Hello everyone,
I’ve been loving War Mode in Dragonflight quite a lot! Been almost exclusively playing with War Mode on since the start. Only turned it off for a brief moment when leveling, because the Alliance at Ruby Life Pools had decided everything must die and there was a whole group of them just farming us and making it impossible to do any quests there, so just dipped away to continue and turned it back on shortly after leaving Ruby Life Pools. And aside from that, only Obsidian Citadel has brought any problems for me with War Mode, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
--------------ISSUES WITH WARMODE--------------
Firstly, I’d just like to praise Blizzard for making War Mode actually engaging for Dragonflight. Between the Bloody Token farming and just the joy of dismounting people off their dragons has brought a lot of life to the game for me. And despite the title I don’t see myself dropping out of War Mode any time soon. Just having a blast playing in it in general. Often times in past expanions I’ve found myself getting bored of the open world pretty fast because there was never a reason to turn War Mode on and all it brought was just a hassle of dealing with people for zero gain, but finally with Dragonflight things have definitely taken a turn.
But now for the issues.
First and foremost, I play on a Roleplaying realm and there’s one issue that’s completely ruined War Mode for me in the past and it keeps making it harder to enjoy War Mode even now, when everything else is great. The issue here is that non-Roleplaying realms are never phased in with players from Roleplaying realms unless they party up. This is all fine and dandy in theory. Let Roleplayers have their peace. But this peace comes at a cost of making War Mode on Roleplaying realms extremely imbalanced. ALL Roleplaying realms are Alliance heavy, which means that War Mode is consistently Alliance dominated. It’s been this way ever since War Mode was introduced in BfA. This in and of itself doesn’t really make it a problem, because War Mode is traditionally dominated by Horde elsewhere. But the thing is, Alliance get bonus quests and extra bonuses to the War Mode buff because there’s “less of them”, except it isn’t true on Roleplaying realms.
So in short: Alliance get huge bonuses for being in War Mode, while also dominating in numbers throughout the Roleplaying realms which just end up compounding the advantage Alliance has. More and more people join in because they realize it’s easy and free bonuses in like 95% of situations because they’ll always outnumber Horde and also just get a lot of bonuses.
This issue has been extremely prevalent in both BfA and Shadowlands, where the bonuses to War Mode were minimal, even negligible. But in Dragonflight we have many things people want to use War Mode for. Temporarily this meant that Horde had nice showings for War Mode, but it’s consistently getting worse with time. People have farmed thier Bloody Tokens, they’ve done their rep grinds so the PvP WQs are less lucrative and we’re starting to see Alliance dominate again while enjoying their free bonuses.
The previous paragraph brings me to the second problem, Bloody Tokens. These things are bloody awesome! Pun intended. They were a very lucrative reward, to the point where I was spending hours just hunting for people and flying around trying to catch some planes in all the zones just to grind up some of that awesome Drakebreaker gear! And the result of that was, I had my gear farmed by like day 2 or 3. I didn’t really need any more gear. I’ve bought some pieces for transmog, I bought the toy and the Wingshredder and whatnot. Now I’m sitting on 2.4k tokens and there’s nothing I can get with them. I can buy some bracers at 200 Bloody Tokens per and disenchant them for around 100g each and that’s it. Potentially a couple of hours of grinding for roughly 100g IF you are an Enchanter.
We need some Bloody Token sinks in the game to keep people interested. Because many people have gotten through their grind for them already and now they have no actual reason to go hunting for them any more. Give us some pets, mounts, epic transmog and other cosmetics. Maybe some bloodied up skin colors for our dragons?
The reason these tokens are an issue right now is because this is going to be yet another compounding effect for the Alliance dominance on Roleplaying realms and it’s even going to have the opposite effect on non-Roleplaying realms because even though Alliance get their bonuses to War Mode, they’ll be “done” with the grind and with no reason to turn on War Mode the faction imbalance is going to just stay godawful there as well.
At least that Bloody Token vendor sells some awesome consumables for War Mode!..for Rousing Ire for whatever reason? Yeah, I’ll definitely see people paying ~1.5k gold for a bomb that has a knockback effect and 5 uses…
And finally, my third and biggest issue with War Mode, bounties. The bounty system is actually horrendously bad design and I am not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea. It’s not engaging in any way and it’s not fun and it doesn’t even fully function on the reward side because the bag the bounty drops is limted to 5 people looting it.
So imagine this, you’re just minding your own business doing some world quests and mining, and every now and then you see Billy Bob John Jr. the Paladin or Ìllïđåđđygødx the Demon Hunter and you decide to kill them. Now some half an hour of mining and questing later later, you get flagged as a bounty. What do you do? Well, you either wait for 15 seconds on the ground because you’re no longer able to fly, and get ganked by 50 of the most elite players of the opposite faction who got the zone wide announcement of your exact location and they all just flew to you. And just before your death, as your last act of defiance, you drink an Elixir of Tongues and giggle to yourself when they start bickering over who got the bag and who didn’t. Or then, instead of waiting for 15 seconds, you do what I do and just hearthstone out because screw that noise.
