Yeah, too little too late. My sub runs out tomorrow and I have 0 intention to renew it.
Reasons:
Loot. This brings back things to TBC-WotLK level of drops while you took away any real loot distribution opportunity (aka Master Loot). I’m still at the mercy of RNGesus instead of working together with my guild to build up our team. Less loot and even that little often ends in the trash bin because of bad stats but no way to trade it.
M+ for some reason is still below raid loot both in drop rate and ilvl. And no, just because it’s spammable in theory, that doesn’t mean most of your player base would like to run 50 DoS or ToS for that one specific weapon drop. The restriction on the Valor upgrades are also laughable. So, basically I’m better off not doing M+ until the patch drops in March because I won’t be able to upgarde anything I get until that point. M+ players get kicked in the teeth while Raiders gets an instant improvement. Oh, and PvPers still simply go to the Gear Market and gets their loot. No comment…
Class/Spec design and balance
Whomever was the genius who thought that target capping some classes are a good idea while leaving others alone should be fired. The unpruning was such a mindless effort that it did more bad than good for many specs (SnD on Assa Rogue, ect…) Some specs are cleary superior in every possible way to other specs and even classes. And most of them are simply not fun to play. Covenant abilities are horrendous and leads to the next point.
“Meaningful choice”
Covenant abilities were a bad idea to begin with. Most of these abilities has zero synergy with the classes and poorly balanced. I don’t enjoy pushing my covenant ability on my Rogue because all of them are so bad. There are a few exceptions like Convoke, but that one belongs to the poor balance cathegory. Just remove it all together and no one would miss them. Or make them Open World only, whatever. But it’s clear you had no idea what to do with them and even less idea how to balance it.
Unless these topics are TRULY adressed and fixed (not these half hearted whatever “fixes”) I’m not coming back for sure, and neither are my friends.
Boosters and multiboxers have effectively destroyed the game, because instead of banning them like any normal developer would, you nerf loot to make everything pointless making boosting worthless instead of actually dealing with the problem, you are killing your own game just to deal with an issue which is just wrong, and you still ignoring feedback.
Which streamers say this? I have watched pretty much all of the major WoW streamers and I cannot think of one that said this.
Many favoured the end of WF/TF
Many said loot should be deserved (no welfare epics as it is referred to - heroic loot for warfronts was a bit silly to be honest) .
Many want Master loot back.
But I cannot recall any saying loot should be as rare as unicorn teeth. To me it is a bit of a myth streamers wanted this, no one did but (as usual) Blizzard did it anyway only to have to reverse it at some point when people vote with their wallets.
edit - I hate the current situation btw and I stated so many times, I am in no way supporting what Blizzard have done, was just point out that blaming streamers - as if they are one entity (which is the meta on these forums) is often done without due cause
less epic loot IS loot scarcity…
heroic warfront never brought high-end gear. it brough good gear-for casuals. but if you want to run the high-end stuff, it wont help you.
i did rolled my eyes everytime they reffered to classic loot as better.
in bfa we had loot, adjusted for the game you enjoy. you and i both know you never got mythic raid from casual stuff. you did get from m+15 CHEST which is not a casual content.
There is no problem with this as long as the acquisition of points is based on the difficulty of the content a player is doing. So someone who is for example doing world quests and heroic dungeons might take many weeks to build up the points whereas someone who runs +20 m+ might get the points in several weeks. The at least there is a point to doing the content. Shadowlands has lots of content that there is no real compelling reason to do.
The azerite vendor was a perfect example (well limited to M+) everyone could get Mythic level gear but it would take 2 weeks if you did 15’s, 3-4 if you did 10-12’s and a long time if you did 5’s OR you could pick Heroic level in a few weeks.
You could also out point the RNG mechanic if you really waited.
Something to work to is the key here and I miss that.
We are now on week 10 in M+. So we got 9 vaults. And most players were not able to do +10 or higher in their first weeks of M+. Also already had a couple of weeks where my 3 M+ vault options fell exactly in my 226/legendary slots.
It is every week fingers crossed for the vault.