My assumption is raidlogging, alt burnout, not wanting to repeat the same steps for specific runes, P3 being a bit underwhelming in terms of raid loot(has been tweaked a bit now, but in some cases, "too little, too late") therefore people just decided to skip a phase or quit entirely because "if this is the way we're going what's the point?". Another thing could also be devs saying balance changes are gonna be minimal until next phase, so people that have a "bad" main currently don't wanna deal with being stomped in pvp/being underwhelming damage in pve.
I also hate the formula for getting runes. Phase 1 was organic. The second you start throwing shared giant quest lines and dungeon grinds behind runes I'm out. There's no catch up, and runes are annoying to get, so alts are out for me.
Yeah the runes are busy work now. Imagine going to the trainer for your next skill and him sending you on some busy work quest. That would get old quick. Well that's what we have with the rune system, only the quest giver is wowhead. It makes alting less desirable.
I’ve been running a warlock with a friend I got back into it, and man I’m feeling this. Hell do you mean my phase 1 rune needs me to kill 25 elites and 29-30 enemies? Alone, cause my guild is all offline? Guess I’m waiting till 30 to get this damn rune lmao
At this point I unironically think the best move they could make when it comes to runes at this point would be adding a rune vendor or something for new players and alt accounts to catch up without needing to spend hours trying to find someone willing to group up or tediously solo-grinding quest lines intended to be done with a group.
I know for damn sure that I am not going to be leveling any alts in P4 if it means I gotta spend all that time getting some of these runes with how bullshit some of them are.
Retail is pulling all this effort for being alt friendly with account wide unlocks. Why not doing the same with runes? You finished dark rider with you main? Cool now you will get the rune on all your current and future alts without the regrinding effort. This would make the game alt friendly again, and at least would make these hard to get runes a little more worthy of our precious time.
I'm just skipping this phase as well. In normal classic, one of the most fun things to me was that even after new phases dropped, old raids still had BIS gear. So it was worth running MC while BWL was out.
Also, you kinda required to have MC gear to clear BWL (for normal average players, your dps, healing or tanking would be lacking in blues). So a phase never felt useless.
With the level jump each SoD phase, comes a big gear jump. Basically most items you get in raids now, is obsolete next phase. Or at best it's about on-par with dungeon drops. In P3 the basically free incursion gear was good enough to raid with, rendering a lot of Gnomer gear useless.
There is no real incentive to raid now.
One of the biggest complaints is the lack of gear jump this phase. There are a few items from Gnomer that are BiS. The trinket from BFD might still be BiS for some specs. And a lot of the Gnomer gear was perfectly fine prebis with ST only offering small upgrades.
This loot changes the other week fixed a little bit of that. But not much.
I'm really worried about them learning the wrong lesson from this. It's great that old raids items are bis. It's just odd because these are level up raids. If all of these raids were end game, it's a positive, not a negative, that many classes bis comes from gnomer. If you streamline gear too much so that all bis only comes from the newest tier, you get old forgotten content that no one does and the game feels so much smaller with much less to do.
A number of pieces of my bis as a prot paladin are from Gnomer/P2. One of the main complaints about ST is that the gear wasn't enough of a jump up.
This thread is weird, it seems like a lot of people commenting didn't actually play SoD P2 or 3.
>There is no real incentive to raid now.
You are right, but for the wrong reasons. If each phase had the power jump you are talking about there'd be a real demand to get all the pieces to keep up, but because there isn't people don't feel the need to push for ST loot and are just waiting for P4.
There's also people like me who lost all interest in SoD with the incursion gold fuck up, even after the "fix" incursions still invalidated all your gold and shit you'd steadily built up in previous phases.
Because the population has taken a nosedive, should a resurgence happen prices will skyrocket and the people sitting pretty on thousands of gold will have a massive advantage.
Fact is one ill thought addition to P3 killed SoD for quite a few people, it's sad but can only blame blizzard for that one.
understand that these in classic would have been around 1g a stack, GOLD was a harder thing to obtain, BOTs boosted the gold economy P1 then incursions inflated it to a ridiculous amount
Raidlogging is only loging in to do the raid then logout afterwards and wait for next reset to repeat it.
