**A Guide to Revitalize World of Warcraft and Restore Its Success**

Community General Discussion
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A Guide to Revitalize World of Warcraft and Restore Its Success

Guide #1: Simplify Class Design

Currently, the power levels of classes in World of Warcraft have become excessive, leading to a toxic environment where the focus shifts from bringing specific classes to simply bringing the best player. This results in a meta that rewards only the most powerful combinations, sidelining those who prefer to play less “meta” choices. Historically, classes had more defined strengths and weaknesses, creating distinct roles within group dynamics. For instance, some classes had powerful crowd control but low survivability, while others excelled in burst damage but lacked sustain.

In contrast, today’s classes are overloaded with abilities and modifiers, which dilutes their identity and makes tuning difficult. For example, Hunter classes have multiple charges of abilities like “Wall,” a full-health heal, damage immunity, and more, leading to an arms race in both PvE and PvP. This creates an imbalance, where some classes are overwhelmingly stronger, and those not playing the “meta” feel excluded. Additionally, the overcomplicated systems, such as excessive talent modifiers, make it hard for developers to effectively balance these classes.

The introduction of the Dragonflight talent trees was a step in the wrong direction, as it led to even greater class power, surpassing that of previous expansions like Mists of Pandaria. This rapid escalation is not only a challenge to balance but also contributes to a bloated gameplay experience, where the interface becomes flooded with addon notifications rather than actual gameplay.

Key Recommendations:

  1. Prune Crowd Control Abilities: Remove excessive CC abilities
  2. Simplify Offensive and Defensive Spells: Reduce modifiers, procs, and cooldowns. While occasional rotational procs or a strong 1-3 minute cooldown are fine, massive power discrepancies between different states of cooldowns are problematic.
  3. Reduce Mobility Across the Board: Too many mobility spells, such as Mages having multiple blinks and other mobility tools, diminish the skill ceiling. Limit mobility to maintain balanced, skillful gameplay.
  4. Maintain Fast-Paced Rotation: Avoid making rotations slow and cumbersome, as was seen in the Legion expansion. Quick, interactive rotations are key to making gameplay engaging, not simply adding more cooldowns or defensive abilities.

Guide #2: Eliminate the Gear and Progression Gap

World of Warcraft has long struggled with the disparity between casual and hardcore players when it comes to gear progression. The game needs a system that ensures everyone, regardless of playtime, can participate in end-game content and feel rewarded.

Key Recommendations:

  1. 100% Gear Drop Chance: Dungeons and raid bosses should guarantee gear drops (excluding mounts or unique items), ensuring every player gets rewarded. The gear will be distributed in multiple items, each with a 25% chance of dropping. If a player already owns an item, it will not drop again, increasing the chances of receiving other gear over time.
  2. No Gear Upgrades: The focus should be on earning new gear rather than upgrading existing items. Gear should be based on difficulty tiers:
  • Normal Raid: 100-105 ilvl
  • Heroic Raid: 110-115 ilvl
  • Mythic Raid: 120-125 ilvl (final boss 130 ilvl)
  • Mythic+ Dungeons: Item levels scale with the dungeon’s difficulty.
  1. PVP Gear Simplification: Remove the need for a PVP gear grind. PVP gear should be available for purchase and be completely free at the start of the expansion, while conquest is removed. These items will have no PVE stats and can be mixed and matched with different secondary stats, allowing players more freedom in customizing their gear.
  2. Maintain Rarity of Non-Power Items: Items like mounts, transmogs, and toys should remain as rare drops to maintain the excitement of obtaining them, but they should not affect a player’s power level.

Guide #3: Remove Racial Abilities and Expand Race/Class Combinations

Racial abilities currently add unnecessary complexity and balance issues, with some racials significantly outperforming others. To foster a more inclusive and enjoyable experience, racial abilities should be removed.

Key Recommendations:

  1. Remove All Racial Abilities: Racial traits should no longer provide combat advantages.
  2. Expand Race/Class Combinations: Unlock more options for races and classes. For example, why can’t Night Elves be Paladins? There should be no arbitrary restrictions when any race could theoretically use the Light.
  3. Introduce Racial Glyphs and Armor: Add more racial-specific glyphs and class-based armor designs to enhance roleplay and immersion. Examples include unique armor sets for Human Paladins, Orc Warriors, Night Elf Druids, and Undead Warlocks.