So why do I do the “cowardly” thing and just Hearthstone out you might ask? Because the bounty system is just inherently obnoxious and nothing else and I absolutely despise the design of it. It’s not engaging for me to get tagged as a bounty and essentially just have it turn on Europe’s biggest hit and start the Final Countdown of my lifespan. There’s absolutely no reason why the announcement should happen and there’s no reason for it to toggle off my ability to fly. These do nothing but completely stop me from being able to play the game for the next minute or two. There’s no incentive for anyone to defend the bounty so the bounty is just left alone, waiting for their inevitable death. This isn’t even a fun system for the opposing faction. All they get is a notification that there’s someone tagged as a bounty and then it’s a bumrush towards the location and trying to be in the first five people to click the bag in all the mess of the 49 other elites of your faction trying to do the same exact thing.
---------------MY IDEAS FOR SOLUTIONS TO FIX SAID ISSUES--------------
So what do I propose Blizzard should change?
Firstly, the Roleplaying server issue is an easy thing to fix. Just separate the War Mode bonuses on Roleplaying and non-Roleplaying servers separately. If Horde dominates the non-Roleplaying servers, give Alliance a bonus there, and then give Horde the bonus on Roleplaying servers where Alliance dominates. This system was designed to help incentivize the losing faction to join, but right now it’s just a best of both worlds for Alliance and it’s pretty frustrating.
The issue with Bloody Tokens I already gave an answer for, give us something to spend them on. Even just making the consumables purchaseable with Bloody Tokens would help.
And then finally, the bounty system. This would need a complete revamp of the entire system. In an ideal world, I’d have all the downsides of someone who is a bounty completely removed. Don’t tell them they’re being targeted, don’t affect their gameplay. Then I would have bounty hunting boards set up in key locations, which give you a quest to go kill player X and a gadget that lets you use it every few minutes giving you a line of “last sighted around X” and you’d actually go, you know, bounty hunting for that player instead of just flying to the chest marked on your map. This would bring other opportunities with it. On top, this could also have the quests be split to different people, so not all 50 of the elite of your faction are hunting the same enemy, and instead you’d have 10 targets separately with 5 of the elite hunting them, making it a lot more reasonable on both sides. Now people can actually get rewards for finding the hunted players, and the hunted players aren’t completely robbed of their ability to play whenever they happen to get tagged.
The rewards could scale with how naughty that player has been. Kill 3 people and get your name on the board? Here, have some Bloody Tokens. Kill 20 people? Here’s a whole bunch of Bloody Tokens and some gold on top! This would make it a whole lot more interesting on both ends. The target could just keep on playing as usual and they’d occasionally have someone come after them, while the people hunting bounties would actually have something more interesting to do.
Then you could add more to this system by having players be able to set their own bounties with their own things as rewards. You were just trying to mine a node in Ohn’ahran Plains on your Warrior and peacefully walked past that enemy Evoker to go to that node they just mined from, and then you find yourself being slept by the Evoker, then rooted by the Evoker and then the mining node disappears? (Sorry not sorry Mr. Warrior) Then just fly to your nearest bounty board and give a bounty of 1,000,000 gold for the head of one Grymvild the Evoker’s head and whoever goes chasing after them, will not find the one million gold but rather their untimely death, but at least they tried. This would be such an awesome mechanic in my opinion.
At the very least, the bountied players shouldn’t be broadcasted zone wide for all to see. If nothing else changes, then this shoud be it. Give the bounty their buff, give them a glowy arrow above their head and disable their flying, but don’t broadcast the bounty for the zone because all that does is make it annoying to kill people in War Mode because the risk is getting your face smashed in by the 50 elite players of the opposite faction. I’ve honestly stopped killing people when out mining, too, because there’s no gain from it as the reward is one Bloody Token, which I don’t need anymore, and some Honor, which I also don’t need anymore.
--------------FINAL RAMBLINGS--------------
Out of everything I’ve written here, the bounty system is most likely to kill my enjoyment of War Mode because there really is no benefit to it. Even the reward for actually managing to outpace the 49 other elite players of my faction and being able to click the bag is some useless Bloody Tokens, some useless Honor and for the first of the day, some Conquest, but then again Conquest cap is going up at a rate of 550 a week and I’ll be getting that much faster than I’ll get my vault rewards, so that is completely worthless as well.
At the end here, I’d just like to say thank you for anyone who actually read my ramble. I know this is just the EU forums, I know this is War Mode and no one cares, except me, I care, and I know a lot of people probably don’t even see the issue with these things but for me, War Mode is quite likely the part I’ve enjoyed most about Dragonflight so far and I’d hate to see it devolve back into what it has been for the past two expansions, since by the looks of it it’s definitely heading towards that direction now. At least dismounting people from their Dragons will never get old!
Anywho, I’ll go off hunting some stinking Alliance, with my finger on the Hearthstone button. Good luck out there, have fun and most importantly, die well.