I meant that in the literal sense, that the tooltip is just a plain old LIAR because it shows lower damage than the ability really does.
I’m aware how that RNGey mastery works. So it should show, say, 600-800 damage when the ability deals min 600 and max 800 damage. What it DOES though is showing 612 while in reality it deals 705 (low lvl, I know, I’m too lazy to level it up, working on it).
I do not like being lied to. In any way or form. ESPECIALLY when it’s some overgrown Tetris getting in it’s virtual head that now is a good time to rebel against humanity
The whole thing would be more acceptable if all spells of all classes had such problems. Or let’s say the spell does 600-800 and tooltip says “about 700”. I’d prefer exact numbers but this is kinda tolerable. Thing is, the tooltips were upgraded somewhere in Cata or MoP to show not “raw spell, no extra damage” numbers but “real numbers that spell will deal on the current target”. So this is actually regression to somewhere around Wrath. Only it’s not even half as cool as it was back then.
The problem is that it’s not because of Blizzard it’s because of majority of playerbase mentality and how they play the game. There are a lot of competitive players who just want to clear the hardest content because less difficult content is not a challenge for them so they are not entertained with it. If you are good let’s say challenger at League you don’t want to play against silver or gold players because it doesn’t make sense. That’s the case here. There is a reason why mythic guilds don’t want new players whose experience is LFR and maybe normal raiding. Everyone has to go through it. If you want to raid difficult content - you have to find a guild. If you can’t join mythic one - join heroic and raid there to get some experience and get better. Same goes for PvP if you are 1500 exped player don’t sign for “2x 2400 exped players look for healer for gladiator push” because you’re not good enough and your 1500 cr only makes them lose more rating.
Also if you are on normal raid and you do less dps than someone else but you have better gear. Inspect him. Read why aren’t you performing that good - you’ll get better and be able to join better content. It’s exactly the same as in every game. If you are new to League you won’t play challengers (unless you are extremely talented) but silvers and golds. And if you don’t care about being good why do you talk crap about players who do.
About 2nd and 3rd part I 100% agree. Scaling is currently disgusting and what’s the worst Blizzard can’t even add proper tooltips. I remember Legion where spells in PvE and PvP did different damage but it wasn’t said anywhere.
About RP in the game… It’s a bit ironic that Blizzard was removing a lot of rp aspect of the game for years:
-Finders? Are finders RP in any way? Instead of finder you could have an npc mage who would tp you to the dungeon what would make sense but instead you open tab and sign in for the dungeon. For years when herilooms were introduced you didn’t play World of Warcraft but dungeons from Stormwind/Orgrimmar till the max level. Tell me if you know anyone who didn’t do it? I guess no.
-Mutliple difficulty levels for raids, dungeons? No. Because no RPG game works in the way that you go to the dragon and say “yo Deathwing, could you please don’t be so harsh on us? Instead when we kill you just drop weaker dress”. It also killed another RP element
-M+? No… Same as here. You don’t go to bosses and tell them “guys try harder on us and give us better dress”. Actually there was good solution to make it RP. Just connect it with infinite dragonflight and create an NPC that is bronze dragon fighting them teleporting you to the dungeons. Bigger power of bosses could be explained with infinite dragonflight corruption like it was in some Caverns of Time dungeons.
-Weekly chests. No… Because in no rpg you find a chest that rolls a dice and gives you an item from random enemy.
-Removal of stats. From my perspective RPG games are all about developing stats, skills and equipment of your character.
-Removal of lots of flavour spells that are rarely used because “they does nothing”. Having different weapon enhancements was there not because they did something but that was the gimmick of your class. Imbuing weapons with elemental power. You weren’t just warrior with lightning power but Enhancement Shaman enhancing weapons.
-Removal of quiver, arrows and many more things. While it was problematic when someone ran out of arrows it was part of their class and if someone wants to raid or do any content anyway he/she should be prepared.
-Making professions meaningless rng based joke. It was also another rp part of the game. You could be a great smith making armors that are competitive to raid ones even if it required mats from raid.
