This expansion will crash harder than any before

Community General Discussion
144

How is SL the same as BFA? Be specific. Lots of handwaving in this thread about “the same crap” yet nobody gives details smh.

Also re: TBC different target audience. If you think TBC classic is gonna lure SL people away when some people are complaining SL is too “hardcore” and has “Nothing for casuals” you must be high. TBC, the expansion that had attunements galore and if you didn’t do raiding or ranked PvP you got trash gear, and by trash, I don’t mean “equivalent to normal raiding just about” I mean literal trash gear.

You think the people in this thread complaining there’s nothing to do, are gonna sign up for that? The people who like M+ because affix and climb are gonna sign up for a game where the dungeons don’t scale, and stop at heroic and if you outgear heroic but don’t have time to raid, well tough crap, there’s nothing left for you to do except do maybe 3 daily quests a date for obscure faction X to a get a Netherdrake?

Yeah, I ain’t buying it.

TBC was good don’t get me wrong, I loved it. You know why? Because it was very similar to Shadowlands. Chore crap was at a minimum and the “added extras” you could do offered only small power stuff (like Ador+Scryer or SSO) rather than something your entire spec works about (like essences) but rather you’d have “a bit more crit+sta” for example.

The majority of the game gearing beyond this was based around heroic dungeons (if that was your ceiling) but also raiding and rated pvp/casual pvp. Just like Shadowlands. TBC is more like Shadowlands than you realise the only real difference is the thematics and the class design philosophy but the approach to the endgame is remarkably similar except SL has more stuff casuals “can” do if they choose to as opposed to them being restricted to grinding reps or crafting 1-2 semi-decent items with a tradeskill.

Obviously raiding was different as difficulties didn’t exist as well, rather u had to progress them (Gruul’s lair to start for example) and then go through- this is all stuff that would probably make TBC less attractive to those complaining SL isn’t casual friendly, because TBC had no catch up. You not geared for black templte but wanna raid it? U gotta find a guild willing to either hard carry you (unlikely) or one that is progressing/farming Gruul and work your way through. That takes loads of time and is probably a huge turn off for a player looking for casual raiding. Whereas in SL if you wanna do X raid at difficulty Y, it’s much easier to do so.

Not saying one model is objectively better than the other as I don’t really raid anymore, but the point is a majority of the “Unsubbing” crowd are complaining that SL doesn’t give u enough unless you invest loads into it, and TBC offers exactly the same experience as that, albeit the raiding is instead of being gated by low drops, it’s gated by lesser drops in general and raids having to be done in sequence. Ie if u miss the “first round” you are screwed.

You see this in classic already. Everyone and their mum is aiming for AQ and Naxx. U come to the game now and wanna raid Naxx? GL finding a guild that’s still interested in running Molten Core etc because you will struggle to find one that is and is seriously considering pushing to Naxx as well.

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You isolated only one thing I said in relation to what was worth doing every week. The highest raid tier you can, 1 M+ for the chest, and a few others you feel like doing for pushing, emissary chest daily, and later relinquished token in the slot of the lego you’re after. After that you’re hitting your head against a wall as you’ve already done all the “highest chance at a lego” activities.

Titanforging is the same thing, it was never worth grinding anything specifically for a titanforge, it sucked as an RNG system but it was never meant to be something you actively grind for, just something that happens while you’re doing other stuff and getting gear naturally.

All the other things you’re describing really did apply only for people who were pushing world first races or incredibly high keys, and it did suck for them, but there are very very few of those people and they aren’t who you should be building your game around.

I was clearing heroic content at the time even faster than now tbh and was never noticeably behind others in terms of gear or AP, but I remember from Preach’s videos back then that even he and others from his guild so mythic raiders actively clearing all content, were not doing the obscene grinds that the world first raiders had to. They were the only people who HAD to treat the game that way, everyone else who was doing it only has themselves to blame.

I fully agree with this though the state of the game now is for me inferior to what it was, precisely because of content segmentation of gear/legendaries/anima that didn’t exist then.

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146

What kind of argument is that even? Are you saying that people that don’t even play don’t get items or what is your point? Not to forget that it’s a billion times worse in Shadowlands.

Yes.

You people are delusional. You’re literally lying to yourself to cope with what? Your addiction? What’s going on with you people defending the state of the game when it’s obvious that the expansion is an utter disaster in every way possible.

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I do agree that there are a few systems that need to be expanded upon, but this expansion is a great foundation for moving forwards with WOW.

Mandatory chores from Legion and BfA are gone for good. We are back at WOTLK / Cata / TBC roots which is a good thing.

Torghast is fun and in my opinion the rest of the dungeons should learn about it. I for one would like to see the end of timed mythic dungeons. Procedurally generated, layered dungeons are more fun and engaging.

The Maw is the reason why some of us were against flying mounts in the first place: they take away the feeling of exploration and danger.

