Bringing WoW PvE Back to a Genuine Experience

Community General Discussion
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I believe the current state of PvE content in WoW is long overdue for a major overhaul. Since Legion, we’ve been going through the same formula over and over again — the structure hasn’t really changed, and it’s starting to feel stale. Each expansion should bring a sense of something fresh and exciting, not just a re-skinned version of what we’ve already done for years. I’d like to open a discussion about a possible PvE rework in WoW that could bring more logic to difficulty scaling and breathe new life into the raiding scene. Right now, the way dungeons and raids are balanced doesn’t really make sense in terms of difficulty. Mythic+ dungeons are labeled “mythic,” but in reality, they fall somewhere on normal raid level. My suggestion is to rebrand Mythic+ as Heroic+, keeping the affix and scaling system, but dropping the mythic label, as the challenge doesn’t match the name. Actual Mythic dungeons should return as true endgame content, with difficulty comparable to mythic raids – not about speed runs, but about tight coordination and tactical execution.

I also think each season should feature multiple raids – ideally three – each with a fixed difficulty and no option to switch between modes. The first raid would be tuned for normal difficulty. The second would offer a solid challenge at heroic level, and the third, final raid of the season would be tuned for mythic only, aimed at coordinated groups looking for serious challenge. This would eliminate the tedious repetition of running the same raid across four difficulty levels and instead encourage natural progression as players improve. The whole system would feel more coherent, rewarding, and could give PvE a much-needed refresh.

I believe World of Warcraft needs to bring back a bit of its rawness and mystery. These days, players know everything in advance – about their class, about boss mechanics, about rotations – and the game has shifted from an adventure into a scripted execution of pre-learned strategies. I think the path back to a more authentic experience could start by simplifying PvE content, reworking class design, and removing systems that constantly push players to compare themselves — like combat logs — while also giving players the option to hide their character profile or gear from being inspected if they choose to.

I want players to feel free to explore and play their heroes their own way, without constant pressure to follow some optimal build based on WarcraftLogs data. Of course, people will still look for guides, but if the only place to find them is YouTube or Twitch, that would naturally boost WoW’s content visibility. Players would have to figure things out for themselves again — experiment, explore, discover. That would bring back space for true individuality and player expression. Everyone could be a hero in their own way, rather than just following the same spreadsheet-optimized meta already solved during PTR.

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balance would be a night mare and people taking part would drop to even lower then it is now.

then they need to stop PTR/alphas/beta’s and data mining and that will not happen.

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Hard pass. That sounds game ruiningly unfun.

I want LESS emphasize on raids, not more.

Are there people who actually do that? I doubt there’s many.
Going from LFR to Normal is already not really a thing since LFR still has that stupid timegated release schedule, compared to the other difficulties.

I don’t think that’d happen. There would still be guides and a lot of people would still just follow those. Because for good or for bad, most people are sheep (and they’ve been conditioned to fear ‘underperforming’ because they won’t get picked anymore).

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I don’t think Blizzard can make multiple raids anymore, even if they wanted to.
Over the years the scope of raiding has only decreased, probably because of a mix of declining player popularity, other emerging game features, and because of an increasingly limited amount of development resources being available to Blizzard.
If Blizzard were to prioritize raiding in terms of development resources being spent, then it would come at the expense of something else. And I’m not sure if Blizzard can justify that.

That being said, I do wholeheartedly agree that the game formula has gotten stale.
I would say that the game increasingly emphasizes replaying the same content over and over in order to pursue character progression and difficulty progression.
I think the fun of that evaporates very quickly (unless you’re very enamored by character progression and difficulty progression) because WoW is such a static game. The mobs are always the same, the bosses are always the same, the world and the layout is always the same. Your character is always the same.
It’s a game experience perhaps best summarized by the movie Groundhog Day.
The gameplay revolves less about journeying and adventuring, and more about memorizing and optimizing. It’s like playing Super Meat Boy. You repeat it endlessly until you get it right, and then you repeat it some more until you get it perfect.

I’m not sure how much Blizzard can do though.
It’s tempting to want the kind of exploration and mystery you see in Elden Ring, or the freedom and ingenuity of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
But the reality is probably that WoW is sort of stuck being what it is. For one because Blizzard can’t change the game too much out of fear that they’ll alienate some existing players who enjoy the game for what it is. And also because it would be too much work. Simply looking at the last couple of expansions it’s easy to see that most of Blizzard’s development resources go into recreating the same-sized expansion product with the usual number of quests, dungeons, and raids as we’re used to – and that simply doing that every 2 years is a very tight operation that doesn’t really leave a lot of opportunity to fundamentally change the game’s design in a whole lot of ways.

I think Blizzard’s goal with the game is to steer it in a direction where they can utilize even more of their old and existing content, and where they can get more longevity and replay value out of it. Whereas I will say that the formula has gotten stale, I think Blizzard will simply try to make it more enticing.
At the end of the day, then Blizzard stands to gain more if players enjoy doing Horrific Visions again, or Timewalking raids, or old Dungeons incorporated into new Mythic+ Seasons, versus Blizzard needing to pour a lot of resources into making a lot of new content from scratch.

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So much this , they need to spice up TW

vanilla needs more dungeons then the 5 it has now and a raid

tbc needs there dungeons resorted maybe bring Mech for Bot and Steamvaults for Underbog

wotlk needs a refresh too

cata dungeons need a refresh

MoP dungeons refresh and a raid

wod dungeon refresh and a raid

legion same ^^

BFA lets see what happens.

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Not that I really care for end game but having 3 raids that I can only do story mode on one seems …redundant.