-Change of talents so WoW became more flashy arcade game. We didn’t create this new flexible talent system it’s Blizzard who did it. They gave us tools to optimize for every fight. They made us able to switch spec to other one whenever we can to limit it now with covenants.
The truth is that Blizzard made us play this way. They made us swap talents what wasn’t the case pre-MoP. They made us switch between all 3-4 specs while in the past we had dual spec only. Now they try to make us guilty for the way most people play WoW. The truth is they ruined the RP aspect and they are not going to fix it with Covenants because the rootcause of the issue lies deeper in the game design.
And just to sum it up old PvP videos have more RP in them than Shadowlands.
While I generally agree with the post above, there are some points I’d like to comment on as a Wrath child.
You could. And then those poor NPCs would be mobbed harder than AH and bankers. Remember that was years ago, when PCs were not that good, and bottlenecks are ALWAYS design failures. Just look at Great Seal & Chamber of Heart. Interface window is just QoL/access feature, you still can do it the old way if you want, complete with “Guys move your butts to instance, I don’t have a whole day”
I didn’t. I prefer quests over DF spam as I’m strange that way. At least until Cata made Azeroth zones into big monorails with that “burned & damaged” looks. Guess that BFA has taught me to join DF as tank, then “pull everything, let DPS guys nuke it down, pull another group” as it’s faster and the real start is at 120, not 1. And then some arrogant liar comes out and says it’s “degenerate gameplay”. Well, if it’s degenerate, then how about those who made it so effective? -__-
Also DF starts at 15. So you kinda have to play some WoW, even if it’s just killing mobs in your starting zone
That’s where RNG started. Burn it! BURN IT!
Firstly they removed some secondaries as they were “too complicated”. Then they reworked items to always grant the useful primary stat - str/int/agi in addidion to secondaries. So why couldn’t they get hit, dodge, ARP back? Too complicated to “cap this at X and then go str all the way”?
There’s arcane elemental rare mob on beach near Silvermoon. If you’re Arcane specced, you are literally unable to kill it while leveling because it’s immune to Arcane damage, wands don’t deal enough damage and you’d have to get one, and you do not have any spells that deal serious non-Arcane damage. So enjoy bashing it over the head with your staff. This was one of very few things that was a complete design failure in Legion and only in SL it’s going to get better.
And the pruning went WAY too far. In this example the Shaman “weapon enchants” should be bit streamlined to spec, i.e. Flametongue for Elemental, Earthliving for Resto, Rockbiter/Windfury for Enhance. Should be “This is preferred because it works best with this spec, as it’s caster dps/healer/melee dps buff, but if you absolutely WANT or NEED to, you can still use others”. NOT “This spell had no purpose so we removed it and didn’t bake its function into base spec cuz cba”. Thinking they know better than us, people who actually play the game. While every few days there’s a new Rextroy’s video reminding how much they don’t. Really, “learning disability” excuse only goes so far…
This was huge QoL issue. Hunters had to sacrifice bag slots for ammunition as they were using it up quite fast. Wouldn’t be an issue if arrows stacked to say 10000 or were not counted as item in bag. Warlocks had the same problem with soul shards before Cata AND they had to generate them somehow, while only executing things with Drain Soul created them.
Once upon a time you had an incentive to have a profession: You’d get some tangible benefit in the form of extra sockets on your gear, cheaper & better enchants, special JC-only gems, etc. But then professions got kinda bloated and leveling from 1 to 600 wasn’t looking like the best possible deal to get equivalent of 2 more gems. So profession benefits were removed in later expansions as frankly they weren’t worth the time investment.
Then professions got cut into parts: Old World, Outland, Northrend, etc. Now it does make sense to put profession bonuses in game again. Make them useful as more than fuel for disenchanters.
Indeed. I was quite happy with old 71 points trees. Only thing they needed was some shuffling, as “signature” abilities of a given spec should not be available only when you’re done with leveling. But then they like the chainsaw oh so much… And the whole “swap talents whenever you like” thing just makes me wonder why they’re designing the game to incentivize doing so. Yes, changing should be allowed, but isn’t it a bit much to swap talents for every single encounter? Required cuz DPS check? Then who made this crap that requires you to essentially rebuild your character before each boss? And just now they say “this bad”? Where were they for the last 8 years?
