Pet Peeve #INFINITY - Thanos gonna cry

Argent Dawn
1965

All that makes you realize how meaningless leveling has become. It’s just a number at this point unlike Vanilla where the process itself was very important all throughout.

In BfA leveling isn’t an integral part of anything.
Nor was it in Legion.
I can’t exactly pinpoint why but WoD’s leveling felt satisfying… Maybe because of the cinematics?
MoP had at least the excuse of presenting something new and fresh, never done or seen before…
Hardly played Cata.
And the OGs expansions like TBC and WoTLK are forgiven because they’re OGs.

Now I’ll mention what good came out of those regarding leveling.

  • BfA has none, it’s fun only for as long as your Legion Leggos are active.
  • Legion wasn’t so much about your level but the power growth of your artifact weapon and that somehow felt alright, but still you’re changing a number that really has no impact whatsoever.
  • WoD… Hmm I think it’s the mix of zone bonuses like garrison soldiers in Shadowmoon, the shredder/gladiators in Gorgrond that didn’t made it so boring, plus I remember that as you leveled your spells could be suddenly improved like making Shaman’s earthquake stunning NPCs (I could be wrong on this one).
  • MoP was rather weak in innovating leveling really however it did a good thing that WoTLK nailed IMO… Zones didn’t felt entirely disconnected from each other.

As I said, I think the leveling idea has truly grown old, what increases our character’s power is the gear by now… Blizz should stop making more levels and instead change the system to just be reflected by your gear Item level… Could even be about ranks, stars whatever really without taking away the idea of your character gaining strength… Maybe even bring back the old talent tree alongside.

That would help a lot and probably get them to think of making better zones with more involved storylines and cinematics that says “Congratulations player, you’ve played through this zone’s story, have a cinematic for your trouble.”

1966

Here’s a point I’ve made not so long ago and would like to make it again: if your playerbase is inclined to either buy a “Get out of jail free” card (i.e. level boost from Blizzard) or to cheat (i.e. ToS-violating bot users) to skip in-game content, then that content is probably very bad and feels like a second job instead of being something that enhances the aforementioned game.

In other words, Blizzard policy on level ups in WoW has been a rather terrible one. It’s not okay to be leveling and telling yourself “Zzz… I can do this. Now when I get to max level the game will properly begin.” just to force yourself to get to that level cap. WoW questing is very rarely interesting, mostly being “bring me 10 bear asses”, and generally asks very little input on part of the player. To elaborate on the lack of input, I’m talking about the game not having any choices or even illusions of choices to make the player feel as if they’ve accomplished something. As the questing content is right now, if you can make a bot do it for you, then that questing content lacks any depth and complexity. Period.

5 Likes
1967

Suramar was actually one of the easier ones. After they removed the rep gate in the quests, you can get to NEARLY exalted just doing the quest line.

HMTauren is a pain in the butt though. The quests only get you to honoured, so you depend on WQs and Emissaries to get rep past that. And of course as they added more factions the likelihood of you getting a HM Emissary got smaller. But at least there you can farm the normal mode dungeon for a whopping 100 rep per run. Whoo.

1968

The thing that leveling really would benefit from, is having additional bonus objectives to do while leveling. At least that way you can either have the choice of hunting bonus objectives, or do quests. You know, choices, something that people often appreciate in a videogame.

Here is my peeve: Kalec isn’t appearing in my Warlock’s Order Hall. Or to be more specific, in my girlfriend’s Order Hall.

I thought I’d do a nice thing for her while she’s at work, and do her Order Hall campaign to get a new appearance for her floating skull, or to just finish the campaign to unlock the Balance of Power questline so she can get a fancy new skull.

And yet he isn’t showing up. I relogged, left the Hall and went back in, and he’s still not showing up. What is this? Why is this? Someone explain/help please.

1969

The thing is, leveling felt GOOD before WoD. From Vanilla to Wrath you got a talent point every level which made your character feel like they were evolving constantly. The OG talent tree does have issues though, which Cata, imo, largely fixed.

In Cataclysm leveling still felt good because every few levels gave you a talent point, which was MUCH more impactful than it used to be with fewer filler talents and less ranks (EG: In vanilla 1 point would get you 0.5% Crit, in Cata you’d get 2.5%). Cataclysm also baked many must have talents from before into the baseline spellbook. Whereas now they’re doing the opposite, pruning abilities only to re-add them as talents. WHY IS CONSECRATE A TALENT?! WHY IS IT COMPETING WITH WAKE OF ASHES?!

