Ap was nice i never felt forced to farm it, it was just that 0,1% that was forced to farm it.
When i did content i had ap while doing it, was nice when i had a lvl up.
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It’s 100% selfishness. These players don’t care about the long term health of the game or what the average player wants. Just reading their replies on this thread is crazy. They don’t want an MMORPG, they want a lobby game.
If most players wanted this style of wow, I would personally just move on from the game instead of demanding Blizzard design for a minority. But the truth is most players want to play WoW and not just Mythic+ or Raids. This is World of Warcraft, not World of Schedule-Simulator…
I just hope Blizzard realizes it before it’s too late and we end up with “Radlogflight 2.0” as our next expansion.
Yeah that’s a really good point. I imagine it’s played a huge role in the extreme healer shortage this expansion. People like to talk about how this season has been rough, but so was last season and it doesn’t seem like they’re making it any better. No wonder healers are quitting.
BFA was a huge success. Shadowlands didn’t have AP, so it’s way closer to Dragonflight than it is to Legion or BFA. We saw record numbers of sales after BFA which was an actual AP expansion. After Shadowlands where we had 0 AP the sales were so abysmal that the game went on sale extremely fast and they tried to prop up the numbers with 50 different promos.
There was nothing forcing you to do any chores other than you gaslighting yourself into thinking you needed it. Unless you were a WF raider you didn’t need to do it.
This is such a cop-out excuse by DF defenders. MoP was an extremely controversial expansion hated by many and it had a 14 month content drought. They followed up with WoD which is wow’s 2nd worst expansion and yet Legion still had extremely good sales & participation. In fact Legion was so good that it was the last time wow saw a large group of new players enter the game.
I see this parroted all the time but it’s just completely wrong. In Vanilla & TBC leveling played the role of AP. Leveling to max was the majority of the content for players and you logged in everyday and grinded XP to gain new talents, spells & unlock higher lvl armour. Functionally it was the exact same as AP. In Wrath we had the daily HCs, Weekly raid and also the badges to farm from HC dungeons.
Not to mention both Vanilla, TBC & Wrath all had a ton of reputation & profession grinds for massive player-power gains. Keeping players engaged everyday to progress their characters.
In MoP we had reputation grinds for player power in the start and the lego cloak. In WoD we had the lego ring which required quite a lot of farming, but that wasn’t enough on its own.
AP was just the next iteration of it. Just because it wasn’t called “AP” doesn’t mean it didn’t exist in all but name. The only expansions without anything similar to AP has been Cataclysm, Warlords, Shadowlands & Dragonflight. Cataclysm was the beginning of the end and all the other 3 expansions had extremely low participation. It’s not a coincidence.
This is such a strange argument because you can apply it to AP as well. If we use your logic then you agree that AP was a liked & well received system? Because they repeated it in BFA after Legion.
Truth is that Blizzard doesn’t always make the right decisions. Removing AP has been a detrimental one. Dragonflight’s participation numbers are proof of that.
You could say the same about BFA, and many people did, yet Shadowlands still saw record numbers in sales. Part of that was because of Covid, but it’s also because most players did in fact enjoy BFA. It was just the loud minority who complained.
Fact is that none of this matters as long as the game is fun. To many players both MoP with it’s controversial theme, rep grinds in the start & 14 month content drought and WoD with it’s insane content drought were both bad expansion. And yet Legion is still widely regarded as the best or 2nd best expansion by almost everyone.
DF did “innovate” in a lot of ways. We got dragonriding, profession revamp, talent tree revamp, new dungeon pool every season, Solo-Shuffle, gear upgrading etc. Not as much as Legion ofc, but still.
Believe me I am not just saying random things. I have thought about this a lot, the lack of character progression in Dragonflight is awful. The lack of meaningful content outside of Raids & M+ is terrible.
I have 9 characters. Five of them are 447-448, three of them are 443-444 and one that is 438. If I wanted to I could get all of them to 445 by the end of the week if I wanted to, but there’s just no point. I am never gonna raid higher than HC on them and there’s no aspirational solo-content to aim for either like Mage Tower.