I wouldn’t use the phrase “RP aspect”, otherwise this is essentially correct. They made this bed, now they get to lie in it, no buts, no backsies, no complaints. Should have design the game better or just make their damn mind up.
The issue about leveling is that it’s a boring chore after my 5th alt.
Something needed to be done and they’ve done that by…reducing time taken by leveling (Which does not solve leveling’s main issue, which is : it’s boring)
As for finders themselves, it’s now a part of the game so it’s here to stay. I wished LFR would be gone, but I don’t care about that.
Surely, but on the same time, raids contain a lot of lore elements and in a way I’m against mythic only phase that has exclusive piece of lore. Imo, lore should be accessible by every player, so having multiple difficulties is good in this way.
I do foresee some issues (Like ilvl inflation) linked to multiple difficulties and I feel like LFR or NM should be gone.
It’s just a piece of disapointement at this point and…it’s remains in the game.
If we could at least target a specific loot, it could be fine.
I’m quite split on that. I mean, hit and expertise were boring, in the way that you just reach a cap and anything above said cap is reforged into another stat.
However, I do think that gear reforging should be brought back to the game, if they were to make ‘loot more meaningful’.
Pruning is still an issue, but unpruning mostly brought back those useless spells istead of actually working on rotation, flow. Many specs are still not functionnal despite a generous unpruning (Arms warrior does not feel good to play, but got quite a lot of spell, Unholy DK faces same issues).
I’m not against any form of flavour spell that I would not bind, but I wished they would focus first on meaningful spell.
That’s the part I still don’t get. I mean, they had a perfect system from wrath to mop, so why did they “fixed what was not broken” ?
Instead of covenant, they should have spent more time on professions, even if what they did is a good step in the right direction.
I do get why some people dislike this and the solution would simply bring back the old talent tree and keep the current one. I guess it’s too hard for them to think about that simple solution.
They can’t change a design that has been in place for quite some times now, or they could, but they would also make PVE way easier, because it became harder thanks to those tools. Doing current mythic raiding without talent swaping, being able to optimize everything would really be a harsh and unpleasant experience.
Thank you very much guys for your effort responding to me.
@Grigory - regarding professions I don’t mind they spread them among expansions - that’s actually fine but the fact that professions were rng based is just huge disappointment. Why can’t professions be like in Wrath or Cata - where you could get even heroic (equal to current mythic) recipes. Professions were really miningful. All enhancements to items like spealthreads, belt buckles - it was good because besides being Retribution Paladin - you could be a blacksmith or jeweler - this is RP. They could even further adding for example single player scenarios for getting mats from different expansions. For example killing a black dragon for scale or whatever.
I know quiver was QoL but it took flavor from spec. If you want as many bags as others - don’t play hunter. That was the downside while having a lot of benefits from playing the class.
Overall I don’t say that every change I mentioned is bad but they are anti roleplay.
@Shihiroki - I understand you are bored etc. but my point is that standing in the middle of the city queuing for dungeons until the current expansion is anti roleplay no matter what but they made it happen. Adding Covenants won’t fix it. I don’t think you can even go back to roleplay roots with the current state of the game without upsetting huge part of the community.
@LFR - have to go and normal should be new LFR. LFR is idiotproof but it also doesn’t bring anything to the game besides letting someone who can play 3 hours a week to see the raid storyline. However it’s actually equal watching this on youtube. First of all someone who can’t play everyday shouldn’t play MMO. This is not the game for him. As harsh as it sounds you can’t sacrifice the core community for such players because they are just unable to play this genre. To play MMO game you need time and you need to invest it.
I’m huge fan of reforging and I would love to see it back but I’d also love to see some extra secondary stats 4 is just not enough. Maybe new stat to lower CDs. Maybe more leech on the gear for squishy meeles who can keep uptime. Something that lowers armor. Maybe bring back some resists but not immunities. I don’t know but Blizzard has to be creative.