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Not the same, but worse. All these cheap grindy systems have been replaced by new cheap grindy systems, which are even worse. Now to these stupid systems you add zones that are small and separate, a story that is average, a gearing system that is bearable but far from good, where the difference in power is even more pronounced, etc. From expansion to expansion, the game looks less and less like wow while the quality is constantly declining.

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So no specifics then, just the usual “it’s obvious ur a baddie if u don’t agree despite no examples” waves hands okay have fun with your inane ranting. I sure hope it makes you happier.

And you’re delusional if you think TBC is that different from Shadowlands in end-game approach. Look beyond the loot fgs. I’m talking about the approach to content and how it is tiered. You focus too much on a single issue and can’t see the bigger picture. Raiding was the most rewarding thing in TBC alongside PvP if you raided seriously. Dungeons were lesser. In SL we see exactly the same pattern across contents. Yet here you stand claiming people will see TBC as a balm for their dungeon woes in SL? Hahahaha. So all these players who complain no loot drops in their +15 are going to be happy they’re getting a heck load of loot in TBC that is vastly below raid gear from their dungeons? I’m sure they’ll feel very satisfied with the fact they’re getting crap loot from spamming content they find trivial.

Elaborate on grindy systems. Again, very general comments, lack of specifics.
BFA grinds:
AP (Player Power)
Reputation (Essences - Player Power)
Coalescing Visions (Needed to access player power)
Horrific Visions (Needed to get Corruptions - play power)

That’s four key grinds that you could not avoid if u were a somewhat serious player. Let’s look at SL:

Grinds:
Soul Ash (Player Power)
Covenant (Player Power)

Okay I count two things I have to do, that occupy one session a week, that are necessary for player power. The rest comes from me simply doing “gearing content”. How are they equally grindy? If you mean grinding gear, you avoided the illusion of that in BFA because so much of our time was spent doing boring crap instead of grinding gear because you had to do it.

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150

What do you want me to do? Make you a list? I don’t care if you think I’m wrong and even if I did give you a rundown of everything you’re not going to change your mind anyway because you do not want to.

It is a completely different game. Literally a day and night difference. There’s nothing that’s even remotely the same. Are you drunk? When did you even start playing the game?

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A list? I asked you to give a specific example or two. Don’t act like this is an unreasonable demand. You’re claiming “oh yeah it’s worst” i’m simply asking you to explain how using a bit of detail, and you act like that’s an unreasonable demand? If somebody says there is something wrong with ur car, do you just give them money rather than asking what is wrong and what they mean? Or just take their word?

And with the night and day comment- again, you’re just using phrases that don’t actually say anything “they’re night and day” so go on then, point out how.

At the moment this conversation is like you going “I love this song it’s so good” and I ask “Why do you think that?” and you reply “Because it’s good” and you think that’s a solid answer. Like if you can’t move beyond that or see it as asking too much to even supply a bit of detail as opposed to just accusing me of being drunk for disagreeing with you without giving any indication as to why, then we’re done here.

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I was referring to PvE. PvP gearing is really easy.

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Why would I list all these well-known stupid systems for you now? To finally tell me how all this is optional and that I don’t have to do it? I’m not a fool. The fact is that if you want to play the game normally, at a certain level, that in addition to pure power you also have all those cool benefits, then you have to constantly do those chores. But I repeat, these cheap, grindy and boring systems are not the only problem of this expansion.

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154

Because old raids and HC dungeons were the content for “casuals” and it was good. Also professions.

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I was to getting gear in PvE is not really hard it is slow but not hard

156

Depends on the group… Imagine wiping to stupid stuff, failing the key and getting no loot for the whole experience.

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People wanted loot to matter, and wanting the epeen of being purpled out, that they had missed since classic. Compared to the plebians in blues at most.

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That may have worked for them then, my point is the disgruntled mythic+ crowd who like both a progressive dungeon challenge and worthwhile loot whom are moaning about SL are not going to be coerced by TBC which offers dungeons with no scaling whatsoever and capped rewards that peter out at heroic difficulty - and these dungeons are all you get all expo with no changes to them over the course of the expo.

That might appeal to the hyper casual “I only run normal and maybe a cheeky heroic” dungeon, but I don’t see how it does in a way that SL doesn’t? As SL dungeons offer the same difficulties and the same static loot structure, the only thing that changes is they scale higher in SL so there’s option to move beyond that if you want, whereas in TBC if Heroic dungeons are “too easy” your only option is to start raiding. But what happens if you don’t like raiding? Well tough crap.

So no, I don’t see TBC poaching a huge amount of SL players because the principle complaining crowd in SL atm is the M+ crowd. They won’t be placated with dungeons as a “babymode” they have to be satisfied with outside of “proper” content like raiding. No way. They’ll probably leave WoW entirely rather than jump to TBC which offers an even worse progression model for their playstyle, don’t you think?

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It’s not about the quantity of grinds but the amount of time and variety, coupled with the subjective opinion of the content we’re grinding.

In BFA:

AP boiled down to a few weekly Islands for the bonus, and the AP Emissary.

