Just posting my raw general feedback on SoD written over time in the past week or so after I got lvl 25 and got most of the content cleared :
Overpopulation is a serious problem making the game unplayable. Quest areas are swarmed and it can take several hours to do trivial mob-killing quests that can also clash with material farming for runes, making the situation even worse. That’s not even counting the surge of bots that appeared on the servers. Respawn algorithm should be tweaked for next phase. The good side of overpopulation in that very narrow lvl range is that the community and economy is extremely dynamic, there’s no trouble at all to find a dungeon/raid group/crafters, etc. even without LFG tools and that feels great. So either (way) more layers or (way) faster respawn time automatically and proportionally to how many people are in the area should fix it.
The content of Phase 1 has run out very quickly. There are plenty of unused places in Azeroth to create content in this phase (like Grim Batol for example). It would be interesting to have these contents released at a faster pace to make sure the lvl 25 population doesn’t run out of things to do in under 2 weeks time after the beginning of the phase.
Although there are no details about the schedule, there should be more phases overall, at a faster pace given that the experimentation only last a year. 1 year also mean it’s a race against time to experiment a maximum of features to get data for whatever comes next for Warcraft. Push more stuff, don’t be scared to make mistakes.
Make more solo content, experiment with unexploited locations and make delve-like open dungeons.
New items and graphics : There should be more new items, the void-touched gear is great but overall it’s lacking. There are plenty of absolutely awesome assets throughout the extension that are not or barely used and who are of superior graphic quality. WoW is a 2004 game, Warcraft Art Direction is pretty resistant to time but 20 years later it’s simply not up to standard and it can be frustrating for players. It’s not that much work if good and stylish assets from other expansion are reused to make new items. The idea is to preserve graphic innovations of WoW extension throughout the years while keeping it confined to Azeroth for extended freshness. Why not even use the most recent and popular assets of the Wildhammer and make a new Wildhammer-focused storyline/raid/other content in the 25-40 phase using those. Plenty of room for potential content in the vanilla map, adding the best graphic elements from retail over 20 years is virtually free.
BFD : The raid is very fun, it shows that mechanics were designed to be fun (Gelihast is very good at that) instead of to be challenging or “hard” with “competition” in mind like on retail and that’s appreciated. It’s a bit underwhelming for a 3-day reset though, it’s more like a big dungeon so maybe a daily reset would be better for this kind of UBRS-ish small raid, it would also help keep having things for people to do.
Free retail-like respec seem logical for people to play around freely with the runes and specs. Or at least no cost at the class trainer is the client doesn’t allow it (which I assume is the reason it costs 10 silver now).
Yet, people rush to overpopulated realms and if it’s locked then moan for unlocking…
It’s out for a week and we have 4-6 weeks more. People with a 7/7 clear will need those weeks to get any reasonable set out of it, others are farming the Ashenvale event, doing quests for gold, farming delivery boxes or alts started to show up.
And there are classes that just scale like casters and some badly need higher level talents so there isn’t much wiggle room that can be done at 25.
There will be 40, 50, and then multiple phases at 60. This isn’t SoM and it’s longer than a year. This is probably a 2Y season.
And in a week you will be complaining you have no raid to raid.
IT’s already limited and latest we are very likely to get dual spec. At 25 you can’t change that much.
I don’t agree with increasing spawn timers, because it can have a negative impact on the overall economy. Adding more layers might be strenuous on the infrastructure, but I have no clue how that works. I think a great change could be to incentivize players to group more often. To that effect, change quest drops to be party wide rather than the current system.
Whenever i tried to group with other players on my healer, most of the time they can’t be bothered cause they don’t want to sit there and do another batch of farming quest drops with terrible rates for me, when they’re already halfway done. Although, there’s been some amazing people that have helped me questing. You guys don’t know what blessing you have been, it’s such a piss poor experience questing as a healer. Thank you!!
Changing the whole quest thing to be more party friendly will alleviate most of the problems without impacting the servers and economy, I think.
Other than that, I agree with you that the game is much more fun due to the narrower level ranges. Trade goods can be found in abundance on AH at competitive prices, there’s plenty of opportunities to make a lot of money, too. So easy to find groups for almost anything you want to do. I thoroughly enjoy the game right now. The only issue I have is something you bring up in your next point…
As someone who does not enjoy having alts, I found myself run out of content to do very fast. I have finished all available quests, except a few extremely high level quests in SS. As it is, I only log in to do my BFD reset, which is such a terrible shame, cause I would LOVE to have more excuses to play SoD more.
This is the most fun I’ve had with WoW since retail TBC. Honestly don’t know what kind of content you could make that would keep people coming back every day, but we could definitely use some more replayable content (that isn’t daily quests).
Like you said, so many unused areas in the game world that could be used for some interesting game modes or activities.
I don’t necessarily agree with this. More phases or more frequent content can put an unneeded amount of strain on the devs. They’re only humans. Giving them more time to cook up the phases leads to better quality content, more innovation and less bugs.
Solo content is going to be hard to implement, there’s a huge difference what a warrior can deal with, compared to a warlock. Healers have abysmal DPS and Priests have very low armor. This isn’t retail, armor has a huge effect on incoming physical damage. I don’t want to recast Inner Fire every 20 seconds.
However you could make some sort of content for small groups, with elite enemies that have a bit more advanced mechanics than “I’m casting a 400 point damage frostbolt.” or “I hit very hard and every 8 seconds I kick you aswell, hoping I interrupt a spell cast while you face tank me.”
Agree completely.
Again, totally agree. No reason this is on a cooldown. If you’re going to allow people have epics that are comparable to level 50 gear, let everyone have them instead of a lucky few that see it drop and roll enough to win them. It would have kept me playing a lot more if I could have farmed BFD without limit.
It would have also made GDKP groups less relevant for those that do not like GDKP groups but feel they are forced into them to get something.
I don’t understand why they didn’t allow us dual-spec, especially with the new runes that allow for much broader and open-minded styles of play. Perhaps in hindsight it’s easy to ask this question. Hopefully in P2 we might get a dual-spec. At least the cost of respeccing is cheap.
Bobby is gone and Chris Metzen is back, WoW might make a recovery just yet.