Your view on talents is exactly the same as mine. Put active spells on new talent trees and passives on old and give us two tabs. A lot of customisation for casuals? Yes but who cares. They don’t care so they will choose them randomly anyway but some core players can benefit from it and have more fun.
The reason why they don’t do it. is because they invented another borrowed power system and will put their whole focus on it. They will spend 90% of the expansion balancing it, tuning it while in fact most specs are currently designed to work around Legion Legendary weapons that are not in the game and they feel unfinished. They had to fully rework few of them to make them work but some still need some love. I think that they try with borrowed power because they are so scared of critique. Borrowed power can always be easily removed after expansion and replaced while with class/spec design it’s not that easy.
While I understand that you can’t add spells and talents every expansion - just redesign them. Replace these that are never taken. Create new mechanics and interactions between players. You can’t endlessly create borrowed power systems because they don’t work!
That’s good for you. You’re already playing Enh what’s already a handicap in the current game. I’m glad it’s ok for you but I won’t be able to enjoy Shadowlands fully with the current design.
The best fix would actually make leveling a fun and immersive experience and nerfing to the ground dungeon xp. Oh Wait…they tried and it black lashed so hard that they won’t do that.
Covenants are not Roleplay at all. I mean, if a ret paladin is dealing shadow damages thanks to Venthyrs ability, then it’s quite not rp because paladin is about the light, not the opposite.
Blizzard should incentivising playing in a guild and should well… Leave LFR as it stands.
Ooof… I would not bet on that
As I said : this is an easy middle ground that would satisfy both sides but… Is not being done yet.
I really don’t like borrowed powers because it’s like building an Ikea piece of furniture rather than building a Lego toy. And I really hate the fact that’s taken away even if some of that stuff should be baselined so easily.
They’ve been literally doing this for ages. Even in Wod when they removed spells, they still added an extra talent row and 4 new passive abilities.
I actually had a lot of fun back then leveling new char with my friend but they reverted it of course due to butthurt.
But they advertise it this way xD What’s the most hilarious thing in Shadowlands
Guilds should be promoted again like with guild levels in Cata. About LFR - for me either remove it or basically keep it with normal difficulty level. The goal of raiding is not clearing whole raid within one attempt but progressing through it. So even casuals will have some form of progression getting gear to finally beat the final boss.
I’d say casuals existed forever but they became so laud during last few years because of Blizzard building this narration of players who try playing well to be the worst evil that happened to WoW.
I see you were stuck on Il’gynoth but jokes aside you can clear lfr the same day you stepped into it for the first time if you have enough ilvl to enter it. Even if you die because stupid hunter pulled the boss with his pet or because people are not dealing enough with even lfr difficulty mechanics - they are going to be replaced end next half brained group will storm through it. But either LFR or normal has to go because there is too much gear inflation and it’s basically not healthy for the game.
That ilginoth is actually an armory bug. I had whole lfr cleared (and also the wing-achievements) before entering normal
But in LFR in the first couple of weeks when that wing releases everyone has to learn the fight too. Obviously you can kill the (3) wings bosses that evening, but it definitely involves communication and adapting with the group while wiping multiple times. It is very possible people have less ilvl and are less skilled/experienced anyway. But it is definitely progression.
LFR and normal are actually on the same or lower ilvl than previous tier ilvls. We currently have 30 extra ilvl per tier because heroic and mythic are adding those ilvls. LFR and normal adding nothing at all. Normal is currently on WQ emissary level (mythic previous tier). The bloat comes from the 2 higher difficulties.
When I still actively played my guild cleared normal during the first week because everyone was prepared and I feel every mediocre guild that just raids regularly can do it.
About the ilvl bloat the good thing is that they reduce it finally to 13 ilvl (+7 for 2 last bosses).
Up till now i never achieved that. Not with pugs, not with failtrain, not with eurogroup/raids. It is a really high standard to me. But it is also very possible i am just not that good of a player, no matter the amount of time i spend on it
The bloat is going from 30 to 26 ilvl per tier. Not sure it is making any difference. It is just scaling.