Like what other content is there to do on my alts? Just the exact same keys but pressing different spells? The game needs more solo content & character progression, not more replayability.
It literally hasn’t, but keep telling yourself that.
I’m not. I’m just disproving the lies about everyone being forced to grind AP when they weren’t. Nobody in my guild sat and spammed islands everyday. People just did their weekly at most and that was it. This was the experience for most players.
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Because Blizzard failed 3 expansions in a row.
Well, farming artifact weapon infinite trait was worthwhile but kinda sucked design wise.
So let’s keep going this way then. If you claim players don’t have to engage with the system then removing it won’t be an issue, since the vast majority of players don’t care or are barely interacting with it. So that would be like removing a feature no one cares about, therefore, bringing back wouldn’t make the game better because it’s been ignored by 99.9% of the players.
So they should never strife to do better again, because they failed? 
And; 3 expansions in a row? Which ones are you talking about?
Legion didn’t fail. At all.
Agree to disagree; I loved it.
“Ackchyually” its 95,97% of the playerbase atm 
https://www.wowprogress.com/ just scroll down
most ppl just stress themself to hard…but yeah doing nothing is better, i love a game where i can do nothing for my char
dragonflight is the best expansion to not log in
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Why do you play this game then? 
I actually play way more wow eversince the removal of borrowed power and grinds. I do feel like playing wow again on top of my raids and M+. Nothing’s wrong here.
Thanks to legion’s fan service on top of people assuming BFA would bring back that true Horde vs Alliance storyline which had been lost since TBC.
What was anima then ? Some kind of soft weekly AP, but still required to get some conduit slots, which brings more DPS or survivability.
Nah, it still had a lot of borrowed powers so that alone make it close to Legion and BFA.
Thanks to agressive marketing and covid forcing people to stay at home.
I mean, Anima is not the sole reason to explain why SL was bad, covenants probably played a bigger role in that.
So if nothing forces me to grind, then we might aswell remove the grind ? I mean, that’s the logic, if no one has to, then we might aswell remove that.
In UX/UI, this could apply to one principle being incitement. So if a system is being designed in a way that has a lot of promptings towards players gaslighting them, then it’s not on the design, not on the player.
Legion was just full of fan service, bringing characters and lore elements teased by blizzard for years. And Legion being good has nothing to do with AP, it just delivered a heck ton of casual content, which, spoiler, was actually not tied to damn AP. I mean, gathering weapon skins and doing class halls didn’t required any kind of AP, just the usual leveling.
And that’s the kind of content I’ve been asking for, some good casual content that is not tied to any kind of power. And that makes it even more enjoyable.
So what’s leveling from 100 to 110 or from 110 to 120 then ?
That’s not how mythic raiding works, since you claim having some CE then you have to know how this works.
Yes, 8.1 was BFA’s best patch, just doing 3 islands on wed and being done with it. But in 8.0, that was clearly not enough. Not to mention of course that Blizzard took 1 patch to fix azerite thresh holds for armors.
And I did farm islands in the end, because I wanted to buy mounts. And in the end, it felt less bad because I knew mounts are evergreen content which neck and armors aren’t.
I mean, at my current work, management claimed teams should strife to do better, and in the end I’ve witness some smalls improvements but the major flaws still remained. It would take a massive project and management restructuring which is not gonna happen anytime soon.
Legion was quite bad in the early stages regarding borrowed power, it got better overtime of course. But I’m saying borrowed powers failed, not the expansion, which had a lot of content outside of AP.
Ok, how would you have character progress at max level in vanilla if you didn’t do instanced content?
In TBC?
In wotlk?
In cata?
And on it goes.
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I don’t agree; I loved it throughout.
Ah, fair enough.
I think that if they had let us carry on our artifact weapons and had developed a system where we could ‘imbue’ those weapons with drops from new content (and thus keeping them relevant and current), then artifact weapons to this very day could have been a popular system.
