WoW has gotten really bad at explaining the game

Community General Discussion
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WoW was, most of the time, an easy to understand game with pretty clear mechanics and “taking players by the hand” to show them things.
I haven’t played much of BfA, so my problem starts with SL. SL was not at all intuitive, many mechanics, no explaining of how legendaries work, no explaining what quests you needed for what, no “guiding you” to important (quest- and mechanic wise npc)
Same goes for DF.
I found out today, that the catalyst exists, because someone asked me “if I had upgraded my pvp gear”. I had no idea what he meant.
Why do we have a “Adventurer’s Journal” and it doesn’t tell us such things? Why isn’t there an npc that runs up to you and says “Hey, it’s important, follow me” (like in Legion so you should never could miss your class hall quest)?

Everything important in WoW is now outsourced to wowhead, icy-veins or youtube and the game can’t even tell you most basic stuff.

Sorry, I’m just disappointed that such basic things aren’t easy accessible in the game, because that’s one of the things that made WoW better than other mmorpg. They completely lost that.

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I mean to be fair the catalyst has a quest sending you straight to it after doing group content. It even marks it on your map and all you have to do is hoover up all the ! in Valdrakken.

But the general point is very true. Almost every tooltip in the game is wrong.

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I have 20 marks in Valdrakken, because I never cared for questing it through and it’s not even specifically marked. It’s just another normal quest mark from the same guy that gave me absolutely nothing of interest before.

I mean it’s an important mechanic. That should be visible, either in the adventure journal or marked more clearly.
I get bombed with any world quest when flying through, Khadgars stupid head still follows me when I’m in Legion, every freaking day I get annoyed by Morgraine in SW with his “CHAMPION! Preparations have been made” on characters from level 10-60.

This is madness.

And it didn’t show up. My group content is Arena, RBG, Solo Shuffle. Nothing of this triggers a quest for the Catalyst.

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Well, enchants aren’t there, either. Nor are gems or craftables or a huge assortment of other things that WoW has that you need in PvP - that you have needed in PvP for 18 years. So this is hardly a new phenomenon.

So you wanna find out what you need to do to stay competitive - well, competition implies fighting other players, and fighting other players means knowing what you’re fighting, and knowing what you’re fighting means checking out their spell books, character sheets, etc.

At some point during inspecting other players you’ll run across an item that says it’s a tier piece and that has a PvP title on it, like Duelist or Rival.

As soon as you see this you know something is fishy, so you just ask a player. You can’t find this thing on the PvP vendor, so how did he get it? And he’ll tell you most likely. If he doesn’t, keep asking friends or guildies or whatever you can find.

I can certainly agree that the game is noisy with things and that the direction isn’t always clear, and this goes both for visuals and questing. And I certainly agree that it’s a problem, but this example just isn’t doing it for me. I mean of all the things - the wrong tooltips, the noisy animations and sounds, the lack of DR tracking, the million talents and abilities that overcomplicate everything to near absurdity… and it’s the Catalyst that gets you.

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Counterargument: people have gotten dumber

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You need addons weak auras and 10 tabs open in your browser to be able to play this game. It has been like that for years. It will never change because people are providing it for free so why should bobby spend money hiring someone to put it in game?

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That’s not an argument, that’s a statement you can’t prove, but hey, at least you contributed nothing to the issue.

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It’s actually the same (for me) in Dragonflight. A lot of things don’t show up on the map so I ended up having to go to icy veins/wowhead to find out what I’m actually supposed to be doing each week once I reached 70. And I’m not even sure everything is listed on there either.
I don’t necessarily want my hand held every step of the way, but someone waving in a general direction that there’s something I’ve not done would be helpful. I’m now keeping lists on bits of paper which really isn’t the idea of a game.

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But most of those things are really visible in the game. You get those over your profession, see people trading them, etc.

And as I said “I found the catalyst thing” because someone asked me and I had no idea. So I started looking.
It’s just bad design to not make such things visible for everyone. I mean I want to play a game not reading guides before I can play. The game just does a really bad job at pointing things out.

And no, I don’t think this is going on for a long time (maybe BfA?) because Wod, MoP, Legion were pretty solid at showing you “new things in the game”.
And DF did it too with the Trading Post thingie. You can’t escape the Trading Post.

