Just done some events, bosses and quests. Man… it’s just a cakewalk isn’t it?
Maybe it’s because we outgear the open world so fast now with M+ spam that we reach this point but there is like…no challenge anymore.
Normal mobs can be pulled with impunity
Several elites can be pulled at once
Rares are dogpiled by players and feel more like target dummies than bosses
Weekly bosses are swarmed and require little effort.
Sure sure, if I want a challenge, there is M+ and PvP and raids but man… I like to play the world of warcraft and the world itself is just a glorified target dummy.
I know I’m nostalgic for those days when you wanted to invite somebody to help you tackle that dwarf fort full of gunners and warriors and such moments created a journey worth remembering but I still think modern wow could do with some less catering and more challenging.
I mean, I just did the 3 zone events. One was a hunt with 0 challenge. Go click things, go kill things. The other is an attack event where the bosses become dummies and the biggest challenge is reaching them before they die and the last one is standing in front of a soup bowl and waiting until you can “Yes Chef” before closing your eyes and clicking 1 button a few times.
/yawn
Friend of mine and I myself leveled some in Classic and played low level zones and the lack of convenience is actually refreshing. You have to engage with the world itself because you can’t fly, have no mount, no portals, no easy gear etc. You can die, elites are dangerous, you have to use CC and such and travel is a part of the game. Feels more like an immersive experience than DF imo. Where you just go through the motions and winning is the default state in anything that isn’t M+, raids or PvP.
And when open world was kind a hard in BFA because it scaled with you to 340 ilvl or something like that people were cryign that OMG i farm dungeon to blast everything down easy not to struggle with ordinary mob
SO what people actually want?
I think the main counter arguments are:
Just because stuff takes longer to kill doesn’t make it harder.
Classes are so different that it’s impossible to create balanced solo challenges the can be done by a mage but are challenging for a DK (just used them as example, dunno which ones have survivability).
I think that’s because we’re spoiled. The game is such a convenience store that actually having to beat a challenge feels like the game is holding us back.
“Why does this have to be so hard, why does this take so long? I don’t enjoy. Just give me my reward.”
But too much of that caused them to cave in and actually just… give us rewards… for almost nothing.
Bleh, I think that by catering to the people that have no time, don’t want to play the game or want things easy because of some excuse, it’s damaged the core of the journey WoW used to be.
Nobody will remember teaming up and entering a dangerous fort to fight past its many guards, find the commander, take him down and escort a prisoner back out. Because none of that exists anymore.
You go inside alone, delete the ‘trash mobs’ find the boss, kill him with a cooldown and run back out before they even respawn. If the place is actually elite, it’ll be swarming with people and you’ll be lucky to get a hit in on the boss at all.
The first you might have remembered because it was social, challenging, and you could fail. You might even make friends. The second you’ll only remember because it probably took too long for our tastes or the boss respawn was too long while he was on farm.
The only friend I made this Xpack was because our characters looked exactly the same - drakthyr - and we got to chatting because I initiated and she turned out quite social. Nobody from the open world because the game brought us together… And that one friend has already quit DF.
There’s the thing though. It shouldn’t be meatshields you have to smack down, there should be serious risk of just getting slapped dead or swarmed to death.
And catering to a solo experience in an MMO is a doomed venture. MMO’s aren’t RPG’s, they can’t match true solo RPG’s in gameplay or story for most of the time. The social element is their strenght. Remove it and… what exactly is left? A reward generator where everything ‘takes too long’. Eh.
Look, if you want the game to be harder, you’ll again end up with an expansion with only the most hardcore toxic nerds left. You don’t want that, it’s the casuals who make the game not dead and they will quit if it’s not a piece of cake. Straight up facts. Everybody who complains about the game being too easy and wanting it to be harder need to have other things in life to do, so you don’t waste your life or want to force others to waste theirs. Stop wanting and glorifying these neckbeard aspects in the game that no one likes. Everybody who actively plays the game want the game to be easy, except a few angry snowflakes on the forums
It’s the result of gearing up, and yes, people want to feel more powerful as they progress, that’s why people complained when Blizz had outdoors mobs scale with players: Gearing up is a lot less fun if you don’t notice the upgrades because everything is keeping pace with you anyway.
