up in the hospital. It's not just that they're better than me because they do different things, that's true, it's also that I'm not set up to do what they do. My body can't handle it and I'll literally hurt myself AND I'm not as good as them.

Aping strategies that are only used by the best of the best and only with extreme levels of coordination often leads to WORSE results than trying to optimize for the team you actually have.

- - - Updated - - -

But the cutting edge groups are *already* spending a great deal of time managing class composition and the average group is not, so this perception issue sounds more like your perception of the community being warped than the community's perception being warped.

I don't know as much on the raiding side (I play with a consistent group and we almost never need to pug in a player), but you can absolutely feel the meta shifting between M+ seasons. S2 of DF when Havoc was pretty lackluster in keys, it would take me 15-30 minutes to get into a key at times. S3, when they were meta, saw me getting an invite in less than 10 minutes most of the time. The balancing/class changes between seasons absolutely trickled down into player perception and behavior.

[Indless]

Healing is in the worst state ive ever seen. it is absolutely terrible. Ive healed in every expansion since vanilla and cant find one I feel good on

[NineSpine]

The bolded are, quite literally, not what I said and a strawman I knew you'd trot out. You're arguing against an exaggerated version of all of my points, rather than my actual points. I argue about the potentially perverse effect of an extreme lack of balance and you act as if I were some hysterical madman for doing so. Why do this? Address my actual points instead of using them as a springboard for yours.

Your actual point was just to provide these examples that don't demonstrate your argument. If these things would have catastrophic effects on the average player, there would be examples of it, but instead, you are appealing to vague community sentiments and personal anxieties, not solid examples. If Augmentation was preferable by some people for a couple of seasons, so what? Who cares? Was anyone excluded from the season? Where are the examples where no rogues were allowed in normal difficulty raids for a tier, or every +20 group was all paladins? These examples don't exist, because the doomsaying is not born out by reality. It's just projection of personal anxieties driven by consuming too much wow media.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know as much on the raiding side (I play with a consistent group and we almost never need to pug in a player), but you can absolutely feel the meta shifting between M+ seasons. S2 of DF when Havoc was pretty lackluster in keys, it would take me 15-30 minutes to get into a key at times. S3, when they were meta, saw me getting an invite in less than 10 minutes most of the time. The balancing/class changes between seasons absolutely trickled down into player perception and behavior.

What I reject in this conversation is the idea that "Maybe on average groups take five minutes longer to get into" is a sign that the game is fundamentally broken.