Do you want to do trivial things 10 times though? I mean personally I’d rather play something else than do the same thing in WoW many many times because the game compels me to.
I want to make clear that I want WoW to have enough content regardless and that. I agree that the open world doesn’t really deliver what is needed a lot of the time.
But it can’t be this separate progression path that you have to farm in order to do anything else, because what happens is I’ll log in and then do chores and by the time I can actually play the game it’s either bed time or I’m bored out of my mind.
For me it’s like: great and fun solo content > no content > compelled content. I just don’t want to waste my life doing chores - that’s all it is.
I’m sorry that this might means a fully decked out player can’t find solo content that improves their character, which is why the game has professions and gold making to make items you get from raids open up content that actually does allow you to have something to farm and upgrade before and after that drop, but gold buying ruins it and they haven’t updated professions and aren’t adding quests that unlock from raid and dungeon drops, so that’s a problem like you said.
I just beg, if nothing else, that I’m not going to be compelled to run around farming easy stuff with a FOMO structure.
White mage is the go to healer that is by far the easiest out of all the healers. It’s meant to be, it’s meant to be picked up quick and do well with by new players. You are not wrong saying it lacks depth. Then again holy only seems deeper because of the button bloat.
You should really give the other healers a whirl, they take healing to a whole new level, especially Sage. I dare you to go play sage in higher content and say it is not as deep as wow healers. The closest wow healer that comes to sage might be disc priest but not even disk reaches sage.
The other two healers, scholar and astro are quite hard, with scholar you have to save your ‘oh sh…’ buttons or things will go awry fast. You have to take care of your faerie as well so it ends up being a mix of healer and hunter. Astro is hard, balancing dps with healing and with the card system will keep you on your toes.
Honestly, ffxiv healers do not lack depth unless you go for the one healer that’s made for the newbies or those who like the easy life like you did.
Dragonflight is generally good or even great on paper. It has Dragons, a cool new continent set on Azeroth, beautiful transmog, etc.
But it lacks content that engages and immerses you, imo.
First of all, the overarching story suffers narratively in much the same way as Shadowlands did. We have a bunch of mysterious villains that are up to something, but we have no specific idea of what, and it takes forever to get there. Each chapter of an expansion needs a more thorough beginning, middle, and end for it to feel interesting all the way through. Shadowlands and Dragonflight have interesting beginnings, boring or confusing middles, and … well, we don’t know the ending for Dragonflight yet.
It also lacks good casual content in the style of Order Halls and Artifact weapons. I had thought Professions would become that, and some of the Renown content seemed to suggest that outdoor content like Gathering and Climbing would be more meaningful than it is. But in reality, world content basically boils down to chasing Rares or ticking off mildly interesting World Events on your Weekly to-do list.
I would LOVE a continous story specific to my race, faction, class, spec, or character. I don’t see why they don’t invest more in that type of personal connection we could have with the expansion’s story.
Lastly, I think they’ve made a big mistake in the theme of all the content post-launch. It’s basically been all about Evokers, Black Dragons, fire and brimstone for over six months now. (I know there’s been the occasional other theme with the Blue quests for example.) This reminds me of Shadowlands, to be honest, which looked and felt mostly the same for ages.
10.1 definitely should have been a larger detour than what it was, thematically and narratively. I get why it’s so similar to launch content. They both want to conclude a few of those stories involving Neltharion and the Dracthyr, and they want to reuse assets for as long as possible while they build a meatier 10.2, 10.3, etc. They did similar things in previous expansions, for example with the Broken Shore and Korthia. But this is problematic, because it wears down and makes you bored with those central themes of the expansion.
If 10.1 was perhaps all about the Bronze flight, it could have reused old assets while still giving us something fresh. Different timewalking experiences throughout Azeroth, perhaps. Or it could simply have added another layer of content ontop of the Dragon Isles, with more World Events and stuff instead of a cave system which delves deeper (heh) into the Black flight specifically.
Anyway, I think and sincerely hope we’re in for a good change of pace with 10.1.7 and 10.2. If we get a bunch of Emerald Dream content it will have been worth it. If 10.3 then perhaps involves Azeroth (the datamined Dwarf assets etc.) that will also keep the hype going.
I only like holy priest in WoW out of the current healers in WoW as well. Holy paladin was nice in BFA with no holy power and resto druid was nice in SL but that’s it.