Guide #4: Focus on Content, Not the Grind

Rather than focusing on time-gated grinds, World of Warcraft should prioritize creating engaging and enjoyable content for all players. Each patch should introduce meaningful content, not just grindable systems.

Key Recommendations:

  1. Consistent Content Updates: Every patch should deliver a new raid, dungeon, and PVP map, ensuring a variety of activities for all playstyles.
  2. Re-skin PVP Maps for Variety: PVP maps do not need to be completely unique every time. A reskinned WSG, for example, can be themed around different environments like a Burning Legion spaceship or N’Zoth’s forces in Ny’alotha.
  3. Dungeons with Engaging Loot: Dungeons should focus on exciting visuals, loot rewards, and fun mechanics rather than overly complex mechanics that alienate players.

By simplifying classes, removing progression barriers, and focusing on content over grind, World of Warcraft can return to its roots of accessible, engaging gameplay that appeals to both casual and dedicated players alike.

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Chatgpt is getting a good run today.

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I feel like I got all my vitamins from that word salad. Thanks Chat GPT!

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What’s with these snide and condescending comments? What’s wrong with using Chat GPT (if it’s used)? I mean, not everyone is well-versed in english or has english as their mother tongue. So why is it frowned upon to use a tool to formulate and structure thoughts in a manner someone might struggle with otherwise? I mean, for us, the readers on the forum, it’s a win-win, because we ultimately get posts that are well-structured and easy to read.
So pretty please, with sugar on top, get off that pedestal you’ve climbed up on.

I would agree with all of this and probably a lot more, and I could write a wish-list a mile long myself.
I think Blizzard’s issue seems to be that they don’t have the inclination or the ability to do an overhaul of the game on this scale. They seem to be firing on all cylinders to simply deliver – on schedule – all the content on their current roadmap. So adding sweeping revamps on top of that, and requesting even more content as well, seems beyond their capability.
And I also don’t see Blizzard being too keen to change World of Warcraft too much. I mean, with Dragonflight they kind of committed to an approach of stability and a focus on core gameplay and none of these crazier revamps and experiments we’ve seen in the past. So “more of the same” is kind of the name of the game right now, I think. And in fairness, lots of people like World of Warcraft for what it is and don’t see any reason to turn it upside down. And for Blizzard, with World of Warcraft being a business, maybe you are ultimately better off with the devil you know than the one you don’t.

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Having the 4 seasons would already be something.

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Truth is I can spot a chatgpt post just by a scroll, I don’t even have to read past the first few words, it’s damn obvious and OP did nothing more than throw in a few prompts then copy and pasted the results direct. I doubt they’ve even read it themselves.

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Because if you read the post its just empyness couched in nice words. Honestly reads like a calorie free nothing burger. Because reskinning maps is content! Killing an enemy team on grass as opposed to sand is engaging.
Every patch should have a new dungeon (that we totally won’t grind) for… a patch.

It’s all words and no substance.

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write this more professional

The Guide to fix world of warcraft and make it a success once more.
Guide Number 1. Simplify Classes
Every single class right now is far too powerful, this creates an incredibly toxic environment because it is a double downing on bring the player not the class, which ultimately leads to a far greater meta design. If everybody brings mobility, stuns, crowd control, self-survival, utility, burst, sustain, area of effect damage and single target, you basically bring whoever is the best. Now this has always been a thing, however it has become more and more prominent because nobody is actually bad at any specific continent anymore. Back in the successful expansion, you had classes which had great CC but low survival, classes with little mobility but high survival, classes high burst but no sustain, and classes with great sustain but no real burst. Now you look at the modern design and every class is overloaded with more buttons to press than ever before. These may not be rotational buttons which are what truly matter as this is what 99% of the engagement of the game is, but instead you look at Hunters who have 2 charges of Wall, A full health heal, a damage immunity, a crit immunity and feign death. It’s such an overloaded toolkit that not only does it create a silly arms race in PVE which causes the vast majority of players to be excluded who don’t play the meta, It has an even larger toxic effect in PVP when one class is considerably stronger than the rest. Another problem with this is the classes are so complex, so many modifiers, so many abilities that it takes forever for you to do a tuning pass which is often way too weak and doesn’t fix any of the problem created.
There is no denying that the Dragonflight talent trees were a massive mistake, interesting there is an interview with Ion Hazzikotas whom said that the class power was the main reason they felt the need to introduce borrowed power, and that by redesigning classes you put yourself in a position where classes aren’t MOP level powerful for atleast 3 expansions… Amazingly it’s S1 of the first expansion and classes are already at MOP level…. Maybe not in ability count but when you combine the number of modifiers, charges of CDs and overall mobility, crowd control and power in burst CDS. It’s surpassed MOP. The only thing different is you’ve reduced the CC duration in specific parts of the game, otherwise it would be unplayable.
Another big issue with the over complicated and over animated classes is you’ve now recreated a situation where everybody has to use addons to maximize the DPS / understand what is going on around them, as keeping tracks of buffs or spell animation is next to impossible. Now an argument could be said that the game needs to have an improved UI to combat this and offer what the addons do… however it’s already at a level of absurdly where you see certainly players screens and it’s more looking at numbers and addon pop ups then it is the game…