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Unfortunately, I agree. It doesn’t help that you can spend hours or even days grinding for something, only to realize that there was a much more beneficial path to take.

There is an argument for just reading quest descriptions, but I also think it’s reasonable to presume that most players zoom past quest descriptions given that the VAST majority of them are just flavor-lore texts that doesn’t actually say much about the gameplay.

On the flipside, we have the island starter zone where players are taught to use wasd and how to move the camera around :smiley: That cracked me up the first time I saw that.

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Actually that’s true but maybe because it wasn’t in the zones players were likely to be. And, yes, it was annoying :smiley:

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I would argue they’re no more visible than the Catalyst. In all those cases you need to inspect and find stuff in the open game world.

I think it’s because they’re so old and core that you know about them because they’re from the time where you were leveling and hadn’t gotten so fixated on PvP yet. I honestly do.

If you can manage to repeatedly fly through Valdrakken and ignore literally every exclamation point, and by the way the main city has always been full of ultra important core quests, then… well, yeah.

This thing is not hard to find. All you have to do is inspect someone. Anyone. And then ask. And you did eventually. The game is doing enough as it is pointing you to everything with arrow. It’s okay to use the in-game chat to ask people. You don’t have to find anything on WoWHead - matter of fact they should kill WoWHead imo.

Your problem is you’re ignoring the world and you’re ignoring the people. This game is fundamentally designed around those two things as well as combat and a constant stream of content. Said another way, while you are probably very competent at WoW’s combat, you actually have no idea how to play the game overall - you’re actively ignoring 3/4ths of it, and tons of the last quarter of stuff you’re in to, and then being confused when something important was in all that lot that flew under your radar. Again, those 3/4ths are NOT raiding or M+. It’s Azeroth itself and its community. You’re ignoring them.

The Catalyst quest is straight next to one of the most important characters in the expansion, in the major city, it’s not a new system, and you can get hints to it by just thinking “Wait, where’d tier gear go and why is everybody else wearing it?”

So this is a very special form of “git gut” moment as far as I’m concerned. Hopefully you won’t find it insulting, it’s not meant to be. It’s just that WoW is something much different to the way you’re trying to play it right now and it’s actually punishing you for it.

EDIT: One thing I do not like, which is a punishment it gave you unfairly imo, is it doesn’t have catch-up. So now that you discovered it late you also can’t just fix it. You lost out. THAT sucks. But that’s not really a discoverability issue tbh, that’s a “FOMO” or fear of missing out issue.

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You get a quest sending you there. If you missed it you haven’t paid attention, or cared for the quests.

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There is no special attention to that NPC. Especially not when PvP your is main game mode.

And obviously I’m not the only one mentioning it.

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Well, if you ignore PvE, you are going to miss out on stuff. There are so many details in this game that you have to be your own filter. It won’t help anyone highlighting all these things, as they all end up as noise that end up ignored because you are not filtering it yourself.

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There’s NO WAY you didn’t see it. You just ignored it. That’s it.

But no, that’s true. And I’m not surprised.

There was a similar thing recently with someone who quit Shadowlands after not learning about Covenants for 3 solid months. In this case the player was confused because he bought a level boost so that got me a drum to beat because Blizzard was encouraging ignoring the game, but here it’s just… you’re ignoring nearly the whole game against Blizzard’s design.

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The npc has normal quest icon, not a campaign one or any other marking.

https://imgur.com/iM0V4Cg.jpg

https://imgur.com/dF62EIe.jpg

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All of the alts get the Dragonflight starter quest pop up constantly where you have to take the boat… when the portal is available ad outclasses it.

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While I agree that quests show you many things, there are some things that gets added later and nothing can be found about that except reading wowhead.
One example is JC setting for neck sockets, I didnt know about it for long time in DF. Always thought sockets come with gear when it drops.
Another thing is bottled essence at vendor for coins, new thing since 10.0.5.
Soul reagent for LW recipe is another example. Without Wowhead, I would never find out how to get it.

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I think blizz made this game to them self. Thats the simple answer. As they implement thing at the moment they have no interest in new players at all.