My view on future of SoD:
-
Remove World Buffs
It’s annoying, they scaled very different for every class and it’s a strange requirement to afk in Darnassus/Ironforge to get accepted into raids to lose it on the Thermaplugg pull after menageries die. -
Prioritize PvP balance, not PvE
It’s not much important how different PvE damage is if all classes have their own traits/unique abilities/utilities etc, especially in 10 man raids where you can’t stuck 30 shadow priests anyway. But it’s very important for PvP and it’s very frustrating and annoying if people can’t enjoy world pvp and battlegrounds because you buffed some classes to have similar PvE damage. It’s a classic, it’s OK if retropaladin will be under hunters, hybrids are hybrids on purpose.
Run your tests not only on BiS phase gear, but also on starter/mediocre gear. -
Make runes fun
The most anticipating part of SoD - are runes. It’s a place where you can do a lot of things people already accepted as a difference from original classic WoW. But you giving us the most generic boring quest lines similar for all classes which give us very boring runes, most of them are unusable. You need someone with imagination here and with a sence of balance. Allow casters to cast, stop giving them 100 instant spells from retail, did you forget you have interrupt mechanics? Why do priest need another dot? Why do hunter need another shot if you already have arcane one which you can just scale by rune? -
Make Open World PvP realistic
Open world PvP in wow classic was something like “one guy killed another guy, another guy called a guild to help him revenge on this guy, this guy called his guild etc etc etc”. It wasn’t a mannequin world bosses like in ashenvale and lag festival chaotic death match like blood moon, you should try to figure something out more interesting, like
- town siege/defense (random town in open world assinged to be seiged by other faction to get kill it’s boss or take the chest, town chosen by the quantity of players in location to find more populated in current time, assault team also could have a boss with them),
- headhunting (some location marked as an area to kill more enemy faction players there than other faction, the random player in place will be selected as a more valuable to kill),
- treasure hunting (need to find and loot the chest before other faction do),
- infiltration (one faction assigned to infiltrate the city of other faction without knowledge of this by other faction and the faction should prevent it by revealing and gathering players faster then enemy do the job),
- revenge (some rogue, for example, killed several players in area, people registered on this event will be jumped to the location to punish the rogue, and the rogue’s faction will be jumped in to prevent punish the rogue, if rogue will survive - their faction won, if he’s not - the revenge faction won, the ganker will get some limits on hiding abilities like stealth, prowl, but also will have more HP to avoid oneshot from shadowpriest to make event more strategic and long),
- delivery convoy/ambush (one faction should deliver the item from A to B, another faction should interrupt that, the route always different, every death means losing some part of the cargo, convoy faction has some NPC to protect or guardian NPCs),
- black dwarves invasion (they dig out from the ground(searing gorge/burning steppes etc) in their machines endlessly for some time to farm them for good loot chances like extra gold, extra greens, extra BoEs, extra reagents etc, both faction could make a raid on this, and both faction should fight for spawned mobs to kill)
even freaking cargodrops from your dragonflight could be better than just deathmatch and world boss race… this was cheap, uninspired and boring.
Make the ability to register on event like you do on battlegrounds to avoid games with no players on one side, but do no teleports to the event to prevent “retail-ization” of the game. Stop making it by timer like Blood Moon.
Separate this events by layers to limit players on one site by 5-10-15-20 depends on the event to avoid lags and chaotic random deaths with no fun
All this ideas above are raw, but pretty sure it could be cooked. -
Make everything scaled
Some abilities still not scaled and it creates you a problem with balance, make abilities useful by scaling them properly based on items you wear. -
Hire some audience to always play the game and have a realistic feedback as a result to avoid fixing broken classes every week. And actually I think you could be more involved in SoD, you don’t need much ppl on retail, guys, retailers will eat anything anyway.
-
Make more rewards to play the game between phase releases, for example - blood moon coins could have something very expensive, even useless toy or tabard or a pouch with reagents. Update the useless rewards for AB, for example.
-
Do not force people to level any professions
Professions should be gold-only motivated, not to have mandatory buffs, except engineering, you can’t do money on eng, but you could have bombs. Now we have almost useless engineering and overpowered epics from other professions. -
Add some extra food to stores or recipes for cooking
It’s annoying to wait 1 minute to refill all HP, 35lvl food svcks, or just update the numbers of already existed. -
Create after-exalted reputations for battlegrounds (like in retail), because some people want to get exalted, but some people already done it and will never play WSG again, so it means on later phases people will have hard times to get into battlegrounds, same useless poaches would be enough to increase player base. Do not allow this extra reputation to gain by ashenvale/blood moon quests. You can also create a new reputation like you did with azeroth commerce chests for PvP events.
-
Remove new roles to establish proper balance, make warrior/paladin/druid proper tanks instead of making warlocks and shamans unkillable in PvP, it’s ok to have this extra role before 60 lvl I guess, but on lvl 60 we gonna suffer from this addition much more. The classes wasn’t design to be hybrids, one-two runes couldn’t make them that. There was a reason why tanks wasn’t able to range attack in classic, warriors coudn’t even charge in combat, paladin’s judgement was very short range and druid’s spell was very weak if you have tank gear. But warlock with plate-level armor with unkickable channeled-on-move life drain scaled by SPD…? You can left mage heal tho, this wasn’t made them invincible and healing requires to stop attacking.
-
Make some buffs autocast after resurrection on battleground, remove debuffs from pets
At least hunter’s heart of the lion… it’s almost useless it gives you 20% of your stamina you will never have after resurrection and should eat after revive?
You can regen some of it by running to the point, but if you are defending the point you resurrected on? And 50% of mana you spend on this buffs… it’s not a spell like Power Word Fortitude, it’s a rune-aura, actually you should do it permanent, like trueshot aura, why we should refresh it anyway? Put it on another rune-slot or make it just a spell like Aspect of the Viper. Hunter needs to press 3 buffs after resurrection. Even priest has less.