  1. Crowd Control needs to be heavily pruned… No more shockwave & Stormbolt, no more Scatter Shot and Trap, No more Fel Eruption and Chaos Nova. It’s too much.
  2. Defensive and Offensive spells made weaker! No reason for the amount of modifiers in talents, procs and cool-downs. An occasion rotation proc is good, a strong 1-2-3 minute cool-down is great, but when an unproc, non -cd, non-trinket, non-enchant, non-ramp up is 500% different to the when it’s all up and running, there is a problem.
  3. Mobility needs to be heavily pruned across the board. No reason why multiple charges of the same spell + additional mobilities spells should be a thing. Mages where extremely fun toplay when they have 1 blink and 1 blast wave, now they have 2 shimmers, alter time, displacement, blast wave, snare dispel. It’s absurd.
    The mainthing that needs to maintain is player rotation. Do you not do what you did in legion where you put higher GCD and slowed down rotation to boring levels. Interaction, fast pace rotation are great!! Extremely powerful modifiers, cool-downs is not. Addition having more mobility and more defensive spells does not equate to more skilful game play, it actually deducts form it because well timed usages of a limited spell requires a far higher level of IQ then pressing a button at the wrong time but still having a multitude of buttons to fall back on.

Guide Number 2. Remove the player gap completely!
I’m going to put this into bullet points to make it easy to understand

  1. Dungeons and Raid bosses now have 100% drop chance of gear! (NOT MOUNTS / UNIQUE STUFF)
  2. Each boss will have a certain amount of gear (4 item for example) which will each have 25% chance to drop. If you own one of the items (in your bag or bank) then that item will not drop, meaning you will now have a 33.33% chance to get one the remaining 3 items. This becomes 50% the week later, and 100% the week later!.
  3. No more Upgrading of gear!! Examples below
    Normal Raid – 100-105 ilvl
    Heroic Raid – 110-115ilvl
    Mythic Riad – 120-125 ilvl (final boss 130ilvl)
    Mythic 1-5 – 100-105 ilvl
    Mythic 6-10 – 106-110ilvl
    Mythic 11-15 – 115ilvl-120ilvl
    Mythic 16-20 – 120-125ilvl
    21+ - 125ilvl
  4. No More upgrading!! If you want to farm M+ for gear upgrades, you can! If a player wants to do all content and be fully geared he can, but if a dad of 3 gets to play 1 hours per week, he can go to any content he wants and know he’s going to get an upgrade or at least a drop!
  5. PVP Gear grind removed entirely!! PVP GEAR IS FREE!!!
    It has 0 pve item level so cannot be used
    It has haste verse, crit verse, mastery verse on every item, mix and max as you please!!
    HONOR IS USED TO BUY PVP SPECIFIC ITEMS AND USABLES
    Conquest is completely removed
  6. Only RARE ITEMS such as Mounts, transmogs, enchants, toys will remain % drop to maintain the rare unique luck aspect but this will not effect player power!!

GUIDE NUMBER 3: Remove the racial powers and unlock more race / class combination

  1. All racial abilities removed entirely
  2. More racial glyphs added to make certain race / class combinations a thing. Blood Light for Blood Elf paladin and priests for example.
  3. More racial / class specific armours. Human Paladin armour, Orc Warrior armour, Night Elf Druid armour, Undead Warlock armour…
  4. I can understand no Human Demon Hunters, I can understand no Blood Elf Evokers, but I cannot understand why I can’t be a night elf paladin?? Literally Anybody can wield to light so come on!! No reason for it.