Ahem. Anyway. In MoP the overhauled talents were less frequent and had it’s own issues but at least you were still getting plenty of abilities as you leveled. And I believe you had one or two new abilities as you went 85-90.

WoD however was when things started getting weird. They took out a few abilities, and gave us ‘perks’ as new passives while we went 90-100. Sure. Not ideal but better than nothing.

Then we got to Legion, where they went whole hog on ‘spec fantasy’. Turning specs into miniclasses. This is where it started getting dreadful. Suddenly as a mage you UNLEARN abilities if you changed spec at lv15, losing frostbolt to get fire based stuff if you went Fire, for example. Suddenly every spec had 1/3rd of the abilities it used to. We also didn’t gain anything new baseline besides a talent row from 100-110. But artifacts more or less filled that gap… except now they don’t. So you earn nothing from 100-110 baseline. But at the time nobody noticed because of artifact traits, and leveling 1-100 being at light speed.

But then leveling got nerfed… and suddenly people realised they’d go stretches of 5, 10, 15, 20 or more levels of getting NOTHING new aside from the odd talent. I’m pretty sure S.Priest has a 40 level gap where they get no new abilities or passives besides their talents every 15 levels. Some classes get all their core abilities by lv20 and then never change in any meaningful way all the way to 120 (MM Hunter says hi, was stunned when I was leveling one and found out my rotation is near identical at end game). Others are literally useless until 60, 80, whatever. (Outlaw comes to mind, as well as Guardian/Brewmaster being super fragile until they get their mastery).

Leveling in WoW is a massive slog. I get that before it was too fast, and I was even in favour of it getting reigned in SO LONG AS LEVELING BECAME MEANINGFUL AGAIN. But it hasn’t.

Meanwhile, every other MMO seems to have it figured out.

XIV at worst gives you a new ability every 5 levels, then every 2 from lv50 onwards. Your class gradually feels like it’s growing more intricate as you go, rather than feeling like you’re utterly gimped until X level, nor do you feel identical from 20-70.

TESO gives you a skill and attribute point every level, and a huge bundle of them at every milestone (Usually in 5s or 10s). The milestones in particular feel fantastic and give you a huge power surge, like when you got talent points in Cata. Particularly as you evolve skills. TESO uses level scaling to a bigger extreme than WoW, but you still feel stronger as you can kill more stuff quicker as you level your skills. Rather than feeling stagnant end to end.

SWTOR isn’t afraid to give you a wealth of abilities by lv15, and gradually expands on those with new passives and abilities every few levels all the way to 70. It did ditch the old fashioned talent trees in favour of ‘utility points’, which don’t directly increase damage but instead offer survivability or buffs of your choosing every so often. And you can view the class/specialisation track to see exactly what you will learn and when. WoW meanwhile clutches it’s chest at the thought of giving you more than 5 abilities at lv20. Probably because if it did then you’d earn even less for the next 100 levels.

GW2, similar to TESO, gives you hero points every level. And every so often gives chunks of them at certain milestones. Both games also offer you points for exploring or completing certain activities, urging you to go off the beaten path and explore. Even if you don’t get XP from it, it becomes worth doing more than just the optimal XP per hour route.

And so on and so forth.

tl;dr/Peeve: WoW’s leveling is :poop:

5 Likes
1970

BfA is even more troublesome leveling-wise than the previous expansions sadly. It’s literally the only expansion where those extra 10 levels feel completely redundant as we get absolutely -nothing- both during leveling from 110 to 120 and at 120. In fact, we don’t even get stronger during those 10 levels. No, we actually grow -weaker- than we were at 110.

BfA is still relatively new so leveling to 120 still isn’t as painful as it will get in a couple of months when all the novelty has worn off and that’s concerning to say the least.

1 Like
1971

WoW gameplay in 2019 zzz

It hit me during Christmas, actually. Old is better, in the worst way possible. Not universally of course—everyone will have preferences—but during my time playing with a Christmas gift (Dark Souls remastered), I ended up comparing it to what became of it. For that matter, DS1 is: easier, clunkier, unfair, niche. Hitboxes are as inaccurate as they get, graphics are plain funny, combat is slow and typically tedious and you are largely restricted in what’s actually viable (notably, the ugliest weapons). I’ve barely died, and the ‘legendary difficult’ bosses (Capra, O&S, DLC bosses) I’ve one-shot without any real sweat.

