To those who aren't playing WoW, what would have to change to resub?

[arkanon]

to the question what would make ME play retail again:

Removal of one raid difficulty, merging normal and heroic into one, with the first boss being normal first boss, and the final boss being heroic final boss - with all in-between scaling up.

Merge M0 and Heroic dungeons

Gearing to be closer to older expansions, so long as the intention is that the best pvp gear comes from pvp and the best pve gear comes from pve.

Removal of all the additional systems, I just want my character to naturally grow and progress throughout the expansion from gear and content.

Unleash the creativity of the visual team, let them go "crazy" with their gear designs - bring back tier sets, and let them move away from the rigid adherence to armor type. I am happy for a priest set to look closer to a paladin, a pally set to look a bit cloth, a rogue set to look closer to mail, a hunter set to just be animal hides rather than mail etc etc etc - i would prefer to see cool, fun, creative designs that fit the class closely rather than something constrained by armor type.

I realize some of these are "looking backwards" rather than forwards, but its a combination - I have no problem with them reusing things that worked over and over again, while still introducing new things, like M+ for example.

And then, on to the biggest one for me, and the one likely to get the angriest response, if there is one at all: Its time to completely rework the classes, starting from the ground up. This is my thoughts on the subject - their pursuit of perfect class balance has taken ALL the rough edges away from the classes, and thats a real problem for me, because those rough edges were the "oh shit! fuck yeah!" moments. Those moments where the warrior got a boner because there was a pack of 12 mobs spawning and all his cds were up and bladestorm was ready to go - the moment were the pally could AOE taunt and be a hero - the moment where the group almost died, but the resto druid was able to pull everyone back to max hp with one well buffed and timed tranq. The times were there was a target for my assassination rogue to tunnel a boss for the entire encounter, because his sustained ST was so godamn strong, that we had him ignore all adds and just tunnel the boss. I personally feel like everyone has to be "good" at everything now, and that, to me at least, means no one is good at anything.

To be clear, I think M+ is a decent system, however it has resulted in Blizzard painting themselves into a corner, which is an amusing place to find themselves since they did EXACTLY the same thing with Arena - made it so all classes needed to be pretty similar, otherwise no one would bring X or Y specs. Using M+, imagine bringing a pure ST spec now - why on earth would you?


tldr return to previously successful and popular systems, while still introducing new ways to play and new gamemodes, just without all the throwaway nonsense. Trim the fat with difficulties, and streamline the entire game to be more straightforward for newer players, while still giving those of us who want to do challenging content an outlet for that.

Lastly, this is what I personally want, im not saying these things would be best for the game, just best for me personally.

[Khahirr]

For classic short of irl friends begging me to get back in the game there's pretty much nothing that would bring me back. The attitude of players towards the game ruined it for me.

I quit from world buff griefing at naxx. I gave TBC a chance and boosted a hunter only to find that almost nobody, not even my guild, would run dungeons with me despite topping the meters in the few runs I did (some with T3 geared dps). I also had several irl obligations that set me way behind to the extent it seemed pointless to even bother. People treat classic way too much like a job and not a game. Over the course of the pandemic it actually heavily contributed to my heavy alcohol use with the world buff meta, and I was hoping that the end of that would chill people out a little. But it didn't so now I'm done with that probably forever. Really has nothing to do with the game at this point, it's just the kind of people that play it.

As for retail, they need to stop with the short sighted temporary systems upon systems bullshit they do with each new expansion. It was old last expac and now it's even taking its toll on development time. Evergreen content is the only content that matters to me.

Stop the gating of everything besides the weekly raid reset. We pay money for this game monthly, I don't want to be told I can't do something because I have to wait for my sub time to be wasted another week. That is a slap in the face to the consumer. If they're going to do that then they may as well switch over to a game time played subscription model or I'm not going to bother.

They could also do with consolidating some of the difficulty levels, heroic and M0 don't make sense, get rid of one (preferably heroic tbh). I also don't think there needs to be normal and heroic difficulty raids if we also have LFR. Either make normal LFR or get rid of normal. If you want to just see the content LFR is there. Normal serves no purpose anymore besides inflating item levels.

Also while I see the purpose in player level and item level squishes, I think they really need to find a system that works without it being so jarring. I'm not really sure how to do that but going from lvl 120 to lvl 50-60 feels kind of shitty with respect to past time played even if the numbers are ultimately meaningless. It's even worse when these squishes have to happen multiple times, it just shows that the game design is short sighted if you have to keep fixing the same mistake and choose the same half solution each time.

