That’s why some guild uses the term semi-hardcore. That’s the in-between. I would put you there, but if you feel better with the casual term, up to you.
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Well i played sl only for one month but i will be 100% playing in few weeks again. I hope that this time i pick spec that will not be deleted by blizzard.
yeh, i quite agree this expansion kept me playing less than bfa,I miss Legion, there was something magical about this expansion in every way with Dalaran, the big questline of Suramar,( AN ILLUSION WHAT ARE YOU HIDIN) or the awful quests in Highmountain where u couldn’t guess where it was down in the caves or somewhere else, I loved Mage tower,Halls of Valor Challenges set and overall lore, Shadowlands just feels a different game to me.
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Unprunning was literally nothing than a marketing stunt along with all the other promises to capitalize on the insane hatred of BFA, all to make those juicy quarterly reports with record breaking sales. This expansion is literally successful almost entirely because the last one was hated.
On any of my classes, unpruning didn’t make 1% of a difference, because it was never the problem. Class complexity and interaction between abilities/talents can’t be fixed by tossing random “fan favorites from the past” and doing nothing to integrate them in the design of a spec.
In Legion they made great strides for some specs with artifact trees, abilities, and legendaries, and then threw nearly all of it in the bin instead of keeping those that people mostly liked and adding a bit more on top. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that if you scrap core class elements every expansion you’re always gonna be actively annoying half of your playerbase.
Another stupid design philosophy is the class instead of spec-centric design, and that too was partially because of marketing as people were crying how the specs have nothing in common, so here we are.
System designers in this game have been bad for a loooong time now, if it didn’t have some of the best art in the industry, many people would’ve quit a long time ago.
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Agreed. But we should have known form the start, cause I remember in the alpha and beta blizzard were urging people to name specific spells they wanted back, and seemingly didn´t consider how it all would fit together at all. Like they could just toss a few abilities back and all would be well… ffs they have redesigned msot specs since the pruning, so they would need redesign to integrate returning abilities, most people understand that.
I mean, from my perspective classes were very well designed until WoD prepatch came along, when it was the opposite, where they seemingly chopped things off more or less randomly with little or no regard to the big picture an mmorpg is. All things deemed “unnecessary” in instanced pve were chopped off pretty much. That´s not the way to go at all.
Classes are still a long way off their glory days, sadly. There was very little wrong with classes in mop, cata or even wotlk.
Then some people say - “but everyone had everything” - which isn´t true at all. To that I would say, who in their right mind, on their warlock, shadow priest, hunter etc were applauding the decision to make executes a warrior only thing, for example. Total enjoyment of course went down, you can´t make one spec special to the detriment of the rest of the 39. That´s just simple math.
What they should’ve done and what they should be doing semi regularly is ask people what specs they want back from different points in time, and then go back to those roots and make minimal changes moving forward.
They would have gotten response like MoP warlock, Cata fire mage, WoD rogue, etc etc. It’s still very subjective but majority will swing one way or the other.
What’s killing me about the class design in the past 3-4 expansions and made me not play 70% of the classes is the builder spender playstyle making every filler ability feel like absolute garbage. Fire/frost mage and destro lock for example, you feel like you might as well not casting anything until you have your harder hitting spells and cooldowns up. They wanted to make those moments more meaningful but it ended up making gameplay outside those moments horrible.
In Cata both fire and frost were still proc based but baseline spell were still doing high and respectable damage. Nothing in the last 4 years of WoW has felt as good as getting a massive Combustion in Cata just right, and we’ll never have those moments again because they are desperate to balance everything to the point of tedium. Hence the no fun allowed meme which isn’t even a meme.
The best part is that actual balance hasn’t improved anywhere near enough to justify all the murdered fun playstyles we had.
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Yep, this along with pruning many tools on shorter cooldowns have made gameplay all about those big burst windows, with complete staleness inbetween. Gameplay should be engaging all the time ideally, not once every few minutes.
Actually I really felt, for msot classes, that gameplay was engaging all the time in mop, and even more so in cata. There were som introductions of longer cooldown stacking in mop if I remember correctly.
Now we have things like crusader strike, backstab, fireball, frostbolt, incinerate etc etc doing very little to nothing. Feels really bad to press. I thnik mage is the ultimate example of this philosophy, a once multi faceted class, with a great toolkit, now extremely stale and everything revolving around their 2 minute cooldown with nothing enjoyable outside of that. Mage is pretty much unplayable atm for me.
Make base spells do damage!
I don’t know if they are ever gonna to that as it would be a massive 180 in direction and them having to admit a mistake, which isn’t their thing.
I was playing a Cata private server before SL came out, so the transition was even worse. Leveling a mage is torture in SL in comparison, with frostbolt and fireball tickling enemis until you can get a Pyro once every 10 or 20 casts. Can’t even bring myself to level him to 50.