Compare that to the shiny new DS3 with just about 3 times more choices in character progression and playstyle, with a higher difficulty curve and much more complexity gameplay-wise; you really need to be good to be good. DS3 is a great game in and of itself, but for some reason I’m enjoying DS1 so much more. Why?

Same question, but different. People have better memories of older iterations of WoW than newer ones. The ‘rose-tinted glasses’ theory might work wonders for killing discussions, but considering the abundance of older private servers, meaning, the fact that people continue to enjoy it (we’ll really see how popular, say, Vanilla just is in a few months) means that it has little to do with ‘pleasant memories’ and much more to do with ‘genuine enjoyment’. I never played DS1 before this. Where do my rose-tinted glasses come from?

Games, older games specifically, were made with different ideologies and rewards in mind. Different progression paths and different world and player designs. WoW was in a dire need of an ability prune, but the extreme clutter is, at the same time, what made it good. It’s funny to think about it this way, but the bad aspects of games that companies have grown to polish are what made a lot of people enjoy them. Vanilla/TBC/WotLK slow, clunky, impossible feeling very easily compares to DS1 vs. DS3, which is why I thought it fitting to bring that up.

It’s not just leveling that’s the problem, it’s the entire approach devs and people take towards the game. BfA genuinely feels like a chore to play without addons.

1972

People who keep refreshing the forum pages and do nothing but whine and moan how terible this game is. Because this is what it looks like with some individuals, sending ten posts a day. Wow is far from being great, but can you just stop? Go and play something else, i dont care, but drop the constant negativity

1973

I never got far in DS3 because iirc poise didn’t work properly, which made playing heavy armour characters pointless, and because a lot of the level design felt fairly bull :poop:. Compared to DS1 where I honestly struggle to think of any cheap design or traps that weren’t telegraphed or given hints about. The closest are the Anor Londo Archers (Who can be dealt with easily if you just rush up and weave side to side) or some of the traps in Sen’s Fortress (Which all have switches, blood trails and other giveaways). DS3 by comparison just never clicked with me. And then there’s DS2 which was just a mess.

I did neglect to mention this as well. I know ‘getting weaker’ tends to happen in past expansions, as people in full raid gear have to start swapping out gear for less optimised stuff. However in BfA this is multiplied by the loss of legendaries, artifacts and some really sharp drops in your secondary stat scaling. Even on a character I’d never gotten geared up at 110, I felt a sharp drop in power from 114 or so. I went from being able to solo and AoE down packs of mobs no problem to struggling to kill more than two without nearly dying.

Meanwhile, SWTOR makes regular use of mob ranks and types to give you the ‘power fantasy’. As a Sith Warrior I can cut down whole rooms of plain old troopers with only silver or gold mobs giving me any notable resistance, usually being Jedi or super droids. Which makes total sense and feels good to play through.

Jokes on you, we don’t need to refresh anymore now threads update live. :^)

But speaking seriously: A lot of the above has just dawned on me in the last month or so where I began more seriously looking into alternate MMOs, and I can now make proper comparisons and conclusions. Also this is a venting/peeve thread, so a lot of negativity when the current expansion is being… controversial, is expected. If you like, you can mute and hide this thread if you don’t want to read it. Click the tracking icon on the right and select ‘mute’.

2 Likes
1974

I genuinely had no idea about the poise meme people joked about around the DS3 scene. For me, poise was always power armour. Man did my world open up in DS1. I’m trying out a heavy poise paladin right now, running a clunky mace and blessed claymore.

Meanwhile, DS3 character is forced to use the DLC katana despite my multiple boss UTGS+5s because who in their right mind wants to get stun-locked by early Dancer, or worse, no-parry Pontiff?? It’s just sad… All the amazing weapons, wasted.

1975

I don’t like DS3 as much as DS1 quite simply because there was just way too many call backs to 1 in it.

oh yeah, we’re now in Anor londo, you remember that right?

oh yeah, you’re fighting gwyndolin in O&S boss room, you remember both of them right?

oh look! you’re in the painted world, and there, over there is priscilla’s platform!