What you're talking about is people checking your performance on earlier raids. Although logs doesn't reflect how well you're doing mechanics unless you really dig deep and analyze(which no one has time for if they are setting up the raid then and there). You could have an absolute gigachad pumper dps be the worst at doing mechanics and be the reason you're wiping, not sure how often that happens as i don't raid with randoms. Join a guild and you can avoid all that.
Edit: good logs = did a lot of dps or healing compared to the average. I'm tanking as an example, if i go for a dps build and do a lot of damage the logs will say im a good tank, but now the healers have to pick up my slack because i am taking a lot more damage since i dont focus on damage negation. Which i would then say, that is not good tanking in traditional terms. But logs say good, therefore i must be good.
I get what ur saying but this attitude is what lets blizzard bend us over fuck is in the ass and they make us thank them for half ass content they put out simply don’t play for awhile scare them and get good content
Another thing i think people underestimate is…the majority of classic players are 30+ dads, and with summer hitting, people are just finding better things to spend their time doing. People will be back for P4 without a doubt.
I was away with work and other staff so missed phase 1 and pahse 2, started a rogue a month ago, got it to 50 questing and had a blast, got my lock picking and poisons to max for phase, professions to 300, I even did incursions to unlock my second last rune and st event for the dagger.
What I have noticed is the pop has plummeted last 3 weeks, whoever was playing is now raid logging.
Getting the world buffs was easy so people clearly raiding. But for example wild offerings farm, I spammed 2 hours straight yesterday and nothing, one group replied when I whispered the from a / who Check of maraudon, and they asked for my mains raid logs as he couldn't find my rogue on wcl, I replied I was new toon and hadn't raided yet. The reply I got was sorry not carrying dead weight.... For a mara princess run....
Trying my best here but despite me initial hesitation cata is looking better and better everyday
Laugh out loud, I can't believe anyone would ever log check someone for Mara wild offering runs as you do them as 10 people and are usually done in 30 minutes with your runs. This is either a made up story or you just happened to run into the 1 person in the world who did that and others shouldn't take this anecdote as normal.
Ehhh, they'd prefer just cata lol
Can't further monetize era/SoD players
I honestly won't be shocked at all if they introduce the wow token into SoD in p4 to "help" all the returning players catch up to the incursion-fucked-economy
Everyone is waiting for some news on SoD...some teaser, item changes, dungeon/raid changes, new stuff, anything.
Like my guild is still hyped for p4 but nobody has anything to do. We parse once or twice a week and basically play different games until there is an announcement.
The fact that they couldn't tease anything substantial at all with the p4 update was pretty telling I think
I'd think if they had *any* new raids or dungeons cooking like SM, Kara crypts etc they'd have announced it to somewhat maintain interest
Feel like we're just gonna get SoM style raids at 60 with updated loot for months in p4
I think internally they got told to not release anything that could dampen the cata hype. If they don't announce anything in the next 2-3 weeks I'd agree with you.
Oh yeah, I have tried to look for something, but no one knows anything? How is this a thing?? Idk when P3 even released tbh haha (what is parsing?? btw)
There are websites (Warcraft Logs) that capture data about your raid performance and compare it to other groups. It looks at your ability use, damage, kill speed, etc. and then gives you a 1-100 rating score of how well you’re doing relative to other people playing your class overall. This is parsing.
They said something about p4 being delayed after being quiet for weeks. After P3 being not really well received I think a lot of people lost faith in the direction the devs are taking sod.
Parsing is your raid performance compared to others playing your same class. All of the information from every button you press during a raid is logged and can be looked up. So warcraft logs compiles all of that information and shows how you perform compared to everyone else who plays the same class as you. You get a score from 0 to 100 depending on where you are in the pack.
I left p3 after a couple weeks into it. Couldn't find any groups to do content with, so I stopped logging in. Currently trying cata but can't find a decent raid group, maybe just time to end the sub tbh
End the sub. Come back when they give us what we want. I was subbed from 2019 till tbc. Came back for hardcore then rolled into SOD. Unsubbed a month ago. I will GLADLY give blizzard 15 bucks a month when they give me Warcraft in a version that is fun to me.
I cancelled after being subbed uninterrupted since 2019. It's clear that Blizzard doesn't give a shit about any of the versions of Classic.
