The Grinding - BFA vs WOTLK

[sanloria]

Hi,

in a recent post whining abut grinding i read that grinding as always been part of the game and kind of been introduced with wrath and the catch-up mechanics of wrath, which made me think about the difference between wotlk grinding vs now.

Dislcaimer : WOTLK was way less grindy than BFA, in my opininon anyway.

WOTLK had emblem of justice and emblem of valor ? some rep ? daily quest ? kind of like we have now.. the difference between now and then is that you didn't need to do all of this to be able to accomplish something.

You want to achieve your weekly cap of valor ? Raid and do a couple dungeon.. capped.

You wanted gold or cosmetic rewards ? Do daily quests

You wanted cosmetic reward usefool tools ? Rep grinding, you could get tabard,mounts and fishing rods or things like that

You want to catch up gear on alt ? You had to do dungeons and then you could go do some raiding like Onyxya lair or TOC, with ICC they introduced 3 other dungeons that allowed you to catch up on ilvl faster to get ready for ICC but it wasn't that much of raid ready gear.

Professions was always a grindy thing but since the rest of the game wasn't as grindy as nit is now, it was an acceptable burden to have small boost.

BFA now ? Everything is mandatory to do anything ... want to raid, do daily quests, rep grinding and everything. The difference between now and then is that they try to force you to play every part of the game instead of letting you play the part of the game you enjoy the most.

I don't know much about corrupted gear since i don't play much nowadays but titanforged gear was one of the worst concept in the game also. Almost forcing you to do daily's that rewards gear because of the luck you could have on those parts. Raiding is and will always have a competitive side, it's not only about topping the meter, as a team you are trying to down boss faster than other team and thus forcing you to do the same work they do to have equivalent chance at it.

Legendary gear forcing you to do daily's to gain talent's and ilvl....

I don't even feel like wasting my time listing everything there is to do, you all know it.

In WOTLK or Cataclysm, with the same time played i was able to enjoy raiding on my main and 1 or 2 alts and i was mostly able to cap my emblem on all of those. Now it feels like the grind never ends, there is no time when you can say, hey am done with this toon, there is always something more you could do at one point because of all the rng and the farming they associated to gear.

I feel like they need to remove that from the game, yes there was always grinding to do and yes it will always have grinding to do.. but it wasn't as hardcore as it is now. If you wanted to do raid, for example, the biggest grind you had to do was enjoying the pve encounter, not going out grinding daily quest,reputation and world event.

Can't wait to see people thought here and i don't say this is a bad game, but they need to rethink the grinding and rng they added in the game while it evolved. It has to be reduced to a certain point. Like, i would accept keeping the flying grindy, but to a point you have to be able to choose what you want to do because you enjoy doing it. Not doings hours of things you don't enjoy to be able to do the thing you enjoy.

Not everyone needs to have epic gear also... epic gear was needed to progress in raid, if you didn't choose to raid, you could get geared enough to accomplish what you wanted out in the world. Different choice of gameplay brings different kind of rewards.

Hoping you all get the core of what am trying to explain here,

Have fun

[ZazuuPriest]

every single gameplay aspect of WoW was better in WoTLK. There are very few that wouldnt agree with this.

Personally the only thing that felt needlessly grindy in LK was the Argent Tournament

[Amariw]

Agreed. I'll echo the main message: previous expac grinds weren't very important from wrath onwards, and were often completed simply by doing the content you liked anyway.

Bfa is unique in how much content that isn't the actual endgame activity (horrid rep grinds, visions, assaults, world quests, ap farm, arena for essence, bgs for essence) it forces you to perform for notable and important power increases.

[Kralljin]

The only real grind for power in Wotlk were the Sons of Hodir Shoulder enchant, which became BoA with 3.3 (or 3.2) and the Badges of Frost with ICC that had you farm Daily hc to accelerate (not sole source!) the tier set acquisition.

The rest was mostly just cosmetic and having a grind for cosmetics than for actual power is a totally different story.

[Nefarious Tea]

every single gameplay aspect of WoW was better in WoTLK. There are very few that wouldnt agree with this.

Personally the only thing that felt needlessly grindy in LK was the Argent Tournament

Wow has always had grinds, some of them miserable: reputation for some Vanilla/BC factions were godawful. But before Legion, most of the grinds just didn't matter.

Didn't want to do the tournament? Who cares? The only rewards were blues that didn't matter because you could get better from 10 man normal of the raid (easily puggable), mounts, and capital city reputation. Nothing that actually affected your character if you weren't a completionist or mount collector.