Also, DS3 is a lot easier then 1, I got to NG6 easily in 3, where I was struggling with NG3 in 1.

1976

Depends on your playstyle. As a tank, I found out that (surprisingly /s), I like to tank things. DS3 doesn’t allow that, which is probably why I had such a difficult time with it and took me longer to adapt to the roll=win playstyle. DS1 allows you to turtle; it’s not efficient, but it fulfills the fantasy. In that regard, I’ve barely died in DS1. Funnily enough, I didn’t suffer at all from this in Bloodborne. Maybe because tank flat out doesn’t exist?

NG+ cycles are also different. DS3 NG+ is more polished; I’ve done beyond 8 games (NG+7), which is where the scaling stops. The scaling is, simply, not as big as in DS1, aka artificial difficulty & 1-shots are a thing in NG++ so a lot of the DS1 mechanics don’t support the infinity of damage enemies do (blocking is not at all viable higher on, unless you’re running Havel/Artorias).

1977

This read off as someone saying “I don’t like reading this! Stop making posts like these so I don’t read them!” which makes really no sense.

I think it’s safe to say that people still care about the game, which is why people are being grumpy about the game’s different functionalities.

It’s why I am always grumpy about ESO and it’s endgame PvE. A game that tries to have some kind of structured playstyle with tightly designed mechanics and also a freeform class design has the two elements conflict with one another

But this is an ESO peeve more than anything. The point I wish to make is that I was grumpy about ESO’s endgame when I was still playing it, and then I silently left the game after I gave up on it and I don’t grumble on the game’s forums, even though I’d still enjoy playing it, if it had an endgame that didn’t feel like a roll of the dice in terms of “Come one, come all! Spin the wheel and see if you have everything you need to be a good DPS!”, where there are players who really can spam only one ability and outDPS me throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the enemy

I think it’s the same here: People are grumbling because they like the game at the heart of it, but hate how some things around it work. I’d be more concerned if they were silent and merely stopped playing, or go about how horrible the game is, while not even playing the game.

1978

My peeve is Croecell taking forever to complete his reply… come on already I’m so curious!

Edit: yay!

1979

I know when the NG cycles stop, I just got bored of it in 3.

And I have found turtling to be fine in 3, I can beat nameless behind the dragonslayer shield a lot easier than rolling him.

then again, its far easier to be a dirty spell caster on most of 3’s bosses.

1980

I apologise, I’m running dungeons on my dps

1981

Turtle works only for a few bosses, namely (lol) Nameless King. Turtle on Pontiff and you’re in for a good time with split damage. Up to NG++ the game is, genuinely, easier than NG itself because the mod HP increase is laughable; you still one-shot everything. Hell, I two-hit killed Twin Princes with my Lothric GS buffman build. That 1.3k AR is insane.

Without proper poise/power armour, you can’t trade hits even on NG. DS1 I can comfortably trade with O&S.

1982

The curse of the ‘so and so is typing…’ thing on Dscord and the forums!

That said you know it’s good :popcorn: material when it’s SEVERAL PEOPLE ARE TYPING…

3 Likes
1983

Dude, you don’t need to explain the NG cycles, i know. I’ve played enough of the 1st and 3rd game.

Long story short, i find 1 to still be a lot harder than I find 3. But I rarely do shield builds on either. i spend a lot of time just rolling around (literally and figuratively) with the grass crest shield for more stam regen.

I do find 3 to be prettier than 1 is though.

I was helping my friend with their first playthrough of 1, and the thing that caught them off was that you can only roll in 4 directions, they’d press the joystick diagonally and go the way they didn’t want to go.

1984

Which was my original point, really. DS1 suffers from mechanical limitations and/or the artificial difficulty of the NG+ cycles. It literally comes down to maths, which in my books makes the game itself easy, as long as you have the numbers+patience. As I said though, always personal opinions and obviously which one you played first. I started out with 3, so I obviously learned there/died more there. 1 is a cakewalk that I’ve nearly finished after 15 hours/a weekend of lax gaming.

But it does bring an interesting perspective on the WoW topic, that being the older setting vs the new one with the copying of locations/themes. It’s fairly obvious that modern games are trying to replicate the design of older ones, either through story of aesthetics. The entire ‘It’s like MoP but not’ all over again…