[Adamas102]

I'll probably resub for the month of September to convert the rest of my gold to Blizzard balance and never look back. I don't think there's anything wrong with the game, it has been perfectly adequate for it's almost 17 year run. I just have far more enjoyable hobbies right now and with kid #1 on the way the prospect of wasting what little free time I'll have on a the never-ending gear treadmill that is MMO's sounds fucking awful.

[regardoz]

100% change i need as pvper is to make me get into pvp easier substantially. now i want to get into pvp i need 5 million years and still cant catch up

[MrLachyG]

Neither this one.
Inbefore "Neither this one."

On Topic: Checked the patch, gave a quick look at the new area, did the daily stuff and the gated stuff. Then closed the game when on the day after it was basically all the same chores that made me quit Shadowlands in the first place.

Honestly no idea what has to change and how. It's simply not enjoyable. And that's why I am a customer and not a developer.

question is why were previous expansions enjoyable to you as opposed to now?

[BdazmedPrim]

Focus on what made WoW great to begin with...

The main idea I agree with is to Focus on what made WoW great to begin with.

I think WoW is can be great in the future coz Blizz's are trying to come back to the classic and maybe sometimes it'll happening)
It seems to combine two types of gameplay in one game - for those who love classic and those who love Vanilla

[MeTaL GuArD]

I technically am still subbed until November, but I only pop in to do the weekly stuff and raid once a week with the guild - 4-5 hours a week is not exactly playing in my book.

What bums me out the most is the state of classes, where a lot of my previous favorites aren't good enough to compete or had their talents changed around and I no longer enjoy them(Havoc DH didn't deserve to get hammered this hard, for one, and the changes to their talents seem to breed a lot of 3-4 button rotations).
The optionality of everything regarding Anima, while technically good since there's less chores if you want to raid, also means there's no incentive to do them when you don't care about the cosmetics, since there's little that's actually fun regarding collecting Anima.
I'm bothered that you're technically forever behind if you wanted to craft legendaries by yourself, because they decided you need to grind out an arbitrary XP bar before you can start working on the higher item levels - and by that time you're going to waste thousands upon thousands more gold than if you just went ahead and bought them from the Auction House. And the fact that the lego crafting is literally the only thing the armor crafting profs are useful for these days(perhaps mitigated slightly with the 230 crafter's mark, but I don't know what the material requirements are, and I already switched most of my toons to Engineering for utility).

Honestly, Legion was my favorite expansion - maybe they could skip the legiondaries, but I actually enjoyed leveling the Artifact Power and getting actually interesting passives out of it. There's very little with actual impact in the current systems(and there's so many of them...).

[Aphrel]

Im not the target of this thread but do i care? nop.

On my wish list would be Player Housing.

A real one this time, i want to decorate stuff!

[Kerrion]

If it went free to play. I really don't like the idea of having to subscribe to be able to play, especially when there's not much time in my day to do so.

[Khasim92]

1. Turn Instances of Warcraft back into World of Warcraft. I want fun quests and things to do in the open world instead of teleporting to a magic dungeon to progress my character's power. Maybe put some easy dungeons or raids for fun and story reasons but make it not necessary to run them multiple times for reasons other than quests or customization.
2. Focus on player expression and customization - no more worrying about balancing skills so that everyone can have a fair chance against everyone else in every scenario, unless the abilities are really ridiculously overpowered and with no counter (like bubblehearth pre mass dispel). More races, classes, animations, customization options, spell customization a la green fire, let casters cast with their staves at long last, let undead and trolls stand up straight, give more body types to all races.
3. Just scrap the current story altogether or make our main characters not important to the story, instead use new characters each expansion and make their stories self-contained so we don't need to follow stories of 2398349 characters across 20 years in 5 different mediums to understand wtf is going on.
4. Make it viable to play with a controller with dynamic UI so I can comfortably play from my couch on a bigass OLED TV without worrying about burnin or getting annoyed at the controls.
5. Implement proper HDR.

3-5 are optional, but I'm so tired of the old WoW formula of new expansion -> new dungeons and raids -> new shitty systems that will become obsolete next expansion -> multiple patches to fix said systems -> new expansion. I know Legion started a lot of that bad shit, but at least it gave me a reason to level more than 1 class (I got them all to max around 7.2 to get the Mage Tower appearances that I liked), so I really wish they just made Legion 2.0. Patch 8.3 was also genuinely fun and the story was cool, I re-watch Rejection of the Gift every couple of months just to feel something positive about WoW again.

