Season of Mastery -- The changes we deserve

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Hello Classic adventurers. With Season of Mastery launching I have a strong feeling that Blizzard does not understand all the reasons why we love this game and will try to present solutions that enrich the experience rather than mainstream it down to something wrong.

In this post I will try to propose new and required changes that we so much need:

  • Duration of Season of Mastery
  • World Buffs/Buffs
  • Leveling & Boosting
  • Raiding
  • Travelling & Transportation
  • Dungeons
  • PVP
  • Professions
  • Classes and Talents

Duration of Classic S2:

Decreasing the duration by roughly 50% has an enormous impact on the changes that must be introduced to raid, dungeon drops and leveling to compensate for this short timeline.

Reducing the season to a 15/16 month duration with 8/12 week for Minor/Large content updates will have a much smoother overall progression.

World buffs and Buffs:

World buffs were a core part of Classic Wow and completely removing them right out of the bat is the wrong choice here. World buffs should be redesigned so only 1 world buff could be active in a raid scenario and also the power creep to be equal for both melee and casters. With the introduction of chronoboon you will be able to pick your precise world buff which should have a huge boost to a character.

Chronoboon should cost more and be a permanent tool.

Having only one world buff removes the “grindy” part of it but still can provide a large boost to a raid group.

Buffs:

Having an infinite amount of potential buffs is not a healthy environment for any kind of balance or a non-hardcore player. TBC flask system does not fit the Classic experience either. That being said, a system that limits the amount of consumables should be set in place.

A combination of one Flask, one Major and 1-2 smaller effects could greatly compliment our game, with major being effects like Mongoose and smaller being lower-level pots/firewater/food etc.

This change is good for both hardcore and casual players as one can top himself with 7-8 buffs, but a casual with a world buff and a major pot/flask can still pump.

Leveling:

Currently the normal leveling progression without boosts is one of the best things in Classic Wow and introducing a huge increase in XP from quests will shake this balance. Quests still feel a bit behind so a combination of:

  • 10% more XP from mobs and 15% from quests OR
  • 15% Xp reduction per level and 10% increase from quests

Many people think that 25% XP from quests is not enough but Classic is all about the journey and exploring Azeroth. Huge XP increase will shorten this marathon and people will start missing zones entirely. Alliance players could skip Scarlet monastery completely as leveling metas shift because people will say “But dungeon XP sucks bro and it takes forever to get there”

Boosting should be addressed with some caps to AOE and hard enrage of monsters after several minutes of fighting them (get 100% reduction to CC after 3 mins for all mobs for example)

Increase rested XP by 50% to help casual players.

Raiding:

The new mechanics and debuff limit sounds great. The increased life of raid bosses must be only to offset the debuff limit. Increasing it even further will completely kill older raid content when BWL/AQ releases as the time required will be higher even with better gear

+1 item per boss should be sufficient for a 15-month season

Revamp of useless items will be cool as well

Travelling and Transportation:

Summoning stones is a disaster change. This will remove so much of the content from the game that I can’t believe Blizzctivision are doing it. High level gameplay with meeting stones is an insane meta shake-up where people will offer services to portal you everywhere and reduce outdoor content to ZERO except for a few bots mining/herbing.

Solution: Improve the current infrastructure of Wow with:

  • Increased flightmasters speed from around 400% to 600%
  • Reduce hearthstone cooldown to 30/40 minutes for a smoother questing experience
  • Increase rate of Zeppelins/Ships by 100% and speed to make continent travel faster
  • Introduce new flightmasters at key positions

Dungeons:

Hardmode is a new mode in Season of mastery that can be activated for any dungeon at any level:

-Leveling characters can go into any dungeon with hardmode ON and experience new challenges, more health & damage on mobs, additional one mechanic per boss and improved loot. Hardmode for leveling characters is limited to the bracket level of the dungeon. (For example Deadmines Hardmode is for players with level between 16-25 or a full group of level 60 characters)

Increased XP from Hardmode dungeons to offset time spent.

Level 60 Hardmode ZF with nice loot and 6% carrot on a stick from the last boss. Bring it on!

PVP:

-Introduce a rebalanced version of the old AV with less honor gained from AV’s

-Hard timer for WSG when all players are fighting in the middle

-Improve reputation rewards specifically for WSG and AB and equalize rep farm time with AV

-Introduce more and better rewards from rank 6 and upwards

-Introduce rank 10 PVP weapons

-Introduce epic gear from rank 9-11 which is slightly less powerful than Grand Marshal

-Remove honor decay until rank 10 so casual pvp-ers can still obtain powerful gear

-Two-minute insignia removing all CC

-Leaving three battlegrounds makes you unable to join more for the day

Professions:

-Fix useless stuff and endgame gear like mooncloth robe to provide adequate power levels

Classes and Talents:

-Tons of changes should be made to mana regeneration, spec balance, raw damage of some spells etc etc, too many things to even start. We need changes, that’s all.strong text

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If they would asked 100 Classic players they would get 101 different responses.