I also just don't like the approach they've taken with SoD. So many design choices that go against the spirit of Vanilla.
I went and found a private server more to my liking and I'm having a much better time for it. For free.
Oh they will. People won't skip out on doing MC, Ony, BWL, ZG, AQ again. It was the prime of Classic Era and will be the prime of SoD. Cata servers will take a hit.
"BWL few weeks after MC" tells me the same. Honestly I'm not even expecting fully redone mechanics for future raids, probably end up getting the exact same raid but HP tuned and some mechanics tuned so you can do it with 20 people.
the community is why im not comming back. everyone is cosplaying world first speedrunners. there is no place for normal players. its all hardcore gatekeepers
Personally I will not be coming back. I'm not going to get baited into that mess again after watching then ditch the game because Cata and Mop remix came out.
They killed it and to be honest I have no faith Classic + could ever be done by this WoW dev team.
Such a sad L for everyone involved.
eh, thats not up to the devs. i agree its a terrible practice but its higherups trying to pump and dump blizzard stock.
dont blame the devs, what they were able to do with the small team and allotted time they had was decent
I don't, SoD has been very chill now that the toxic players are over at Cata.
I dread that they will hop back on to SoD when P4 hits, because these people will devour any new content like locust whether they actually like it or not and in doing so bring their negativity with them.
Playing HC, Era or SoD now is amazing because the people there really want to be there.
I've been in era 3 years now and locust analogy is spot on. Whenever era gets too popular it goes down in quality. When something shiny releases it goes back to normal medium server feel.
Short of taking place in the Classic world, there is almost nothing Classic about SoD. It utterly fails at recapturing the feeling of Vanilla, or even 2019 Classic.
Blizzard went overboard as usual. Became such a chore to get new abilities, too many of them at that. PvP has been awful, Aggrends attitude on twitter defending premades broke my heart. 9 hour WSGs because they didn’t want to add a 20 minute timer, and yet had no problem adjusting overall damage and healing by wild ratios. Going from 10 to 20 in raids was awful, they can’t help themselves but change it. Guilds were set up for 10 for 2 phases then blizzard threw that wrench into the system. Gnomeregan has hilariously awful bugs like being stuck in combat indefinitely so no mage could use their new portals at 40. Last boss spawned directly and immediately on top of previous boss, something they could easily fix if they bothered to play their own game. STV PvP event was awful. Ashenvale PvP was kinda fun but had big problems.
They just have no idea what they’re doing and we all fell for it.
The main reason me and my group called it quits was the move from 10 man raids to 20 and 40 man raids.
The raids require more time and coordination and we were just looking to play casual goof off and have fun in raids.
I can’t speak for everyone but I know a lot of people are playing cataclysm and MoP remix. Half are guild went to each, only bcuz SoD content is dead atm. Most of us maxed our professions and are missing 1-2 items from raid.
Also with absolutely 0 updates on what’s happening doesn’t help the situation. I expect them to make an announcement within 2 weeks of something.
My theory is with the lay offs at Blizzard this pass year and how buggy cataclysm was at launch they needed help from the SoD devs and have been working on that to fix issues.
I think people were ready for 60 not 50. Also some of the classes are weird, but they said they will do a ptr and revamp some classes so it could work out
For me, SoD felt like Classic up thru p2, what the game was supposed to feel like, Classic with a twist of new moves, gear, content etc. When P3 came out, they completely shifted the balance to make the game play much more like retail.
Leveling is an enormous part of Classic, and giving everyone crazy experience boosts and a way to power level repeating the same dull quests over and over was such a slap in the face to anyone that was playing Classic for Classic, all so players that wanted 9 alts could do so easier. I made it to 41 on day 1 of P3 and immediately logged out and never came back.
Now with all of that said, I’ll potentially come back for p4 if they turn the ship around and bring it back to feeling much more like Classic, but if it’s more of the same BS catering to these weirdos that want to speed rush through everything then nope.
Devs dropped the ball. Sod felt like it was abandoned as soon as cata was released. They shot themselfs in the foot. Blizzard have shown they don't care. Doubt I'll be back for phase 4 and I'm sure alot feel the same way.
I’ll probably go back, but all my buddies who played up until raids changed from 10 to 20 man, they’ve moved on to other games and won’t be back.