We need some fel reaver like mobs flying or walking around. They will scream in your face and then kill you. The skies are awfully safe despite dragons being our main enemy
You don’t have to always use the gear just cus you have it. I don’t. So if you want a real challenge go fighting in your starter gear. Yesterday I took one of my low chars out onto Hellfire in her mage starter gear and punched the Fel Reaver till I killed it. So funny. I often like sitting next to the big elite ogres round the fire until they notice I’m there and then have a fist fight between a blood elf and a big ogre. [ put 'em up ] I level all my chars this way … doing it right now in just a shirt and slacks in WoD. Hoot and a half.
You want a challenge then leave your weapon in your bag. The game makes it real easy to do stuff. Only you can make it hard.
I know it’s subjective brother. I’ve had a discussion about how we experience this game and I learned I’m one of the last few people here who really wished retail felt like classic a bit more. Storywise, challenge-wise, tone-wise, etc. Classic is dated, it’s not a game I can really go back to in 2022, and I miss some of its design choices here. That’s all.
That’s quite a tall order. “Stop wanting this”. We don’t choose what we want, mate. And what I want isn’t for this game to be some elite experience that only the sweatlords can be good at. We have M+ etc for that. What I want is that the world stops catering to our every whim and actually asks something of us. There could be areas that are smooth sailing and quests and areas that are not. Don’t worry, nobody at Activision is going to give me what I want, people like me are a minority.
But I still miss the days when the world itself was exciting, challenging, dangerous. Where you didn’t know what would be coming, or where some quests and areas really upped the challenge and you naturally gravitated towards seeking other people to help. Overcoming together. Saving eachother, becoming friends and continuing your journey together.
It’s true, if the world scales with your gear, then gearing is pointless. But I dunno, maybe the power gained from gear scales too steeply now? I have iLvL 390 on average and I just steamroll anything that doesn’t kill me first. In the olden days, gear upgrades were - I think - a bit more a sloped climb. You got better, but slower. It ties into the making everything irrelevant too. Once 2nd season comes around, Vault will be irrelevant, open world will be even less of a game and more whack-a-mole. Because the power gained is so huge.
Something that challenges at the very least yea. Classic was full of casuals and they didn’t bemoan the challenge, did they? Safe is the right word. I feel very very safe in the world of warcraft these last few years and it’s not exciting. Every enemy I look at I know I can either kill alone or summon an army of people with 1 click, who’ll kill it for me before vanishing back into the twisting nether.
Facts. I know it’s nostalgia for when the game played differently, when the journey was more important, when navigating the world itself was a key element. Navigating in all ways. Finding things, managing to clear a mob-filled mine, managing professions, completing questlines, doing dungeons, getting gold and equipment. A slow but meaningful progression. Now my alts reach 70 and without stopping, fly into a M+ 8 dungeon at Mach 3 to reach iLvL 380+ in days. Vrooooom!
That’s just not a way to play the game for me and I reckon most people. Same suggestion I heard on the ESO forums. Just take your gear off. That’s not a challenge, that’s putting a bag over your head to play tennis. I plan to wait until more race/class combo’s arrive and hopefully level a lowbie character with trash gear and no heirlooms or mounts. Maybe even freeze leveling and see which zones I can explore, never reaching endgame. Because you are right that we must make our own challenge.
It is, it is. ESO has the same problem. The open world is - if you’ll believe it - even less of a challenge than WoW. You can literally do it without gear, or skills and punch things to death. The challenge there is it the trials - raids - and dungeons. Which are all super demanding and require the meta and you have to pay to unlock them. So I played PvP there until the lag made everybody quit.
And yes, yes I agree that it’s good WoW had different difficulties but I still miss that feeling of “You’re not in Durotar anymore” Where you would be mindful of where you went, and if you took quests, you might get asked to go do something that would probably be easier with allies or where you had to look at each skill in your toolbox and plan it out. Use a stun here, a CC there, maybe use a potion you had, use a bomb to AoE and stun enemies. And it felt so rewarding, no matter if you did it solo or with a group of people. That’s all just missing now. The only areas that are ‘hard’ are the Djaradin zones and even there, people pull and delete mobs in seconds.
The world has lost it’s teeth and serves only soup. Yes Chef!
Sounds like the start of classic. It was not engaging, not exciting, not fun. Just borderline painful.
And what would it be good for? Open world died the moment they introduced flying mounts. Making some challenging mobs will only annoy people at high level, while low lvls will just avoid them and spam dungeons. At the same time you remove the easy content for ultra casuals.