You get like few weeks less of MC-only and BWL-only. The some time less on AQ40… just note that by the time of AQ people will start thinking about next FRESH and only selected few will do Naxx and IMHO most naxx would happen after SoM would be move to “static” Era type status (if they do it that way).

Also running 30 of same class will be harder to gear which is one of the ideas behind the change :wink:

Original WoW developers said they were NEVER intended to be used as mandatory huge raid power level jump. They are powerful but that wasn’t the plan.

IF they decided to remove them this season let it be that way. Any half-way solution won’t change anything. Those that want all WB won’t be happy, and those that want peace and quiet without WB won’t be happy either.

I’ve seen flasks used rarely, mostly by parsers. Moongose was more common and mp5 stuff on healers. Any limitations of potion usage would likely impact mostly healers and casters (meme specs?).

So you really want instance leveling to be superior yet again? Instance mob experience is why instances are so good for leveling even when not boosting. 1.25x from quests and limiting instance exp (depending how they will do it) will move leveling from instances to questing in the open world. Mob exp and especially instance mob exp is something that should not be increased (and instance mob exp should be lowered).

Not really. In Classic you spellcleaved to 60 and then boosted all the alts. That was the meta and now if Blizzard doesn’t fix instances it will happen again. People will optimize the fun out of the game if allowed to.

AoE Cap won’t fix it and just breaks AoE (and Pala consecrate is different than mage blizzard). The problem with instances is that they give a lot of exp. Plus pathing abuse. All they have to do is limit mob exp in instances and prevent large absurd pulls, especially if they use pathing glitches.

Debuff limit won’t change anything really and with no WB the overall DPS will be lower. If they add noticeable amount of HP to bosses nobody will play this. HP sponge with 0-1 mechanics dropping usually bad gear isn’t worth it.

What content? You have to have 2 people of appropriate levels to use the stones. You save some time sometimes. And on PvP realms using end game stones is quite risky as you are a static target far away from entrance.

“Hard” for old class design is “tank takes more spike damage”, “lots of fear mechanics”. You would need a modern instance design to add mechanics that create a good flow and are challenging/rewarding to overcome but then it would be “retail with dysfunctional classes”.

Also note most Classic players plays Classic because it’s the only game they can play and would fail in anything modern.

So use TBC class design in vanilla content. They may do it in another season. Hybrid meme specs are unfinished in Classic and in TBC they started to put them in the right spot as a DPS+support. Trying to balance them in Classic as a DPS-only spec would be really bad.

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I have played spellcleave Meta and normal leveling. For the 80% of people that are not blind tryhards meta or no play, the balance is pretty fine. 25% increased Xp for questing will pretty much lean the scale towards questing which is also wrong. The tryhards will just move to questing and ignoring everything else anyway, so why ruin the dungeon leveling as well for normal people. I played some beta, killing mobs seems you are wasting your time. Completing quests that has low drop chance also feels awful.

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All of private server and old vanilla speed leveling records were with questing and bit of grinding so I don’t see it’s bad. You can do dungeons, especially for lots of quests or really good items but you should not do it just because exp - over and over.

If you can kill them efficiently and they are of your level then it’s not.

Either make SoM “no changes” so people can force 60 through instances or allow them to force a different experience - experience based on questing.

Half-way solutions for Classic are bad - those that want changes won’t really get new experience, while those that don’t want changes already have changes (even if they don’t do much or anything).

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Since you did not say anything positive, can you atleast share your experience and the changes you want implemented?

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None of them would be implemented. This game changes aren’t player driven even if alpha/beta feedback is valid/good - but it would be nice if Blizzard release a cohesive “organic” version of Classic. Good leveling, mostly in the open, no long content drought phases where only raidlogging exists, no artificial gameplay like mass pulls/pathing abuse, mass boosting, exaggerated world buff meta and so on.

That would be good to level up, do some initial progress at 60 and done.

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I disagree on every single point.

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We already have the solution for people who don’t want to have world buffs: don’t pick them up. We also already have the boon which solves most of the frustrating aspects of world buffs. Fresh without world buffs will be very boring to raid in, it’s quite off-putting. Also the 1 year cycle means that loot does need a small bump, even just 1 more tier off of tier bosses would be enough.

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Season of Mastery - no thanks

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Stopped reading as soon as you started complaining about ez mode world buffs.

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We need dual spec. The only reason I do not play PVP it’s because I don’t usually have enough gold to buy respecs all the time. The the concept it’s: "if you want to play the way you like, you have to play a little bit the way you don’t like - that’s grinding gold - only to be able to play both pvp and pve.

I am a dad with 1 - 2 hours per day to play after my kid goes to sleep, I would like to spend that time either doing some raids or doing some pvp, but I can’t so I will just raid log.

Dual spec it’s mandatory for the ones like me who have family responsibilities but still want to enjoy the game. And don’t tell me to play shadowlands, I like classic more than anything else.

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