SOD probably lost most of its casual audience. Casuals aren’t addicts like a lot of people here, they play until it isn’t fun, then carry on to another game without looking back. Unfortunate that the game is just sorta left out in the rain to rot atm, because it’s surely going to have large lasting effects for later phases.
Nah, the good ones kept at it and we had so much fun in SOM version of Naxx and AQ40.
AQ40 was actually fun in SOM with the crazy power boost, riding the fine line to doom the whole way, fuck yeah
I'm also a casual player, and the stuff you're supposed to do/grind at level 50 is the most soul draining content.
These mara runs and inc for rep and gold are not what people wanted from classic. It's incredibly boring, and you can only raid ST every week. I thought I liked SOD until I actually got level 50 on 2 alts. Why would anyone play this unless you're levelling a new alt
They also delayed p4 because they want people to enjoy other versions of wow right now
People don't do dungeons or elite quests in SoD. Why do dungeons when incursions are much faster? Why do elite quests when just doing a couple quests makes them green in your quest log and you can just move to another more efficient zone?
All that speed and convenience has a cost, people rush to max level and then hit a wall with progression and don't want to play because the dopamine rush ran off.
I’m planning on it but it unfortunately looks like they set it up to be a situation where people rush prebis and then will raidlog for MC because they won’t have anything else to do :(
I’m still enjoying SoD too but I’ve been playing pretty actively since p1. Have three characters at 50 now and I’m just gold/rep farming for p4. I’m certain people will come back for p4, especially first few weeks of launch to do new content. I’m just hoping Blizz knocks it out of the park enough to keep people for a prolonged period of time
As a cata player I hope they don't. SoD seems to have run its course, the "season" is over. Regardless of your view on SoD, it was never intended to be a long term mode (same with SoM).
P3 extended and cata release isn’t helping SOD at all. Most of the runes in SOD come from cata changes, a lot of people are enjoying it more than they thought and are leaving SOD til p4 maybe
I would like to know what level range you are at the moment because I believe that will heavily impact your experience in SoD per the current situation. Assuming you’re not max level yet, then yes you are going to have a heck of a time getting a group for pretty much anything that isn’t (Alliance bias incoming) DM, Stocks, and/or SM. If you are max level, but only recently hit max level, then yes you are going to have hard time getting the “requisite” stuff done like RFD quest, WO farming, and BRD key quest. Most of the population (on CS-NA) have been 50 since week 1 of P3 and they farmed the Hell out of all that stuff already. Everyone either moved on to farming incursions for gold, honor farming, and/or raiding ST.
I have been leveling alts lately and so I can empathize with the plight of players that have only now decided to give SoD a try. Very few people are in the lower level zones at the moment. Almost none of the dungeons are being run except for the 1st dungeon of your faction (dunno if Horde really do RFC much, but I assume they all love WC for the quest rewards) and maybe the 2nd (Stocks for Alliance and we’ll say SFK for Horde since it’s easier for them to access). No one is grouping for quests like the elite ones in Redridge and Duskwood. However, at least for alliance, at lvl 24-25 there are still groups doing Duskwood incursions every day. SM still has SOME activity because of quest rewards, decent loot, and skill books dropping off the bosses. Then it’s Ashenvale Incursions to 50. After that, GL getting RFD done, WO farming is practically dead, and the PvP grind takes a strong stomach.
An active guild is the only way to survive at 50 right now.
I don't really have any expectations that they can make Molten Core into an interesting raid. That alongside this month having some pretty big releases I've been waiting for means I doubt I'll give much time to Sod next month.
SoD is fine. I’ll come back if they decide to dosomething to make holy paladin any good. I have played all the other classic classes to death and don’t feel like playing classic mechanics again.
People will try out cata and hate it, and some will like it, and some will come back to sod once they’re raid logging cata.
To be honest they've spread themselves too thin with what the game has evolved into (can't count the current iterations of the game on one hand) and how much time and effort they put/are capable of putting towards each said version.