I personally would love to see a complete change from Blizz involving the ‘Raid Scene’ theres so much difference of opinion on what really matters, but at the end of it all, the ONLY thing that matters to those raiders it what does most damage. Irrelevant of what those spells/abilities do they will just run a sim and pick whatever does the most damage/healing or w/e even if they hate it.
Now if they completely remove those systems made those covenants story/cosmetic based, baked those abilities in to the classes or maybe like green fire just change the animations etc none of the raider would care about these things, Blizz could restructure the raids to make the Mythic boss encounters longer/more difficult and just make those guilds farm that little bit more gear for those encounters. The only thing that matters to many higher end raiders is getting the kill. Theyll jump through those extra farm hoops to get it (Mythic Tax).
No-one whos normal raiding is really going to care about your covenant or whatever, i dont see why this is such a massive issue every expansion. I know its Blizz’ fault but to me it seems so straight forward to fix. They could use those developers to actually create an engaging story for the expansion maybe.
Stop right there. They’ve tried this approach already. Turned out, mechanical benefits trump any “community building/feeling” so people had to get their gathering alts in a guild so they weren’t missing 20% extra loot, mount speed, ghost speed, repair discount, mass rez, guild summoning…
And guild masters/officers had pretty much free profit because when a guild member looted any gold, a percentage of this amount would be magically created in GB. Guess who has access to GB or can decide who does? THIS WAS NOT FUN.
Also a guild is basically a big group with some additional mandatory functions, like extra chat channel that you cannot leave when it goes bonkers or you lose your “progression”. Again this is pure crunch, hard numerical mechanics crushing any “RP” notions flat because it just doesn’t work that way. It’s OH SO IMMERSIVE, MY BUTT! that you have to get into a certain type of group or you’re effectively penalized by 20% in pretty much everything. Like it’s not enough that there are some things you need a 20man group for, which is the original incentive and it has been working since 2004.
And I don’t know if you forgot this or what, but the guild levels also mean LEVELING THE GUILD. Unless you joined a guild that was maxed out already, every week you had to complete some amount of MANDATORY GUILD-ONLY ACTIVITY. Imagine what fun was THAT to people who didn’t like raiding because they were PvP players. Or having to do any activity you don’t like, with people you can’t stand, just because it’s “guild run” and “the guild needs levels to get X perk”.
Guilds are already well-equipped to do any organized activity better than hand-picked or Discord-made group. Leave them be, let people have fun in whatever way they wish. Don’t be like that one anal-retentive trolling control freak who’d like to dictate people how they are to play the game.
The solution is not to apply nerf chainsaw to what works best. It’s to apply buff to what is worse so it can compete. Random DF experience gains are just too high. Instead of reducing that - let dungeon farmers have fun that way if they like it - quests etc. XP should be buffed.
About immersion, in the “old world” Cata pretty much broke it when you see quests are one big frickin monorail per zone, from that point to this point. No choice, no alternatives, no possibility of “consuming content” in any way but THEIRS.
And then you get over 9000 players doing the same quest in the same place and they HATE it because not enough mobs for everyone. Bottlenecks BAD, but guess SOME PEOPLE didn’t got it in their developing classes…
But what about those paladins who would prefer to purge that wretched hive of scum and villainy with holy light and fire, a lot of fire? No RPG immersion for them?
Fixed that for you!
The bloat comes from too many item levels and that insane obsession with them. Mythic gear should not be 10x better than starting gear. 2-3x would do, it has Mythic in tooltip to boast about, it has best stats available, and that’s it.
Small steps, yeah. Waiting for them to take a giant leap for mankind.
Indeed, just making numbers smaller doesn’t make them change relative to each other…
Blame Blizzard for designing the PvE endgame that (at the moment it’s released) is HARD and REQUIRES you to grab every % of performance you can. Life finds a way, so people use sims & theorycrafting so they don’t have to crunch thousands of possible cases on paper.
This is how trying to forcibly put “RP” stuff into “numbers” game ends. Nobody is happy, everybody is annoyed, and you know it’s doomed to fail from day one. So why to do that in the first place?