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It’s funny to see how different opinions are. Honestly, I don’t care what they do as long as it’s fun…
I agree with that.
The problem is; what is fun differs from person to person.
Being hard capped at 4 legiondaries at the start of the expansion was not a good idea, since it pretty much locked players out of the 16 remaining possibilities.
They shouldn’t have destroyed those tbh.
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The Purpose of AP was to serve as reward for determination. You play the game and your character becomes more powerful with each passing week aka to help you kill that final boss or to go key level or two higher.
And guess what? it worked flawlessly. Liveliness of participation was high thru entire season.
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Things change. This was covered in Ion’s interview with Preach I believe.
The community was asking for something to “progress” and AP etc was the answer to that. It was new, fresh and exciting for a while but became stale when it came to be seen as a chore, which they have data to prove and stacks up with what I’ve heard from many people.
So first expansion with it was “yay, cool”, second was “awww, not more of this” and then it got removed.
I refute that removing it was a detrimental idea. The fact is Blizz subs go up at expansion and patch launches and then go down afterwards after people have seen what they want to see.
All adding in an artificial retention / chore measure like AP does is make people resent it because they feel compelled to “not fall behind”.
People are going to walk away anyway, now they can do it not feeling aggravated about artificial retention measure, a much healthier thing for the player and their relationship with the game.
So in short, removing AP was a brilliant idea.
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I agree.
This system probably worked ok for a while as players did farm their AP to gain power.
But I suspect it has the opposite effect now. When players see a chore-grind such as AP, they don’t even start it, they decide they’ll come back to the game at the end of the expansion, play through the story and wait for pre-patch to gear up for the next expansion (or at least they used to until SL killed even this playstyle and they didn’t come back at all).
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Sure but at the same time, the vast majority of players aren’t getting curve or ksm, let alone ce and ksh, so it’s not determination for casual players but a time tax for ce and ksh players. I do get why getting stronger is fun but it’s not like casual players would notice the effects of having 5% extra damages on a builder or a finisher.
It had many flaws from the start, such as not being able to progress 2 specs at the same time, which for obvious reasons, was fixed later on.
Probably because there was a carrot like in any mobile or asian mmo game. If ap was still a thing but was a currency only for cosmetic rewards then participation would drop.
I hope they release zero content for the next expansion. They should call it World of Relaxation. You pay 60 euros to go around and farm old transmogs in the old expansions and just chill for 2 years and not log in.
Just think about all the cool games I would be able to discover because I would never be playing WoW, would automatically make it the G.O.A.T expansion IMO
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I don’t disagree with your message, but if we wanna get technical it’s way less. Wowprogress numbers is based on all guilds and not the entire playerbase. Data for Azeroth shows Sarkareth CE as something only 0.695% of players have.
You and literally nobody else. There’s a reason why the open world is dead, why people’s friends lists are empty, why guilds are disbanding like crazy even though it’s a “good” expansion, why raid & m+ participation is in the dumpster etc. etc.
It did. BFA was the first time in years that world pvp was alive & extremely fun. It was also the last time since then. People were just too busy parroting content creator takes instead of actually enjoying the expansion.
BFA’s biggest “problem” was having to follow up on the end of Legion which is when wow peaked. No expansion on launch would ever be able to hold a candle to the end of Legion. People weren’t upset because BFA was bad, tbf azerite armour complaints in 8.0 was completely justified, but most people were upset because the beginning of BFA wasn’t as good as the end of Legion.
It was the first time we went from a borrowed power xpac to the beginning of a new one, obviously there would be massive whiplash. But despite that, they did a fairly good job all things considered. BFA from patch 8.1 to 8.3 was extremely fun.
I mean this just proves you don’t know what you’re talking about. Anima was a completely cosmetic currency. It wasn’t required for Conduit slots at all, you unlocked them through Renown points.
The one weekly quest asking you to collect 1000 anima for one renown point is the only line you can draw between Anima & player power, but that’s extremely flimsy. Blizzard just chose anima as the quest, it could’ve been “collect 300 boar legs” and it’d be the same. That doesn’t wouldn’t mean killing boars is the same as an AP grind.
