IDK why does Blizzard have a seething hatred for alting. There will always be people who complain thereâs nothing to do, it seems to me that AP farming and titanforging and essences have just ensured that you never reach a plateau and feel complete.
A feeling I severely miss, because it meant I could now just enjoy whatever content I wanted now that the grind was over, or I could play an alt.
People like that sense of accomplishment, ticking off boxes of to do list⌠Why canât we just be allowed to be done with a task and go on break from the game and come back later.
This endless treadmill is visibly what makes the game not worth investing time in⌠After all gear will have a catch up mechanic one patch later, what AP you farm is meaningless since next expansion will render it null.
Time invested in a game =/= Quality content. But I guess activision Blizzard spreadsheet believes otherwise if they only go by metrics.
PS : Blizzard fun police is also why people leave. If players are rats in a maze, Blizzard of before allowed multiple exits⌠Activision Blizzard will shocl the rats if they dare dig a hole through the maze even if it means putting more efforts⌠You have to take that single one exit they made for you or else youâre having fun the wrong way.
Hilariously, people say vanilla is oh so grindy and, yeah, it was. But it had an end point. You could gear up a character and be set for multiple patches, maybe swap out the odd BiS. But you had tangible, realistic goals to achieve.
Contrast to today where there is no end point. Youâre constantly pushing higher and higher M+ keys, your gear thanks to titanforging has an extremely high upper cap that could take the entire patch to achieve, which is then instantly invalidated by the massive ilv jump next patch with all the catch up mechanics. it makes any time I invest feel pointless because I know in 4~ months itâs all going down the drain.
I know iâve been shilling XIV hardcore in this thread but screw it: Yoshi-P said outright he doesnât want XIV to feel like a second job, and even achknowledges people probably unsub when theyâve reached the âendâ that they have chosen to meet (Doing main story, raids, savage raids, etc) and he even encourages people to unsub if they get bored and come abck for the next patch. WoW by comparison desperately tries to string people along patch to patch with artifical treadmill grinding.
I mean, yeah, but that falls apart slightly when the âmultiple patchesâ didnât contain any new endgame content. It wasnât until 1.6(!) that the first new raid came out (BWL (though this patch itself was âonlyâ 6-7 months after release, reflecting a different approach)) with the intermediate patches giving usâŚdire maul/maraudon and the honour system*. Not to mention gearing up in general was way more strung out given how loot worked back then.
*man you wanna talk about grind how about we add something which basically requires you to give up your life or account share to attain?
Not to mention the grind for that endgame gear was in many cases for several classes just honestly completely unsatisfying unless you were doing top end raids or the pvp grind which was atrociously time consuming. In early vanilla gear basically was primary stats save a few freak pieces with the occasional attack power buff or whatnot. Spell power was added later. So for end game casters as your gear got better, your nukes actually didnât in original vanilla, your mana pool simply got bigger and your spell crit chance went up ever so slightly based on int. It was basically tier set bonuses. Thatâs it. At least rogues and warriors got attack power based on strength and agility. But then again I donât think many vanilla abilities used by these classes scaled with attack power save things that augmented your auto attack like sinister strike or heroic strike. Itâs why rogues were all about hemorrhage with slow weapons.
This is why initially pvp gear was highly sought, it was a reliable source of spell power for casters.
Honestly vanilla was a complete slogfest grindwise. Yes the grind had an end sight unlike bfas (I donât view this as a bad thing) but the journey to that end point was extremely long, and in many cases felt quite unrewarding in terms of literal growth and was more about vainity growth.
When I get an upgrade now I can feel some differences. In vanilla on my priest if my bracers had more Int and sta I basically saw no change at all bar some health gain.mana was never an issue in vanilla healing due to downranking casts and how spirit worked. It was very rare I cast greater heal at max rank. I think my go to healing spells were lesser heal rank 3 and heal rank 4 or something.
I mean (Honour system aside) thatâs what Iâm talking about. Thereâs a crowd that insist that vanilla was just as bad or even worse when arguably it was far better in this regard. You could hang up your character for months, come back, and you wouldnât have to worry about grinding all over again. Maybe replace a few bits but that was it. Once you reached a platau you were free from the treadmill! (Insert DOBBY IS FREE sound file here)
Thatâs not to say that approach isnât flawless mind, but it did at least mean I could play multiple characters after maxing out my main and not feel like my main would start lagging behind with every passing weekly lockout. That and said main could directly help my alts, via crafted gear, BoEs, gold, the works. Nowadays Iâm pretty sure itâs just gold, but that rains from the sky nowadays.
