Core gameplay of classes and professions is extremely underwhelming. Classes are slightly improved over bfa, but still miles off pre wod, which is unacceptable really.
And crafting professions? Well, they may as well not exist at all this exp. No content whatsoever, no creativity, no profitability, no nothing. Pathetic. Even gathering, fishing and cooking are bare bones.
Classes and professions are core to the gameplay experience and need much more attention.
What does all the visual splendor matter when the gameplay is stale?
I have been dissapointed by profs for a while now.
I always thought that it would be good for the economy and farmers if old crafts had to be combined to make new stuff. This would stop a lot of crap becoming… crap and reward players for exploring old content instead of filling their bags with unwanted junk.
professions are only here to remove gold from the servers. not enough player bought the ah 5mio mount. it is much easier to bind player power to something that costs 500k. That is the only purpose for professions atm. Pathetic!
I thought most classes were in a great state in wod, the prune was actually fairly successful then, they were all mostly very entertaining and the current borrowed power systems would have been perfect on wod classes.
Instead most classes are still half baked from their legion reworks that was designed with borrowed power in mind that they no longer have, nothing really changed for most specs in this regard in bfa or even shadowlands. It’s all just the same, even half the shadowlands borrowed powers are just copies of old powers.
It really hurts to think about how good my hunter, priest (enjoying it now though that bfa/legion is gone, just not as much as wod) and warlock would have looked today if they still played like their wod versions with the new borrowed power systems.
100 % disagree. So many specs were butchered. The pruning of Wod and Legion destroyed most classes. Those that were spared in Wod got demolished in Legion instead. The game hasn´t recovered since.
But the balance is complete trash. It’s just super-horrible whether you look at PVE or at PVP (or at Torghast, ROFL, this is SUCH a mess wrt balance). And they are horribly late with their fixes. They fix very little and very slowly.
Can you give me a specific example? Because most people tend to just throw wods name in there simply because it was wod despite it having nothing to do with it. Like i remember people instantly trashing wod timewalking announcement despite wod dungeons and raids all being great.
Of all the complaints people can have for wod, class design is never one of them i hear many people say.
Yeha most specs got some slight improvemenets, and a few some bigger ones (shadow, subtlety for example). But it is far from enough, at this rate it will take a decade to undo the damage they have done to classes. They seem to have so few resources available for class design.
Fire mage, which was my main got destroyed. Removing shatter and deep freeze from fire, along with alter time and utility such as arcane explosion, ice lance, cone of cold and blizzard just made if feel like a husk of a spec. Half the class got pruned.
Fire was dominant all the way until the legendary ring was finally complete and arcane cheese took over.
Alter time was removed in legion, not wod
Shatter and deep freeze, not exactly fire mage stuff is it?
Arcane explosion being arcane only, theres people complaining that it was a useless addition to the shadowlands “unprune”
Wod was a massive improvement to shadow priests from mop
I do believe your intentions are more aimed at legions class design rather than wods here because you’re really not convincing me. There is a lot of things you can throw criticism at wod for, but class design really wasn’t one of them.
Edit: even trying to think back, i don’t think i can remember anyone i knew ever complaining about their class prune back then unlike legion/bfa, outside of the obvious demo warlocks and sv hunters who had their specs destroyed mid-end expansion most likely because of the drastic legion rework that was coming.
tbh, what the OP is touching on here is but a fragment of the problem with ALL retail xpacs since MoP I’d say and that is the fundamental flaws of the baseline systems in the game that ruin the overall experience. Some problems are newer than others such as bad classes, which have only really been a thing since legion imo, but most of the problems are cata/MoP onwards.
The flashy systems can be nice and cool and the new zones look cool and yeah the raids and dungeons are difficult and masterfully crafted as ever but the ground they’re built upon is damaged and I don’t know if retail will ever fix these problems.
I’m so fed up already I’m levelling a new loremaster who is also doing all the reputations and having way more fun… level 50, Shadowmoon Valley to do then rep farm!
It’s a sad state of affairs when old rep farming beats current anima farming.
Im sorry to disagree my friend but , i also dont like sl , due to few reasons , but i have never made so much gold on this game , just picking herbs/minig skinning , it sure is profitable , but all this burrow power and the zero loot ruined this expansion , but profess hey they never been so much profitable imo
This may be the last active expansion for many players.
For years, instead of making new contents, they have been wasting time on making systems after system. Then they waste time on fixing one system by introducing another system. I don’t have confidence in current Blizzard can make any meaningful change or new things.
It is no longer a “fun” or “social” game for many players. Its player number will continue shrinking until a stable and loyal player base left. WoW is dying for real this time, not joking.
I wish it were the case so that blizzard would learn a lesson and change the game for the better but activision reports record launch sales for shadowlands, and the money they make from all xpac launches is enough to keep them in the positive until the next xpac no doubt on top of the whales who cash out on the store.
Essentially, wow lives off a love hate relationship with it’s long time invested player base. It sustains profit through it’s die hard core who will never quit and makes big surges in profit every 2 years from the casual invested audience who will return every xpac no matter how disappointed they were by the last one.
Yes, WoW has a die hard core fan base. And I am sure there are a lot of them.
There is no unconditional love or hate. Players love wow because of its quality (story, art, gameplay, etc. ). If wow keeps being disappointing and more competitors starts being promising, people will switch to others, just like how they switched to wow from other games in the beginning.
As a veteran player myself, if I had to quit during BFA, I would feel sad about the time invested, my chars, the friends, the communities etc. If I had to quit today, I probably will feel relief more than sad. Time changes people.
WoW is an very old game now. On one hand, we hope it will get better and keeps momentum. On the other hand, we know that it won’t, because everything has its lifespan. It is just nature.