SoD had massive potential, I think any phase 1 enjoyer will agree with me there, but they didn't do enough out of the box things to keep the replay ability and interest at high levels.
i loved p1 and got bis on 3 characters but i just couldn't be asked to level up any more characters for the subsequent phases. if reaching the max level of the current phase took the same length of time as p1, then i'd probably play again
what for? with their mentality of nerfing everything to the ground so groups full of fresh max lvl chars can clear everything there is no reason for me to invest any more time into this abomination of a game
I think it’s just burnout, and lack of content atm. It happened toward the end of p2, but not as extreme so hopefully they make p4 worth everyone’s time again
Phase 3 was awesome but too Long imo, a lot of people are gonna come back to P4, its gonna be huge with content creators picking it back up when Cata gets old.
Since cata launched and I see how much better it is than SoD in nearly all aspects of the game, I definetly won't come back to this random, untested shit.
I still might, stopped about 2 weeks in p2, but highly unlikely. Not sure people are still leveling, but that foesnt scare me so much, its just the inflation shit that i dont feel like dealing with. Im also an altoholic, and really disliked the time you had to spend to get some of the runes. I know, i know, wow is a grind, the normal grinds i love, but the way of getting the runes was just very boring to me, not sure why.
At this point, blizzard is just killing its own game modes by spreading its community launching more and more modes. People is leaving SoD? They may be in classic cata or remix
Because instead of fleshing out Classic WoW content, SoD went the route of "let's make everything overpowered".
That's fun, but only for a very limited amount of time.
I will 100% be back. I have loved SoD. If you focus on what’s wrong you’re gonna have a bad time. Phase 3 definitely killed my momentum but I’m just messing with Cata for now and having fun. The people saying they’re quitting while we are still level 50 is funny to me. But also going on forums to tell everyone how “you’re done with SoD” doesn’t really sound like someone that is done - normal people simply put something down and move on if they’re not having fun. Not go on forums and complain lol.
Same here. I quit halfway through phase 2 and just got back in to level for phase 4. Guild is gone, friends are gone, so I hope phase 4 can bring everyone back together again.
I’ll probably check it out, but the lack of content in p3 sent me to revisit retail for the first time since original MoP and I think I’m stuck boys. Dragonflight is kinda sick
They designed about 2 months of content and are letting it sit for 3-4 months, people have really stopped playing SoD in the past couple weeks.
I'm hopeful that ppl will return once P4 finally arrives.
'Im a new player'
Thats why youre still playing lol.
P1 was fun, stuff to farm, honeymoon period. Ashenvale was meh but we could convince people to turtle and pvp sometimes. The quests were decent, the areas were cool. Also personally I feel like less is more with abilities. We had a few runes and a few spells. I didnt need 100 keybinds, which was really refreshing.
P2 everyone I know hated STV. You didnt need to farm prebis, so nobody did dungeons past 'gotta zerg to 40 sm cleave woo'. Questing was also impossible. 30 people trying to kill 20 total mobs on a 5min respawn timer and not scaled at all? It was bad.
Gnomer didnt have many pugs off the bat compared to how easy it was to find one in p1. A lot of people didnt like the bump up to gnomer mechanics.
P3 we had an xp boost and incursions. Dungeons already killed open world, they did fix questing toward the end of p2.
People hit 50 in a few hours, the meta was incursions and now the open world (mmorpg btw) was more dead than ever. Maybe this was an idea to congregate people in one zone for wpvp? But it was just boring, mindless postal quests that really dont fit.
Sunken temple being 20 instead of 10 just destroyed whatever few guilds had stuck it out. A few merged, but a LOT of them just stopped playing.
P1 difficulty 10 mans or flex is optimal. You want to casually find a pug? You can. This is classic, not mythic raiding. Retailers want a mythic challenge, a version exists for that. A lot of classic is easy and seemingly most of the players are just casuals who dgaf.
Could easily join a pug if you want gear, join a parse monkey pug or guild if you want to parse.
A few people 'really want 40mans'. The issue is most of the community was just 10 man tiny guilds. 40mans are also brutal to manage, a lot more awkward to pug fill vs 10.
They also decicded to make st a 1 week lockout instead of 3days like other phases. So raid logging went from twice a week to once.