It’s kind of what WoD was, wasn’t it? Somehow that wasn’t succesful either.
The PvE was exceptional, the PvP was fairly balanced and gearing was good, class design was still good, story was warcraft-y, there were collectibles to be farmed. Overall it was solid I’d say. Only that it wasn’t enough of it.
So in conclusion people want ALOT of quality content. 
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i know, what could have been if they didn’t have forced release dates…
But it wasn´t as good at it was before unless you were a rogue and a few others. The rest were considerably worse than mop.
I don’t know about that honestly, I had a ton of alts in WoD and I found most classes to be pretty fun.
When it comes to wow, people want what they don’t have.
In BFA “too much loot, loot is meaningless”
“Titanforge needs to go”
“too many chores”
SL
“not enough stuff to do” (same stuff exists just u don’t have to do it)
“Too little loot”
thread about titanforging.
I’ve given up trying to work out what players want. I think for many they have this fantasy-land idea of a game in their heads and what blizzard execute will never live up to it because the game in their heads is in all probability designed with only them in mind and blizzard simply will not do that.
So anything that has any element of compromise to it to cater for “everyone else” they take issue with and moan how it needs to go.
Just an ad nauseum at this point.
Also a lot of ppl don’t define what they mean in these discussions. “I want balance” “I want depth” all the while offering no indication as to what they mean by these terms or what that might look like.
Like, there are issues with SL to me. If you ask me what they are, i’ll be able to tell you and type out a paragraph or several about why i think it’s an issue, how i’d change it and why i’d do that. As opposed to “just fix it” or whatever.
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Which expansion you think has it better? WoD or SL?
I mean as fire mage I’m guessing you’re heavily biased towards SL.
WoD fire was much better than now. Fire has never been worse designed than now. Overall I´d say WOD had better class design, yes. There are some brigh spots if you look in shadowlands though, enhance, sub and shadow are much improved - still worse than MoP mind you, or even WoD.
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Shadowlands needed to be something different than Legion and BFA.
People needed a “back to basics” for a little while I guess. Something more simple and relatable.
Perhaps everyone is too burned out from the same gamestyle, it’s been going on for 4+ years now.
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Fire is an abomination of unfun right now.
Went from a consistent “little and often” spec with ramp pressure to “arcane, but better” focused entirely around a burst window and being crap outside of it (all the while doing this window burst better than arcane due to lack of hardcasts and mobility)
It;s such a toxic spec design.
Don’t even get me started on the fact this is paired with exceptional mobility, defences, a spammable CC, two instant forms of melee CC and cheat death. I think nobody was supervising fire balance this time at all. Why in the seven hells would you play arcane or frost atm? They’re worse at everything, in every type of play than fire is and fire still has better utilities than they do. It’s hilariously stupid.
With other Pure DPS you at least see some variation.
Rogue - OL is best pve, sub/assy can both make plays in pvp
Lock - Affli = raid, demo can do as well or better in dungeons depending on dungeon. Destro is a bit behind admittedly but can still shine is situations like BGs.
Hunter - MM is Pve hero, Survival performs as well as MM in pvp as it has better utility and gimmicks and less telegraphing. BM is a bit lost but still king of the ring for solo content.
Mage - Fire is best for PvE, best for PvP, best for raids, best for dungeons and best for Torghast and solo content.
How does this even happen.
MOP fire mage was incredible. So much you could do at any given moment, and yet, it took set up to do damage, nothing of press this button and win we have going on now. Cata fire was good too, even though I didn´t play it then. Cata destro warlock was my mainthen, alike in the way it had a lot of tools and engaging gameplay all the time.
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I mean, i don’t mind the rotation of fire now with streak, i just wish more of the dmg came from correctly cultivating a good ignite with abilities to maybe “flare it up” so it ticks really hard at periods and you work with that. Or to make it explode. Combustion should make all your ignites active do something really amazing and threatening.
The issue is combustion being critastic does that in a way, but it also means in PvP Fire alrgely ignores their mastery because they drop targets in 2 seconds, making ignite worthless.
There has to be a better way for combustion to facilitate the play without using stupid burst like crit. Even like:
“For 10 sec your Pyroblast, Fire Blast, Scorch, Fireball and Phoenix Flames will always grant a stack of Heating up, and any ignite damage caused by spells during this time is increased by x%.”
Same end (big ignites, easy hot streak) without making it stupid big burst. Just tweak X so it makes combustion offer similar DPS to now, but it;'s through ignite rather than stupid crits on everything.
So like atm it’s fireball deals 2x(crit) dmg thus ignite = 2x plus amstery buff, when it should be fireball=1x dmg plus 2.5x/3x ignite damage.
Exactly this. 3 expansions of pretty much the same stale class design is way too much. We want somethnig else, something better. Something akin to what we had before.
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