Guide Number 4: FOCUS ON THE CONTENT NOT THE GRIND

  1. Every patch should have a raid, a dungeon and an arena / BG map
  2. The PVP Maps don’t need be unique, they can be re-skinned WSG just for virtaty but have the same game play. Why can’t we play capture the flag on a massive Burning legion spaceship? Why can’t we play an alteract valley type in Nya’lotha?
  3. Dungeons also don’t need be super unique in mechanic every time, they can be a simple dungeon with fairly simple mechanics but look awesome and drop awesome looking loot!
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How about no? Most of your suggested changes removes the incentive to play altogether. There is no more goal to pursue if you remove all complexity in the game.

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Empyness?

I ask for

  1. More Battlegrounds which are re-skinned version of teh current to make it easier to produce
  2. CC, Mobility and Cool-downs pruned from classes with an argument that having more buttons doesn’t increase game design
  3. Change raid loot to 100% drop chance
  4. remove gear upgrading for grinding the content over grinding content for current to upgrade
  5. making pvp gear free to allow everybody to have access
  6. removal of racial and more race theme stuff that doesn’t effect power

It has a lot of content within. clearly you didn’t read it. even using Chatgpt to make the more understanding was still too much for you hahahahah

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Unfortunately with M+ and it being more of an e-sport these days that won’t be possible and won’t fit the pillar. It’s meant to be sweaty and super challenging.

Your suggestion would apply more to delves. They should be simpler and more fun and even the visual or “telescopic” should be added and applied. They don’t need to be overtuned and nor should they be overcomplicated. The reward system needs a bit of look at if blizzard insists on staying with this rubbish valor and crests upgrade system. Delves should be a source for these too and should be between 60 - 70% less than M+ but definately not what they are currently (if I recall you get between 1-3).

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Oh… wow accounts have gone from from 11million to 1.1million… i guess having the treadmill of complexity really helping the game?

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If you think it’s a troll post or general spam, then just report it as such and leave the snide and condescending commentary to yourself. No one here gives a damn about your incredible ability to spot Chat GPT from a mile’s distance. No one.
It’s a post about WoW on the WoW forum. If you don’t have something constructive to add to the topic of discussion, then you just keep your fingers off your keyboard, okay?

That’s in the eye of the beholder.
If you don’t have something to add to the topic of conversation, you can just sit this one out Dejarous.
There’s nowhere in the Forum Code of Conduct or Forum Guidelines that says that someone cannot write a post with the use of Chat GPT or that they cannot write a post with little substance. So again, get off the freaking pedestal.
Again, you don’t like the OP’s post? Fine, go somewhere else and post. If you think it violates any rules, then report it. But keep the snide commentary to yourself, it’s embarrassing.

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I’ve added what i wrote into chat gpt and simply asked it to make it more professional. nothing wrong with that.

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Lets fling loot at people so they are “done” in a week!

Thats not “content”.

Racials are about as impactful as whether someone has freckles or not.

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oh yes… only 94% Of all M+ competitors are night elf and 60% of all high rated pvpers are night elf too…

guess they don’t make a difference…

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No really, 94% of people that step into M+ are nelfs? You could have fooled me.

If you wanted to say 94% of MDI competitors I still wouldn’t believe you. And if you have to pull a niche event like that as an example, what bearing does that have on the other 99.99999999999% of the playerbase that don’t need to meld after a skip they practiced 700 times on the tournament realm for an event that happens twice a year?

Zero.

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If you wanna revitalize world of warcraft… WoW has to offer more content to do than delves and mythic+ as endgames…

I hate to break it to you all but doing the whole world map of trivial quests that gets your character literally no where… and just doing them for the sake of doing something. Is not really engaging content.

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Not sure where you got that figure from would be nice if you can post your source.

A simple google search shows and estiamtion as of March 2024 to be roughly 7 million.

A report from [IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/world-of-warcraft-subscription-numbers-are-higher-now-than-at-expansion-launch-in-a-franchise-first) in March 2024 also revealed the game was on the up, with over 7 million players subscribed to the service.

It does not say for which region or if this is world wide but I am going to go with world wide.

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the problem is that it IS successful, but what we want is to have a word with Chromie and see if she can send us back a la Terminator to stop activision taking over and destroying the original path.