[thilicen]

Rental powers like covenant powers and time-gating powers like conduit slots would have to fuck right off. Also, shit like conduits taking up loot slots. Not sure if that's fixed yet since I unsubbed three months into 9.0, but getting a garbage tier conduit for a spec I never even play for the 3rd time while trying to get a decent weapon or literally anything else was the final straw for me.

[Dadwen]

Get rid of the current garbage designers and roll back (class design\scaling *gone\power systems\ general game design\professions) back to about MOP.

[Menog]

I'll probably resub for the month of September to convert the rest of my gold to Blizzard balance and never look back. I don't think there's anything wrong with the game, it has been perfectly adequate for it's almost 17 year run. I just have far more enjoyable hobbies right now and with kid #1 on the way the prospect of wasting what little free time I'll have on a the never-ending gear treadmill that is MMO's sounds fucking awful.

from personal experience don't resub bro. fuck the gold. the problem of you ressubing is that you will actually have content to do (the 9.1 shit) thats not gated anymore and that will eventually lure you in and you'll forget this shit you have experienced and give them actuall money till this shit happens again (and it will happen. I have no faith in these dev's bro). Just quit the blizzard dumpster fire and unninstall battle net. Atleast you can see shit from prespective now :P

I am just lurking this cause I am curious of the "ending" of the ridiculous storyline they presented. Waiting for the sylvanas defeat cinematic and almost surely cringe.

Good luck on parenthood, its an amazing ride! I am waiting for #2 now wich is scheduled to release in January

enjoy

[ZazuuPriest]

Ion needs to be fired, maybe then

[dictainabox]

I haven't played in nearly 3 years. To be honest, the game can't bring me back. This isn't a slam towards Blizz. I just lack the time to play the game the way I need to in order to enjoy it. That's the thing: I absolutely could play WoW and have plenty to do. Azeroth is a massive place with plenty to find and enjoy. Problematically, I really enjoy high end raiding. The amount of time I would need to spend to raid at a high level is just too much. Now, I just break single player JRPGs for fun, because it doesn't matter when/if I log on. I just got old.

[dacoolist]

Ion needs to be fired, maybe then

Blizzard does work as a collective, Ghostcrawler said it, hell even Chris Metzen said it.. Everyone called for their termination, and they eventually quit and the games been in a tougher spot since.. Like what do you want fam.. the game to die

[schwank05]

I have to resub to play BC, I wish it was a separate sub though I don't want to play shadowlands it was cool after release for about 2 months then it was just the same old WOW as it has been since WOD.

[Deferionus]

Like many have said the systems and time gating is pretty bad. I don't care that they make you have to unlock flying, but this should be doable at the expansion launch. It is nice to have something to work towards.

On the systems the implementation feels bad. Many people said outright covenants having the abilities and talents tied to it was bad design and they did it anyway. No matter what choice I make with this decision I won't be happy. Also, it does not make me feel incentivized to play when I know I can play SL in a year and get to 100 renown in a week vs it taking 9 months the first two content patches. This just makes me feel like SL content isn't worth doing until the final content patch when everything will be most efficient.

Legion felt really good to play. Suramar was great. Class order halls had great implementation. I loved legiondaries though many didnt for their well documented issues. I think if they took the Legion design, made AP account wide instead of character based, and made a way to target a desired legendary, you would have success. Forcing people into Torghast is questionable - I don't mind it, but others outright hate it.

[schwank05]

Get rid of the current garbage designers and roll back (class design\scaling *gone\power systems\ general game design\professions) back to about MOP.

I could get on board with this bring back MOP Disc Priest.

[Scathan]

The most frustrating thing about this situation. The team outright proved they're able to make a banger expansion with Legion. It had problems but God was it a good expansion. That was the only expansion I stayed subbed through the entire expansion cycle. Yet here with are, with relatively the same team, and they can't figure anything out despite being slapped in the face with the feedback from the community.

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I love Zepla, she's such a good content creator. She absolutely nailed a lot of the problems with WoW when they got to that in the show.

Disagree on the Legion thing. It wasn't that good. All of the problems of bfa and shadowlands were also Legion problems.