I don’t even know about evokers because I’m not going to play a race that looks that ugly.
It depends for how long.
In MOP you did 6 or 8 dailies for a faction but you only needed to do this for roughly a month (some might have been three weeks or some might of been six weeks). Then you were Exalted and were done (unless you needed to do it on an alt but at least they had a commendation system to ease that grind somewhat).
In DF my highest Renown is Valdrakken which is 22 or something and Dragonscale Exp is around 17. This is 9 months into this expac. I’ve been doing the Feasts, siege, hunts (sometimes, cba to track them down usually) and the Aiding the Accord pretty much every week except the few weeks when I was away on holiday.
I miss being able to set a goal of exalted and be there in a matter of weeks. Even with tedious repetitive dailies, they’re tolerable when it’s for that length of time.
So can you honestly say ffxiv healers aren’t as deep as WoW healers? Safe for white mage they are completely unique compared to WoW’s healers.
For the record I have all ffxiv healers at max level and played them extensively. When I am tired or feel lazy I go White Mage. When I want a challenge I use the others. When I want to go uber mode I play Sage.
In WoW I used to enjoy Holy before they got rid of some spells back after WoD. The only healers I currently like are druid and shammy though they both seem quite light to me in comparison to the 3 ffxiv healers. Granted I have played neither in high end content so its nothing but an anecdote for me to say.
I don’t know exactly.
I don’t do every WQ every reset. I don’t do much rare or treasure hunting. I don’t do dungeons so the weeklies etc which grant rep are out too.
I liked the focus in MOP where I could just do the dailies every day and get to that goal. Now it’s a bunch of Renowns are just that you earn over time (maybe I’m doing slower than most) just don’t focus my attention.
FFXIV healers are a joke. They’re not unique, Sage is basically a Scholar clone and half of AST’s buttons are similar to WHM. AST is the definition of button bloat with Astrodyne and Minor Arcana contributing barely a few % to your overall output. Worse, the developers acknowledged the job is flawed, early on, but then said they won’t fix it until next expansion. Yep, their devs need 2 years to rework a job they broke.
FFXIV healing boils down to spamming a single damage button for an entire raid fight and weaving instant heals. A single button. You’ll press your one damage nuke 150-200 times per boss fight.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the idea of contributing damage while juggling cooldown heal resources but the fact you have a single button because the developers treat their players like children with one braincell is depressing.
Healing is also obscenely overpowered, again because they treat their players like children. Heals on the GCD are ridiculously strong and can be spammed freely, tanks are brick walls and most fights tend to give you long 30-60 second windows for breathing room after dealing any damage. Most of your heal cooldowns are aoe and if your group don’t step in anything bad, you often won’t even need to target individual players to heal them. Just press an all-in-one aoe cooldown or two and forget.
Healing in FF feels interesting while you learn it, but the better you play the more mind-numbing it becomes. As a result it tends to attract players who want a free ticket through hard content while pretending they’re doing something. Most healers in FF are dreadful players.
So yes, I agree with the above (and I’ve played all 4 healers, including in Savage/Ultimate), WoW’s healing is worlds better than FF14 in terms of engagement and fun.
I’ve done up to +26 in WoW and FFXIV has nothing on WoW as far as PVE goes and I do mean nothing. FFXIV is one and done, you’ve beat the encounter when you beat it. You don’t have to continously learn, you only have to learn to beat the encounter once and then you’ve done it. It won’t increase in difficulty and require you to find new ways to beat it.
In m+ difficulty increases for every level you’re going up. What you’re doing in a +10 is not going to work in a +20. Difficulty is dynamic and requires you to find new ways to beat the encounters as you’re going higher.
This is also why pug healing in WoW is so bad in some groups. You get people trying to play a key like if it was a lower difficulty key, where they could rely on the healer just bruteforcing it and making them suceed. This obviously doesn’t work in keys when the damage becomes unhealable if you don’t mitigate or stop it but then they blame the healer rather than look at what they did wrong. It’s not normal to have to dump 150k hps into a blood DK tank as the healer.
Which is insanity. The same exact thing every day for a month, no ty. That’s around 30 times. This is exactly the kind of thing I hate.
There is such a goal. You’re just unusually slow, but honestly I don’t mind it. You don’t need these reps, they’re just for transmogs and mounts and the sake of it.
I guess you could describe it that way, but idk. The things I listed I think are really good, I don’t think they’re mid. But the game is just really boring for some reason. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason as well.