I honestly feel the opposite. But maybe thatâs because I tended to play warriors and other melee classes, where I crawled and limped away from fights until I got a green weapon randomly drop and suddenly I was a killing machine. I didnât play casters much if at all back then, but to me while leveling I felt a tremendous boost from each piece of gear I got. Itâs only towards end game things started to level out but there was still a contrast between the gear from Molten Core and Naxx. Nowadays however I feel all gear is just a JPG with humbers on it, and with a bajillion difficulties and scaling being a thing I rarely feel like my gear grinding is paying off.
But at the end of the day this is just my 2c, your 2c might be different and thatâs fine. I just feel BfA especially is designed to string us out as much as possible rather than make the gameplay meaningful. See: Removal of badge gear and gutting of crafting professions that arenât alchemy, because they canât have us have a constant and measurable reward system for our playtime, everything has to be random drops! (And as I mentioned before, benethis gear is close but at the last second they bungled it by letting it titanforge with sockets, bleh)
I mained priest in vanilla, I played with my two brothers, one was a warrior tank, the other a hunter so we had a âholy trinityâ group. They didnât complain so much about itemisation, although most of it was in the weapon granted. The weapon made or broke you as scaling from stats was so poor.
Now for me, in early vanilla no caster weapons had spell power to my knowledge. A weapon was almost unimportant to me as they didnât even offer int that was vastly better than other slots. When spell power appeared this changed a bit, but it made gearing very inconsistent as it was mostly pvp and dire maul that gave spell power drops, so I had to get gear that was technically from lower content than my char was dealing with to become more powerful at heaing.
Thatâs totally ignoring the gearing mess that was healing shaman and Paladins, where for the longest time you were actually expected to gear up in a cloth set because it generally would yield better int and spell power than your tier sets for a good portion of the early raiding scene. This made gearing as a priest even worse because when spell power cloth dropped in places like dire maul there would be ele shaman and boomkin trying to grab it as well because their own armour was not itemised very well for them at all (pretty much all druid tier sets had healing power, assuming resto spec so boomkin had to gear from odd picks, same situation for ele)
My brother affectionately called melee weapons âhunter wandsâ, this joke largely stemmed from TBC where you could buy the arena hunter 2hand weapon for the same measly amount of honour as a wand, but the difference was the 2hander had tons of stats and made raptor strikes when doing flybys hit very hard. He was a bit of a pvp junkie and remembers killing people who messed up his deadzone kiting because of random raptor strike crits with this weapon.
I seriously doubt Iâll commit to classic but I do have fond memories of it, TBC and wrath. Mainly because thatâs when me and my brothers would play together. It was the only time I seriously tried arena and man was it fun because we just didnât take it seriously. I wish I could remember our team name because it was one of those names that made it clear we were clueless. That said we had some good matches mainly because of the hunter brother. His feign death trap game was A rank stuff
What I also donât like about the infinite grind is that it will be discarded. Not outdated, like the rest of our gear, but thrown in the bin and made worthless. You spend a whole expension working on that thing and then itâs ripped from your hands⌠only to then be given the next big thing, knowing it will be the exact same story again.
Having said that⌠I would like to get back into the game. The 6 month deal looks very attractive because itâs a good price (the mount is nice, I guess, but I donât care much for it) but am I gonna play this game for six months? I was barely hanging on after two months of 8.0.
I see that now. It says the usual price is ⏠77.94 but that would be the price for a monthly subscription for six months. Dang it. I fell for it. Iâm a mark >.<
I gotta admit, I assumed it was the same price as 6 months normally 'cos thatâs what it was with the ship mount and I wasnât going to check if they did a special deal this time.
You might be logging in every day or every three days or whatever, but I doubt youâll be playing it. Thereâs a key difference there.
Edit: Peeve: The Javelin of Suramar exists in the same zone as a concept alongside the Spears of Azshara. Yes, I know that one is a magical mcguffin and one is just an area in nazjatar but theyâre still two X of Y things with a long pointy stick motif in the same place.
Why couldnât it have been a Glaive of Suramar or something?
Whoever designed Nazjatar, whoever made it such a twisty, turny, windy mess, and whoever decided it was SUCH a good idea to SO densely populate questing areas with mobs, and fast-respawning, mile wide aggro range mobs at that?
Yeah. Get in the *@%$ING sea, you UTTER cretin.
Blizz canât make good enough content for people to stay, so they make it a CHORE to get things. Wow. Well done. Get in the sea.