[Soikona]

every single gameplay aspect of WoW was better in WoTLK. There are very few that wouldnt agree with this.

Personally the only thing that felt needlessly grindy in LK was the Argent Tournament

Yes to this! I let out a loud cheer and popped a cider to celebrate when I got my crusader title.

[Nnyco]

Fuck daily heroics for raid tiers. That alone makes wotlk have a worse system.

[Polarthief]

Catch-up in 8.3 if you've been gone for all of BfA and want to raid Nya:

- AP
- Essences (including EP and many time-gated grinds via rep, have fun)
- Getting Azerite and Trinkets that aren't abysmal

Nuff said. That alone makes BfA stupidly more grindy. I didn't even bring up Flying or anything else. Removing Azerite and making Essences BoA would be a massively huge step in the right direction for alts. As for new players/people who don't have Rank 3 essences unlocked yet, just make obtaining Rank 1 give you Rank 3. Also making AP catch-ups better would be good (IMO you should start this patch at ~60 neck level, like how we started 8.2 with 35)

Fuck daily heroics for raid tiers.

Well now we have Weekly +10s/15s for raid tiers, so...

That said, I've always said 7x weekly quests are much better than 7x daily quests. Once a day for 7 days is significantly worse than simply 7 a week, letting players pick when they want to do their content: All at once, or in small bursts, or even as dailies if they want to. I'd gladly give up an entire Tuesday and do 3 assaults (2 minors, 1 major), 49 dailies, and 7 mini-visions than having to log on every day for the week.

That alone makes wotlk have a worse system.

They used to be 7x weeklies which was a much better method.

[Itori]

I remember the only grind in wotlk was the dailies which were fine, i honestly prefer them, and being a fresh new player its not overwhelming because you know with this 30min a day repetitive grind you will have what you want.

Being a fresh player in bfa and even legion is a nightmare, you havd to grind for flying, grind for allied races, and grind for azerite, now to be fair no one needs the first 2, but also for arguements sake you feel like youre only getting half a game because races shouldnt be part of a huge grind, and flying should just cost gold once you hit 98/108/118.

Imo its getting really hard to defend WoW even for loyal players, and stuff like this seems attractive to the newer players but once they find out what they have to do when they get there, its pretty overwhelming, almost to the point that they could sell unlocks on the store for $$ and get away with it.

[Littleraven]

There is literally no argument that the game was as grindy then as it is now. Sure you don't HAVE to grind now but when they added AP in legion it opened a whole new door.

Aside from dailies and badges there wasn't much to grind back in wrath.

[Kaibhan]

Wow has always had grinds, some of them miserable: reputation for some Vanilla/BC factions were godawful. But before Legion, most of the grinds just didn't matter.

Didn't want to do the tournament? Who cares? The only rewards were blues that didn't matter because you could get better from 10 man normal of the raid (easily puggable), mounts, and capital city reputation. Nothing that actually affected your character if you weren't a completionist or mount collector.

This, so much so this.

[Socialhealer]

Fuck daily heroics for raid tiers. That alone makes wotlk have a worse system.

Essences denying you making any alt says hi.

[Demsi]

Fuck daily heroics for raid tiers. That alone makes wotlk have a worse system.

far superior to island expeditions, daily heroics took like 5 min at best and was piss easy

[callipygoustp]

Kind of like, no, I actually like, that there are grinds that don't involve raiding but add substantially to the power of my toons.

[Soon-TM]

I wouldn't mind returning to the WotLK version of "grind". Much better than the neverending heap of trash you have to go through in BfA, if you want to have a minimally decent alt.

[callipygoustp]

Also. thinking back on Wrath:
I came into WotLK with three max level toons: druid(main), lock, and hunter. At the beginning of Ulduar I started running out of things to do, outside of raiding (and raiding wasn't nearly as accessible as it is today). So, out of boredom I started leveling alts. Leveling alts was fun, I enjoy playing the various classes, but, the point is, again, outside of raiding, during Wrath, I ran out of things to do. This will most definitely not be the case during BFA.

I can come up with plenty of criticisms about BFA, too much to do is not one of them.