I think Cataclysm was an average expansion, but I didn’t think it was boring like I do with Dragonflight.
Really, you did not played the same Wow i did in Legion and BFA (That was far better designed). Azerite/Artefact Power was required, but there was far more than enough of it everywhere in all content so you could do what you want in the game and still get to the average level (Weapon or Neck).
Really the only one who were really affected were the highly competitive players, who wanted to be 2-3 level over every week. Was it necessary, tho? Absolutely not. I did as much content on every one of my Characters, even tho my main had like 20+ neck level more. It did not harmed me to Mythic raid at that time with my 3 alts, at all.
It also affected Raidloggers, but since they’re the worse (cause the don’t participate on the game being alive), really i think it was a good thing.
Under Azerite we had:
An incentive for the dev team to diversify sources of Azerite, which meant a new set of WQ, even for the old zones on every patch to refresh it.
World PVP as never been so alive, cause people chased the rewards and suddenly there was a lot more people in WM.
A good incentive to do the boss raid you did not need, helping others while doing so.
Essences revitalized BG queues.
You’d felt the world was more alive since you were encountering players all the time ouside main cities.
You had a reason to keep logging on every other day, even if it was just to show up for 30min to do weekly content, which made Guilds felt more alive and each of those connection was then an opportunity to be social.
The whole expansion was relevant until the end, each patch adding instead of straigh up replacing the previous ones content.
Since the removal of AP in SL (No power gain in Anima):
World PVP died.
World quest feel like a waste of time.
Raid Tier dies way faster, since people stop doing raids once geared.
Open World feel meaningless.
All those had one thing in common that is essential on an MMO, population density. Cosmetic and Renown was fine in DF, until everyone got them and no one did the events. It could easily been fixed by make parangon caches a great source of rewards, but people like you wanted to be done with the game. And so now comes back the ‘‘Only the new zone feel kind of alive’’ situation that we had before Legion. And this feeling, in an MMO is the worse in my opinion.
There’s a reason why i like playing GW2 and TESO. In those games i feel like everywhere i go there’s a bunch of players doing stuff and i like joining those bus of players. You know the secrets of those MMO’s to achieve that? Materials and a good repeatable reward structure (Which AP was).
The end game is built mainly around PVE/PVP so if you are not playing that content you are kinda a free solo player why dont you go swimming in one of the lakes in the dragon isles the graphics are beautiful
Oh boy. Gotta love how you keep posting nonsense post after post.
DPS and Tanks do one mistake after another in pugs and healers are fed up with it as the have to compensate all of it next to the general healing they have to do. If DPS and Tanks would either get more personal responsibility that a healer cant compensate and making the tank/dps solely responsible or learn how not to make a vacation in void zones then maybe healers would be more willing to pug.
Healers arent weak in dungeons. Thats the reality of it.
If player after player after player keeps standing in void zones (amongst other issues) then yes, it is the players fault. Either learn how to dodge and all other stuff you have to do as expected of your role at that key level or go do lower key levels. Its that simple. You dont need the meta healers to advance in keys.
And as I said healers appear to do absolutely fine as far as the statistics go aside from Mistweaver who have really taken a beating in M+ (and in 25+ its Holy who received a massive beating (as of currently) but that is 0.1% territory). The only issue appears to be in pugs and you can take a really wild guess why healers avoid pugs like the plague.
I sighed when I saw this title and reached for my Keyboard warrior glasses.
But I have to say, you’ve got it kind of right.
These things are all really amazing!
Yet this is a problem I find myself in as well.
There isn’t really anything to indulge yourself in once you have completed the Raid, or gotten KSH.
There isn’t really anything to work towards, unless you want to gear up another alt.
World content is finished pretty quickly, and don’t really have any particularly desirable rewards. I think after how good Zeroth Mortis was (in content, not theme), both Forbidden Reach and Zaralek Caverns have been huge let downs for some good old fashioned Time-sink world content (themes have been great though!).
The only real Time-sink content I have to do right now, is farm 11-15 keys for Wyrm Crests on my 2.25k Alt, so I can upgrade my gear, when I should be progressing 16-18keys (and higher). But I’d much rather than something casual to indulge in at this stage, rather than having to farm out content I don’t need.
The problem that Dragonflight has they dont have something like choregast, garrisons, artifact weapon grinding, thats the problem no player has something casual to do. There is no system that needs to be done by some time. You can basicly log on and log off whenever you want. You are not getting behind or something.