Either way if all there is to do is raid log, gunna feel dead
Entire guild of 300+ stopped playing because pvp is completely ruined by shamans and other classes. The entire PVE content was ruined by slashing it to the ground so much so that no one even has to try at the game to kill the bosses. Just press your 3 buttons and its over! 0 ways to die or wipe the raid EVER. its like playing a childrens game now.... A very unbalanced childrens game. Dunno why if your alliance you would even consider coming back. Just to watch shamans continue to be the only class in the game getting attention from devs?
I will most likely be back, I was one of the people who really stuck it out towards it started dying off HARD. Cata just split the player base because people were bored with P3 and sunken temple. Eventually I just stopped logging on though because it doesn’t feel good playing a dead game. But I agree, the gameplay itself has been really fun. People complain but I enjoy SoD way more than classic.
Multiple poor decisions by the SoD team, player burnout, other versions of the game to play that are more interesting. On top of all that, parse culture has yet again negatively impacted another version of Classic and will continue to do so.
My sub ends tomorrow, im not going to resub until p4, the reason is that its hard to get into groups for raids, dungeons and pvp. Its like playing a single player now.
Prob not for me. Rune has be underwhelming since P2.
Blizzard has been trying to balance/improve classes through runes, instead they should have just balanced spells/talents.
Runes are likely getting rebalanced again so I don't know whether the class/spec I'm playing going to become dogshit (I play shadow priest) so no incentive to invest in my character.
P1 runes felt like a either a surprise, secret, or a journey. Half of P3 runes felt like a grind.
Overall, Blizzard had some interesting ideas, but didn't think far/hard enough and plan ahead.
Oh and complete lack of testing of their contents. Literally bug/exploit mess.
Please don't be fooled by the comments here. I am glad you are enjoying the game and my honest advice (aka what I am doing) is to stick with it, use the downtime to make gold or prepare an alt, maybe play elden ring or dabble in some personal projects.
Sadly, there are people who give up very easily without an obvious low-effort path before them, there is SO much to do in classic, even in p3 with only a fraction of content available its unreal! I guarantee not a single person in the comments here has accomplished all of the following:
Revered+ with Argent Dawn
Revered+ with Hydrax Waterlords
Friendly+ with Timbermaw Hold
Exalted with AB & WSG
Farmed significant gold for p4 (5k+ is a realistic and sensible goal)
Farmed Tidal Charm
Farmed AGM
Maxed Both professions
Max level alt at least with runes crucial to raid role and take advantage of extra professions!
Acquired significant patterns/recipe's for your main professions
Farm special on-use trinkets/items (nifty stopwatch, luffa, skull of impending doom, etc)
Farm materials for upcoming class quests (Such as Eye of Shadow for priests (my main))
Consumables/weakauras/keybinds/rotation/mechanics studies to get that 95+ parse average for raid!!
The list goes on, this is not a uber-hardcore list, this is meant to be a sensible example of what the average semi-hardcore player should aim for.
What's super cringe with the people doom posting is most of these guys know they're full of it, that's why you will see them sharing their reasons for quitting at every given opportunity to create an echo chamber and feel validated. Their egos can't handle just openly saying they are casual/tired and want to take a break, they have to blame an external source - so you get these crazy uninformed takes like nightmare incursions ruined the economy, runes ruined the game, pvp is broken, etc.
Just ignore them, they will be back in p4 spreading their mental gymnastics about how its Cata/Mop/WWs fault they got bored, and if hypothetically not... Oh well! The longer these people are away from influencing the devs design choices, the better quality of game we can hope for in the future, which in turn will attract more likeminded people who are able to have fun without constant instant-gratification welfare/handouts.
Its high time these people reached their mental breaking point and left, for the past months its been nothing but negativity and moaning about getting XYZ classes nerfed. These people went into a experimental twist on CLASSIC WOW with a design philosophy of "make everyone OP" and have been complaining that the game is not hyper balanced the entire time, leeching the devs attention and creative freedom away from doing what made p1 such a hit, which was to just experiment and have fun.
Yes, the population has taken a hit, but these peoples incessant whining steered the design choices that made p3 underwhelming, I have a feeling that p4 is going to be peak SOD. Population will boom from p4 and if some of these guys who have sworn to never return really follow through I think we will see a steady incline in population and some content that truly feels like an expansion of vanilla WoW
Blizzard actualy took a content break for sod so that people can to all the early things in cata without having to choose what game to play.