[munkeyinorbit]

Catch-up in 8.3 if you've been gone for all of BfA and want to raid Nya:

- AP
- Essences (including EP and many time-gated grinds via rep, have fun)
- Getting Azerite and Trinkets that aren't abysmal

Nuff said. That alone makes BfA stupidly more grindy. I didn't even bring up Flying or anything else. Removing Azerite and making Essences BoA would be a massively huge step in the right direction for alts. As for new players/people who don't have Rank 3 essences unlocked yet, just make obtaining Rank 1 give you Rank 3. Also making AP catch-ups better would be good (IMO you should start this patch at ~60 neck level, like how we started 8.2 with 35)



Well now we have Weekly +10s/15s for raid tiers, so...

That said, I've always said 7x weekly quests are much better than 7x daily quests. Once a day for 7 days is significantly worse than simply 7 a week, letting players pick when they want to do their content: All at once, or in small bursts, or even as dailies if they want to. I'd gladly give up an entire Tuesday and do 3 assaults (2 minors, 1 major), 49 dailies, and 7 mini-visions than having to log on every day for the week.



They used to be 7x weeklies which was a much better method.

Nostalgia is sting in this one. At least the catch up mechanics work. If you were behind at any stage in WotLK it was a lot more grindy. A solo player today can get ready to raid in less than 2 weeks. I went from 110 to 444ilvl with good esscences and LVL 72 neck in that time.
It cost me;
5 hours to level
1 hour to do 8.2
2 hours for cloak
6 cloak runs solo
8 heroic dungeons
5 time walking
2 Mythic + 4 dungeons
2 weekly invasions
3 smaller ones
No dailies

Including queues, around 20 hours all up as dps. Solo. That is hardly a grind.

To do the same in WotLK which might not even get you raid ready at all it would take far longer.
270 badges for previous tier.
300 badges for other pieces.
That's about 63 hours as a dps in heroics.
Gold for a trinket so dailies every day.
2 to 6 weeks of heroics for a piece of current gear.
PvP grind to get a weapon.

BfA is far superior than WotLK when it comes to catch up. More sources, more activities, varied content. Gearing was stupidly slow in WotLK.

I agree. WotLK is a better game then BFA in my opinion but put your rose tinted glasses down. Catch up was terrible compared to BFA.

[Malkiah]

Hoping you all get the core of what am trying to explain here,

but here's the huge thing that denotes a massive difference between wotlk and now (and every expansion since wotlk, while we're at it) that most people seem to either ignore or are just totally unaware of:
at the start of WOTLK the majority of the playerbase were NOT max level.
by the end of WOTLK the majority of the playerbase WERE max level.

this is why LFD and LFR came into existence, this is why 'optional' endgame content started going away and everything ended up being part of character progression: because for the first time in the game's history a significant majority of the people playing were doing so at max level and needed something to do.
prior to i'd say halfway through the ICC patch most people weren't max level yet, so all the stuff there was to do that involved leveling was enough for most of the players to have plenty to do.
and when most of your players aren't max level anyways you can have the leveling journey be more leisurely, as it was in WOTLK, and have entire zones that barely ever get used to give people a ton of optional paths, since that's where most of your players are spending most of their time.

once you have a significant margin of your players being max level, the end game becomes the focus point of your development because that's where the bulk of your customers are spending all their time.

so it's not even grinding in BFA vs WOTLK, it's what was "grinding" in WOTLK vs BFA.
in WOTLK most of the grinding was leveling, and post-level-cap character progression was sparse because so few people (proportionally) were there it didn't particularly matter.
in BFA leveling is now considered an annoyance to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible, and the post-level-cap content is all there is for people to occupy their time with, so yeah they have to come up with a lot more it.
when you have more content at a static level point you're confronted with either: A. completely impossible development standards wherein you make enough new content fast enough for millions of voracious people to never get bored of it, or B. you make content parceled out in such a way that the majority of players have enough to do to keep occupied, but who will probably get bored of it within a few weeks and slowly stop doing it so adamantly.

[Thelyron]

every single gameplay aspect of WoW was better in WoTLK. There are very few that wouldnt agree with this.

Personally the only thing that felt needlessly grindy in LK was the Argent Tournament

Not every one, but a good 90%, definitely.

[Torvald]

Also notice how the grinds in WotLK (including for the cosmetics) really involved practically no RNG and had very defined endpoints. All those reputations? You were done at Exalted. They didn't really try to keep grinding world content relevant regardless of being Exalted, with the one exception of the Argent Tournament pets / mounts, but again, that was earning a pure currency, you could see exactly how much progress you'd make per day towards your next goal, and buying the item from the vendor was a very non-RNG defined endpoint.