But most of the abilities are fire and forget and bring nothing to the rotation or class fantasy, there are exeptions sure like Decimation bolt which had interesting synergies with our tool kid but they nerfed it, pls tell me why should a DK care about a fire and forget ARCANE DoT ? This especially showcased in hybrid classes where its mostly fire and do some dmg and healing and forget about it until the next press when its off CD, look at shamans i forgot which one it waas but it had 0 insentive to press it if you where an Enhancement shaman because it empowers lighning bolt of all things. Give me interesting spells and i might not care about the numbers as much, however its not just about the spells, but there is also utility, soulbinds and conduits, the system is way too complex and restrictive. As i have said multiple times i like to play more than one spec, i enjoy all my warlock specs and i am planing on playing a paladin as my primary alt, whit these restrictions i cant even change roles properly.
Its not about the PvE design, its about the borrowed power. Did a little experiment, removed all the corruption, azerite and neck (because cant unequip essenses), the character i did this on was doing 30% of the DMG, that means that we are getting 200%+ more troughput just from the systems. If they didnt design the encounters with this in mind everything would be a faceroll, i stoped going to Nya’lotha a few months ago and only recently did i enter again because a friend returned and wanted to get his AotC, it was so boring doing it with the power we have now (9x%stat corruptions), the bosses just rolled over and died. So bassicly blame Blizzard for Borrowed power.
Oh lets talk power creep for a bit, numbers might be a bit off but in uldir we were doing ~10k dps, in BoD it was ~15k-20k, EP 35k-40k , Nya 65k-100k ( not to meantion the AoE s^^tstroms where mages can ramp up to 150k+). Each tier we are doubling out troughput, not saying neccaraly that Uldir should still be hard but cmon. also there is no insentive to go to those raids anymore (exept jaina mount).
This is also a problem, however in the context I was responding to post about how the “endgame crowd” doesn’t care about RPG and they will just do what is most efficient, and because high-end PvE is designed to require this optimization, it’s not going to change any time soon just because someone said “pretty please”.
Might be a tad overdone - unequipping items also takes away their basic stats - but yes, this power creep is a BIG issue. Causes a cyclical problem: encounter is designed with best simming things in mind > encounter REQUIRES best simming things > players who don’t have/use/want best simming things just can’t do it > OK, let’s make them work for it > 6 months later ANOTHER tough encounter comes in.
Didn’t care to raid in BFA except some LFR to get a look at encounters - well apart from R’lyeh at the mountains of madness - but holy crap these numbers are insane. I do get the reason for it - to make people play the content in newest patch - but they’re taking it too far. And they’re still failing because when there are such overwhelmingly strong “low content” trinkets like Font or Razor Coral, players will use them anyway. Shouldn’t made them so bloody strong. Or design better versions in the “newer” content so players want to get these new items.
I’ve been most active in Wrath, situations like “trinket from old raid beats trinket from new raid hands down” happened several times. Thing is, in Wrath you didn’t got 2x stronger with each tier. 30-40% tops because items were addition to talents and baseline abilities, not the other way. And the older raids (1 tier back, let’s not talk about abusing Patchwerk in full heroic t10…) were still quite easy if you didn’t fail mechanics HARD, because you didn’t really need to focus on making the DPS checks. Thus no need for increasing numbers.
Also this numerical power creep is THE main reason of stat squishes and associated balance problems. Start of expansion, we have reasonable HP numbers > doubled in t1 > doubled again in t2 > doubled YET AGAIN in t3 > let’s do this double numbers thing some more, what can go wrong? > numbers reach scientific notation and units normally only used in astronomy.
And one expansion later there we go again: HP > double > double > double > more zeroes than can be shown in frames. Back to square one… -__-
And THEN the crybabies whine “We don’t want you to use sims” while THEY THEMSELVES made the game that way. This is stupid and willful stupidity is, as you might have noticed, one of few things that really get me triggered.
…The things we do for science Hope you won’t come to regret this, as stacking Expedient is one of things that make BFA casters somewhat bearable, especially Destruction. I don’t know how anyone can expect people not to go crazy with baseline 3s casts.