Reputations were only relevant to player power if that specific Essence was your BIS, which wasn’t the case often, and even then they were at Reveared and rep was gated behind a couple of daily quests.

Vision itself could have been done in 2-5 minutes max if you only wanted the mandatory stuff and didn’t care for pushing.

Assault weeklies for the vials if you only wanted one quick Vision for one cloak upgrade, was extremely fast to do a 2-3 quests in the major assault zone.

Also worth to mention that these grinds weren’t up all the time at one point, Nazj/Mecha rep guide and Visions were each a separate patch and you weren’t grinding 8.2 reps in 8.3 again if you already did them back then.

I’d much rather take all that again than do one more Torghast run ever again.

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160

Legion was great for casuals. As it offered alot of extras

Legendaries dropping from all sources ment casuals could do dailies and more to collect them.

We had the class order halls. With pretty decent mission table rewards.

Class hall mounts to work towards

Granted we needed to wait til Argus gear if you didn’t raid but mage tower eventually became farmable.

Imho these are the small things SL miss.

Mage tower went miles in giving players alot of reason to play alot of chars. Imho we need something like it back.

Torghast just isn’t concrete enough to offer that same experience and I still feel like it’s no where near as good as heaven on high in FFXIV for example.

Legion did alot of things right. BFA took em too far.

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161

They just had to repeat and improve on Legion. Secondary gameplay like Mage Tower was the best iteration they had. Just improve on it. They also forgot that people like stuff related to their class as it is deeply attached to warcraft. Not some fantasy diablo covenant stuff nobody cares about.

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The point is the stuff I had to grind wasn’t meaningful at all.

It was boring, and repetitive, and above all it required no brain power.

Stomping crappy low WQs for rep? Huzzah. Much fun. Literally flying to X point to do X task which requires no skill whatsoever. TBH I think as we had 4 essences, if you managed to get away with not a single one requiring a rep, u were the lucky one because everyone tended to use at least one of the mecha/naz/visions rep essences. This isn’t even talking about the others gated behind even worse grinds like Lucid or the PvP one for non pvp players.

Also reputations were tied to pathfinder, which meant everyone was coerced into doing this trivial WQ content which is largely worthless.

Even if AP was resolved by islands, it’s still a stupid chore I had to do for “reasons” that involved no depth, no planning, no real execution, just zugzug an island. I’m sorry, may as well not ask me to do it. It’s about as fun as being sent to Durotar to round up all the level 10 scorpids and kill them. Waste of time.

Same for the visions. both quests and the execution of them themselves.

I’m not saying all this took zounds of time. But here’s the thing:

  • AP was largely weekly
  • Rep (if u were grinding) was daily, so u had to do it every day (so even if 10 mins, that’s over an hour a week)
  • Visions - again multiply up the time by runs a week and factor in assault time etc.

SO although the time is not my main point, if it were BFA still took more time from us for these chores a week than SL. My two torg runs plus souls in maw takes about 45 minutes maximum. The anima I don’t count as I don’t “grind” it, I always hit the cap before reset by just doing the PvP I would do otherwise.

45 minutes a week to be done with my chores. There is no way you can tell me BFA allowed us to do that. The portal travel time added up every freaking day probably gets to over half of that.

The main point however was the grinds in BFA were utterly boring. I’m not saying Torg is the height of excitement. It does however have the potential to differ run to run, allowing you to “muck about” and make the “chore” fun, by trying a stupid build in the run for example. The gathering of souls isn’;t super exciting but it takes like 5 minutes if u know how to do it.

In BFA these chores were repeating the same crap every time you did them, no variation, no challenge, no risk. It was utterly boring.

And remember it’s good to look at BFA at end and go “yeah well the catch up???” I remember pre catchup because I had 5 chars geared and I can tell you now grinding their essences out for each of them because rank3 in many cases was such a big upgrade was a HUGE chore that took me several months to accomplish and during that period I ran barely any content on them outside of grinds until they were “done”.

In SL I have in a month got 3 chars to 197+ with their leggo at at least rank 2 (two of them have 4) and their covenant campaign is within the weekly max range (28-30), so they’re all “optimal” aside from gear, and on them i’ve been doing content.

Nobody will be able to convince me BFA was good for alts and better on the chore front. BFA is the only wow expo to date where i’ve actually took a prolonged absence because the whole roundabout of “stuff to do” before i could do the stuff I wanted to do was so massive I just noped out.

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163

You didn’t mention one very important thing. The Story is NOT world of warcraft. Yes, it has world of warcraft characters, but the storyline is abysmal. At least with BFA (which I loved, but others seem to hate), we were developing the story and lore of Azeroth and World of Warcraft and learning more about the different races across Azeroth. Shadowlands has very little to do with the game, and I feel very little connection to any of the characters. Trying not to spoil anything, one story involves the death of a character and it’s played out to be really sad. Didn’t care, didn’t know the character, the character meant nothing to me. Failure in the writing.