Everything is borrowed power in this game. Your gear, trinkets, special weapons & tier sets are all borrowed power.
No it was thanks to BFA actually being good. Go to Rio’s website and look at the boss kills. BFA had a drop after Uldir, any expansion would, but it slowly climbed throughout the expansion again because it was good.
Anima had absolutely nothing to do with why Shadowlands was bad. It was a purely cosmetic currency. I don’t think it’s one reason alone, but the lack of meaningful character progression in SL was a big factor.
What? Players want AP back because its a good reward giving you player power, allowing you to progress your character. Good player power rewards makes content fun, it’s literally how this game functions. Remove player power(aka gear) from raids & mythic+ and both game modes die over night.
It’s on the player when it’s only a minority doing it.
I don’t disagree that Dragonflight’s story is pretty bad, but a lot of the casual content gave you AP as well. It was a good player power reward acting as motivation for a lot of content, but it also gave you good bonus rewards.
Are you really gonna compare leveling that takes 6 hours to back in Vanilla & TBC when it played a massive part of the game?
It is. The majority of guilds didn’t force you to perma grind 24/7. The worst I saw from a regular guild was telling players to unlock X trait which you got by playing passively in the first week and then also by playing what you’d normally do in the Heroic week. I unlocked all 3 Essence slots in BFA without grinding Islands.
Beginning of BFA was rough, I don’t disagree with you there. But going out of your way to grind AP just wasn’t a thing for 99% of players.
Dragonflight numbers never went up. It just kept going down. Participation in this raid tier is lower than what we saw in Sanctum of Domination which is the worst patch they ever made. Even Dragonflight launch had fewer players than Sanctum as well and xpac launches is by far the most hyped.
Yeah it’s so brilliant, nobody’s playing it, but it’s definitely brilliant. Just trust.
It’s not about whether they need it or not. AP added character progression & player power progression for everyone. Especially for casuals & solo players who aren’t likely to engage in group content. For CE level players it was still extremely nice because it gave you a way to progress your character whenever you wanted, without having to rely on 4-19 other players.
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Rofl, what.
I play a lot more than I did in Legion. I barely played Legion due to artifact weapons, I pretty much lvled up at the start and saw that I had to regrind it on off-spec and was rather annoyed and then when I saw I had to start over totally on alts I just straight up started playing FFXIV more than I played WoW. The only time in WoW that has happened.
I also play a lot more than I did in BFA.
I had to reroll to horde for BFA season 4 & SL because m+ was really rough to play as alliance due to the lack of keys, lol. I started lvling the horde rerolls already in season 1 of BFA because I saw it coming miles away that it would drop off like mad and then I stuck with them in SL until they announced cross faction play. There’s more keys in LFG now than when I was playing alliance in BFA.
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Oh you only play for gear?
Says the player playing an MMORPG who would obviously play something else if gear did not exist in the game.
Great posts in this thread by the way. The sad state of affairs is that it is somehow controversial to argue that current Retail WoW participation is in the dumpster.
Youtube views? Massively down (worst they have ever been)
Twitch views? Down (despite Classic HC carrying the category).
PvP? Dead
Raid participation? Way down, almost at Sepulcher level, if not worse.
M+? Lower than one million total runs before the Exodia disaster of 10.5 hit, no idea what the numbers even are now.
Reddit? Weekly threads about somehow, no one is playing, and there is literally no one online on their friendlist. (I am also the also the last person remaining on my friend-list, even though I made online friends in Legion, BFA and even Shadowlands).
Yet somehow community perception is that Dragonflight is doing well?
I don´t really think we can have a serious discussion about Dragonflight until Season 3, where numbers will be so awful even content creators / community will be forced to admit defeat about the expansion. Sadly, we might just end in a situation where people will just try to blame BFA / Shadowlands again lol… Maybe people will even try to blame Christmas, or season 2 of Diablo 4, who knows at this point.
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