I’m going to get a little feisty/offensive here. I don’t really mean to be but my brain’s just going nope at the idea of all that garbage coming back, so you’ll have to excuse me. I’m not mad at you because you just want to have fun, I’m mad at Blizzard because they’re professional game designers and they should understand things that I can’t ask of ordinary people. Just wanna clear that up before we go on.
With Legion you were sort of right but I honestly am not sure you played BfA. Listen up - the best way to get Azerite BY FAR was doing islands. People ran islands for days - back to back - to get to level 50. This was an intentional choice by Blizzard I should mention. I bad decision, obviously.
Islands were terrible. They were monotonous and easy. The best way to deal with them was to literally pull the whole island at once and AoE everything down. If for some reason you failed that was okay because the other faction NPC’s would literally slow themselves down whenever you failed - even at higher difficulty levels.
Another thing of course is that if the objective is to use these things to keep the world active it’s pretty silly to put the best acquisition method inside instances. Right? I don’t even know how to fail so catastrophically at game design. It’s like 7 layers deep - all of it fail.
Again, I’m not entirely sure you played these expansions. Although later seasons of Legion fixed it by simply not adding more traits to the Artifact Weapon, the first season did not, right - so what people did is they ran Maw of Souls in M+ literally thousands of times because those traits were really powerful.
Now, you might say “Why are people so tryhard? Just don’t do it!” - and that is exactly what I did but my guild actually broke in half and nearly died because of this mechanic and how differently it was treated by some members compared to others, so don’t come here and tell me that these kinds of mechanics are not toxic.
As for BfA - set bonuses. Same deal. In both cases the systems were basically neutered in the season after the first one because in both cases they were horrific grinds that nobody had fun with.
The objective of a game is not keeping people nailed to their chairs playing something they don’t like so they can play something else that they do like. The fundamental problem here is that you, and many others, and Blizzard in the past, are arguing that because players doesn’t want to engage with a piece of content they should be forced to engage with it even though it’s objectively terrible. You know what happens if you do this? They all leave to play Final Fantasy 14, that’s what happens. How’s your lively game doing now?
Which they did not do.
No there wasn’t - and also WM had this interesting property where for some reason the thing was sorted by faction so I always saw alliance players and my horde friends always saw horde players. Which makes it pretty pointless.
People do that anyway - at least if they like you. Imagine that, having to incentivise people by charming them.
It doesn’t matter though because CRZ undermines the town effect so it’s just a bunch of random nobodies running past you. You can’t trade, you can’t attack, you can’t compete, you can’t invite them into your guild, you’ll never meet them again, and a lot of the time you might not even be able to talk to them - and even if you can there’s no reason for them to talk to you as the game is devoid of group content that you must use the world to construct groups for. They just exist - which in itself isn’t terribly exciting.
I don’t want to “have a reason” to log in for 30 minutes every day because all it means is I’m booting the game up not to have a fun playsession of gaming, but just because. And more importantly I may be booting the game up when I really don’t want to because I came home from work after a crunch at 11 PM and the busses were late an I just want to go to bed but oh no, gotta do my dailies.
I want to boot the game up when I want to play video games and want to have fun with an MMO. And the more often this can happen the better. If your objective is not that but is instead to compel me to log a certain number of minutes per day then you have lost sight of… well, of making games entirely. It’s like record companies who think stores are their customers, right?
This is objectively not true for any of the expansions excepting M+. Which was not a good thing.
You know, if I’ve conquered something, I don’t really wanna play it anymore, know what I’m saying? If they want to keep me for longer, give me something to conquer, don’t give me chores.
Population density does not even scratch the surface of what is required for an MMO to be a social and living world. You need to go so much deeper. I have gone so much deeper in the past, and I’ve already started a little bit above and am not going to continue lest I completely derail the thread to talk about CRZ and the town effect. Suffice to say, filling my world with meaningless entities does not a good MMO make.
I don’t want to be done with the game, I want to be done with activities that don’t engage me. I want to be done with activities where I might as well literally turn my brain off, drool all over my keyboard and win anyway.
Both of those games do a ridiculously terrible job at it compared to vanilla WoW. Which is why their popularity is quite middling. If only Blizzard were actually capable of running that thing without it being completely flooded with cheaters and gold buyers. Oh well.