If the community of a hypothetical WoW2 is the same as the first game, the problem would be the same. It could be fixed by lessening the focus on competition and a better moderation of the game, but that’s not what the devs want. The developer team needs to change for the community to do the same and that’s not happening.
More skills and spells with visuals that fit the race of the character would be nice. That includes renaming some of them for the Tauren priests for example, and have direct mentions of An’she instead of the Holy Light.
More new quests requiring to go back to previous zones. The map of this game is beautiful but underused.
Don’t care about the gear much. More freedom when it comes to tmog would be nice.
I’ve made my peace with the fact that the lore isn’t a priority for the devs, but a tool to keep the game running. They have no real story to tell, no will to let go of past characters to develop new ones. WoW2 would be no different if the writers are the same, but a WoW2 that has a true story with new protagonists to tell over several expansions, a fixed lore that isn’t retconned every time something new comes out, would be great. That’s like the basics of a good RPG when it comes to immersion.
FF14 controls min-maxing by making many classes who’s speciality isn’t dps. Bosses tend to die sooner or later as long as everyone is doing something, but odds on less than half the group is primarily a damage dealer. AFAIK they also ban discussion about dps meters.
We have enough classes, imo. I do like evokers, but the way Blizz had to tie it to a single race to make it make sense says a lot.
WoW would benefit from dynamic spawning, i.e. it should know that X amount of a given mob should be up. If there are less than X, spawn one immediately. Yes, you’ll get hyperspawning on busy locations who promotes farming - but the solution to this is have some GMs who actually ban bots. Outside of that, shards should always group people from the same realm. The only time 2 people from Silvermoon shouldn’t see each other is because there are multiple shards full of Silvermoon players.
WoW has always been about the gear chase, really… not sure how I would change that.
Story… I wish someone would actually check what players are interested in before committing to the overall arc for an expansion. Nobody wanted Shadowlands. Players have responded accordingly; by leaving.
In more freeform terms…
WoW needs to downscale it’s problems. It’s suffering from power bloat, to the point players have saved the known universe several times, and it’s getting hard to imagine what we should move on to next because we literally rival the old gods. The Titans should be scared when 20 Azerothian natives come knocking. This is weird.
Following on from this, I for one preferred being one soldier of many, rather than a “champion” or “hero”. Call me an adventurer, a mercenary, a soldier, but don’t pretend the other 999,999 players don’t exist. I remember how the N’zoth cutscene removed the other people in my raid… it was bad. I did not solo N’zoth.
In 9.2 I genuinely enjoyed the optional nature of Zereth Mortis - at least as far as alts were concerned. I did it on a couple of characters, the others skipped it. This is ideal for open world content, imo. It helped that it was a good looking zone that I enjoyed being in, vs the Maw and Korthia which were mandatory and ugly. Bad combo.
WoW has 3 methods of obtaining endgame gear, which have been out of balance for a long time. Dragonflight is actually upping the demands of the “weekly” M+ so it might be a bit closer to running mythic raids, which is good. Whether either are as hard as rated PvP is arguable.
On the PvP note… I preferred when there was no gear split. It’s currently 2 games, and my progress in raiding doesn’t help me in PvP, or vice versa. This is disappointing, since I invested many many many hours and feel like I earned some degree of advantage. Personally I would prefer that all content rewarded the same gear. No PvP stat, nothing.
Also on the PvP note, brackets should scale you DOWN to them. Sure, fight a team with 1100 rating in your 304 gear. You got downscaled to 284(ish), which is what they can get from their vaults. No more dropping your MMR and roflstomping. This would make it much more accessible to get started without facing a wall of veteran players with way more character power than you can handle.
From the PvE front, which is what I actually do 95% of my time… DF is looking good with how M+ is no longer going to be a free ride to mythic-raid gear. I know many are upset about the M+18 weeklies, but let’s face it; M+15 is much easier than mythic raiding. Why should it give you the same vault loot?
In my opinion we need more “world altering” events like the WotLK Scourge invasion. Not quite on the scale of the Cataclysm old world revamp, but certain events that force players to adapt to change.
Unfortunately, as we can see from the reaction to both the original WotLK scourge event as well as the WotLK Classic scourge event, this is not what people want. Players expect to be able to do the same content every day with no disruptions except on Content Patch/Expansion releases. Its a bit sad, really.
At the end of the day WoW has catered to the “wrong” crowd for too long. Wrong is obviously subjective and Id rather have a game populated by the “wrong” crowd than a dead game.