Don’t tell me it is phasing or sharding or anything. These zones are full dead. Nobody is killing rares. Impossible to solo them. When will they nerf their HP or buff the reward? Nobody needs the 370 green items or trinkets. They should be like 410 by default. Never seen the dev team this out of touch possibly ever.
Even Korthia and maw had more activity than this.
Korthia yes. Maw BEFORE the changes: naahhhh.
Anyway, yes… The zones need tweaks. Now, rather than later.
Korthia and maw was mandatory though for sockets & conduits.
And once ZM came about there wasn’t a huge amount of activity in Korthia.
Korthia was completely dead after 9.2, aside from the occasional leather farming groups.
Never had a problem starting my own Rare farming raid group and then killing everysingle one of the rares >.>
And yesterday we had that… needs tweaking maybe.
yes but 10.2 is the equivalent of 9.2 (ZM). We are still in 10.1.7 technically main zone is still zaralek.
Of course ZM took over Korthia once it came out which is a no brainer but right now there is no ZM equivalent just yet which will be the Emerald Dream.
forbidden reach did hold on for a while at least but it only took caverns 10 days to die lol.
I think it is because this is the second zone in a row which was mainly just a “rare spawn simulator” zone.
Outside of the questline, and possibly to gather the crafting recipes there is little reason to engage with it.
The rares in there are basically a waste of time to do unless you are aiming to get an armor recolor. The bulk of the weekly rep you can get by doing the digs and the researchers event so that reason is out, and the drops, while some are nice, people can easily get now from Time Rift and even from Dreamsurges.
Yeah, I did the Researchers yesterday. First time I looked in LFG there was no group (this was for the 2.30pm event) but a few minutes later (about 2.28) there was one group which I joined and got it done.
So even on Reset day you’ll get only one group for Researchers just before it starts.
I think Bliz need to implement loads of AI “players” that can be grouped with to do these things.
I think there is a degree of truth in this. Zaralek Caverns very much felt like just another example of the rare farm zone that has been a mid expansion stable since the Timeless Isle - and IMO it’s a format that’s become very stale.
In this case it’s a bit of a shame as there is a lot of innovation in many of the individual gameplay components within the zone, however those components drew from a very shallow pool of alternatives (for example while the WQs are interesting they same ones come around almost every week which compares poorly with the feeling of variety and diversity WQs offered in Legion).
For me the caverns had two issues, that aforementioned lack of depth and diversity combined with a very fragmented feel to the activities which mean it never really came together in a cohesive whole.
The end result of this was that 10.1.5 which despite having techincally a lot less content ended up feeling like it had more depth and was a lot more interesting - which I think effectively killed off the desire of a lot of players to continue with the caverns.
A great example of the effects of the caverns shallow pool of content can be seen by comparing Researchers under Fire with Time Rifts. While they share many of the same elements of mechanical gameplay Researches Under Fire consists of the same activities in the same order wheras Time Rifts have a wide variety of activities and what feels like random assignment which meant that no two rifts ever felt the same.
No surprise then that every rift I did in 10.1.5 was always busy while for Researchers Under Fire even before 10.1.5 came out unless you did it on a Wednesday it was hard to even use group finder to get a full group in time.
If I was to give feedback to the devs it would be:
games that have less players than wow have no issues with open-world events. it’s about rewards, if those events don’t give rewards that would appeal to majority then thi happens
I think most players do open world content alone. They do not want to sign up for every different rare that is up. And then we got it on a weekly lockout too… yeah, that is the recipe for getting empty zones. Especially a bit later in the season.
People were forced to grind in Korthia and in other places in Shadowlands, thats why there were people there all the time in them. Here in Dragonflight it’s all optional, with no ‘need’ to go to these zones to progress in group content why bother going to them.
There is nothing to do in Zarelek Cavern besides World Quests. People go the cavern every 3 days, hence why the zone was empty from the start.
Korthia on the other hand, had daily quests and rares that dropped mounts (on a daily reset).
you forgot about snail racing !! researchers !!! all those amazing stuff and the rat thing that you dig with a map that gives you another currency you can spend on limited stuff !!!
As far as mount quest-chains go this one was one of the most annoying in WoWs history. One quest in particular had you ride a painfully slow snail FOR NEARLY 10 MINUTES and if you agroed a mob you had to restart the quest because your character couldn’t attack.
this has everything to do with the rewards structure of caverns and time rifts.
add to caverns farmable wyrm crest fragments (4-5 fragments for each WQ ) on daily changing WQ and it will be filled with people.
you cannot have life and thriving content in mmo which doesnt offer any rewwards whwich give real player power tied to them .
Remember several years back when there was a really popular addon that grouped you with nearby players for WQs almost automatically? It was popular for a reason.
People don’t WANT to go and look for a group because that sucks. People just want to do the content fast and convenient.
That addon could’ve maybe done some good for Zaralek Cavern.
PS: I get that it caused issues for the server with people jumping around shards and whatnot, but still… It was quick and convenient and it worked.