I think if they stopped triyng to push it as an e-sport, M+ and Raids would be more popular. Also, making the tactics less whacky. Hopefully they do that with their addon ban and UI upgrades but I imagine that will be a rocky road.

I liked doing dungeons in wotlk to get badges and buy gear, also the tabard rep. I really think they should bring that back, it was so much simpler.

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The idea of raids having a static singular difficulty is bad because then you just go back to the times before raid finder when people who couldn’t get into raids were locked out of the story. And despite trying to push the competitive aspect of the game there are plenty of people who would just like to see the story.

Next part is a bit off topic but I would like Blizzard to focus more on the story when it comes to instances. Delves in my opinion should have stories comparable to dungeons or MoP scenarios where the story had some thought put into it and not just a random side quest given as an excuse (yes some dungeons are like that as well).

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its playability is over.
they finished this game.

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I understand that taking risks isn’t easy, but I’ve been playing WoW since Classic, and in my opinion, the biggest risk for the game right now isn’t in making changes but in not making them.

We used to have a game that evolved every 1.5 - 2 years with new stories and reworks that gave players something fresh to play and explore. But since Legion, it’s felt more like Ctrl-c Ctrl-v. And lately, it feels more like big patches than real expansions. And I’m starting to feel too old to have spent the last 10 years playing what feels like a copy of Legion over and over.

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No thank you. I love my Wow spreadsheets and utilized them since 2006.

I am not interested in anything other than min-maxed carefully curated mathematical harmony. Regardless of WoW being Classic or retail or seasonal.

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To play devil’s advocate though: In the last 2 expansions Blizzard has started doing way more out of the box stuff than ever before. And that’s on top of the traditional quest, dungeon, raid basis.

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Also, I have to disagree with this part. It was not Blizzard that caused this, it was us players.

Blizzard cannot change anything from game or engineering perspective.

No matter how many raids they release, how many class changes they make, there will always be significant, not big, part of playerbase that will math it out and then start winning more efficiently.

And over the time, more and more people will copy those approaches to also win more efficiently.

And then, they will start to soft require that from others. And as with everything since the dawn of time, the more methodical and systematic approaches will prevail because at the end of the day, they just deliver.

Blizzard adapted the game to us, not other way around. And they are maybe hesitant to invest in adventuring changes, that sooner or later will be decoded by us and AIs.

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Wouldn’t mind the removal of PTR, so folks need to spend some time figuring it out. It’s something else, experiencing and sharing infos along with the way with the players online without having mods been already processed and optimized for it on test servers.

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But that would mean blizzard would need to test stuff themselves.

That will never happen.
And no one takes the exploring part from you.

If you go to wow head on patch day and look up all that’s new that’s on you.
I specifically avoid things I don’t want to know about until a few weeks into the season.

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In such case, new information becomes valuable and why would we have any reason to share it outside of our cliques or without hefty sum of gold involved?

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They do not fix the stuff on the PTR before pushing it out to live anyway, so what’s the difference? We already have seen the mess on the last few patches that they aren’t capable to react to player reports and feedback.

Because people will share it over time, whenever others want it or not.

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This doesnt make much sence. M+ or H+, as how you would like to call it is infinitely scalling, no matter how hard you want to make your new Mythic difficulty it will eventually be overtaken and surpassed by H+.

Oh and please dont be one of those “raid or die” people that just go “people dont play M+ beyond +10 or for fun”.

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I would say we need fated raids as a permanent feature, so the tier doesn’t just die as soon as the next one comes out.

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A lot of solid points and I agree, the current formula, especially the repetition and static systems, does feel creatively boxed in.

If I can add to the discussion - Blizzard’s kept this ship afloat for two decades, which is no small thing, especially with how much the genre and the playerbase have changed from the early 2000s to today.

I imagine, like many others, that there’s a lot happening behind the scenes on the development side. Apart from the legacy systems and outdated tools meme, there’s the reality of teams being reshuffled onto other projects that need support. Or even quietly dissolved. And with the Microsoft acquisition, we know there’s been a ton of internal change. Probably more so on other Blizzard titles, but it still affects the bigger picture and definitely slows things down for everyone. You start seeing more reused content and more cautious design - not necessarily because the newer generation of devs lack creativity (they do) , but because they just don’t have the same flexibility or manpower they used to. But also keeping a massive live game running, with millions of moving parts, takes far more upkeep than most of us probably imagine.

Even if they wanted to reinvent the wheel every expansion, I don’t think that’s currently realistic without something else suffering for it. And to a great extend, we already see this.

I also think it’s easy to underestimate how hard it is to retain players across such a broad spectrum, casuals, hardcore raiders, m+ addicts, collectors, PvP lovers, solo players, RPers. Everyone wants something a little different, and any big shift risks alienating one group to please another.

But that’s not to say Blizzard shouldn’t push harder or take more risks. Though perhaps the better question is: how do you evolve a game without breaking it for the people still holding on? Is bringing Metzen on stage and adding player housing the answer? If you’re looking at it from the bean counters’ perspective, probably yes. It’s safe, it’s familiar, it prints them money. But if you look beyond the sparkling surface, I think they’ll need to make more deliberate changes to how they approach both design and storytelling. Because when players get bored or disappointed or angry, most won’t wait around. They’ll leave. Open their Steam backlog and move on.

So, are they willing to take the kind of steps that actually move the game forward, rather than just keep it running? And is it even possible, given the current direction and Microsoft’s more cautious, cost focused approach, to not just momentarily please the crowds - but to actually surprise us and build something that moves the needle again? (no, I don’t mean player housing).

I’m curious, but not especially optimistic.

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This probably better explanation than my attempt.