When its back to raid logging in cata sod will get updates.
I think the main reason for SoD's "Failure" is due to the devs focusing extensively on the RPG aspect of WoW to expand on classic. I personally dig all of the features that they've added, most notably this gigantic overarching quests were you obtain a powerful ability, or just more incentives into dungeon content. Incursions are chill farms that I can do whenever there's nothing else to do, and you also have the pvp events lets not forget. Maybe they winged it on dungeon xp farm but that's up for debate.
The issue is that people reeally love raiding. So much in fact that most people only like to raidlog and be done with it, without interacting with the world around them in an RPG format (akin to swg, Ultima, EQ). The earlier phases weren't as punishing regarding this aspect since you could easily level up an alt. But not many people are willing to go through extensive quest chains and level to 50. So once they hit max, they raid, get the "levelling epics" from raid and that's it, when really SoD should be treated as a true RPG (if you don't look up stuff on wowhead and don't use addons, because if not then everything is going to be cake and there's no sense of "discovery").
And that's another issue, people just don't interact the same through WoW as they did before: there's all of these guides and info on how to min max and get your runes and what not...which undermines all of the RPG themes. Everyone just wants to rush in...when it should be experienced at a slow pace. But this is just my take :)
Quite disagree there! Only something like 10pct of wow players raid. And even those seem rather hellbent on making it take as little time as possible.
I'd dare you to reward the most powerful gear through any endgame activity (questing, pvp, crafting etc) with a comparable time investment raiding would take you. How many folks would still go raid you reckon?
In SoD? Then I stand corrected, but everyone around me seemed to focus on raiding as a means to an end (gear) rather than something to enjoy alongside other RPG elements from the world of SoD
By the time I get my runes, get pre raid bis, do the attunements, and not get invited to groups, the season will be over and I'll have to say goodbye to my character.
By the time I get my runes, get pre raid bis, do the attunements, and not get invited to groups, the season will be over and I'll have to say goodbye to my character.
I was enjoying P3, but the population got too low, so I moved on to other things, I'll be coming back for P4 almost certainly.
After 4 days in a row of spending 3+ hours idling looking in LFG chat for anyone wanting to do full Mara runs and finding nobody, I pretty much gave up. And yes, I know I could've just made a group myself, but the point is that in other phases, it was easy to find a group for almost any relevant content within an hour or so.
Instead I'm playing MoP Remix, and other non-WoW games, until P4 launches.
I'm very concerned for "average casual" player returns.
Catacylsm is good, but for Fairweather games it's technically a massive hamsterwheel loot grind for people that only player a set amount of hours a week.
The path from 80 to heroic dungeons to raids is going to dull people from wanting to level in SoD.
None of this should be taken as an attack against SoD or Cata. It's going to be a bad case of attrition.
It's indicative of the situation of most games now, unless you can sweat the fuck out of it and gatekeep, it'll become dull quick and will essentially dictate the game state for the rest
The damage has been done. P4 will see an uptick in players but it won’t be like it was before. Plus with cata now and war within soon there’s a limit for how much time problem have to play wow
Phase got boring for some and they stopped doing any type of updates because the same team is running Cata. Now you just have a lot of the player base playing that instead and tbh absolutely killing the vibe. In the end it will be a big mistake Cata absolutely crushed their subs back in the day and it will do it again.
Honestly for me, I didn't make it to the end of P2 (I quit), I was over the elitism, the minmaxing, the constant "must be meta" attitude of people maxing their gear to minimize HAVING to do anything. I'm surprised more folks didn't catch on bail earlier. Now they just want to crush content, say they "did it" to themselves, and then move on. The dopamine hit is there, albeit small, but there for a short time before they have to move on.
I was burnt out already from wotlk raiding and p2 wasn’t as fun as p1 for me so I was happy to just ultimately quit wow altogether. I was considering coming back for Cata though but not sure
Why would I come back for P4? It was said that the intention is to make P4 more "classic" and not change as much. As it seems, the biggest change will be the raidsize downscaled to 20 and some loot changes (which have been mega tame in P3). I already played classic. I dont need to do it again.
Of course everyone's coming back. AV will be happening. These phases are working like seasons in Diablo games or something. This is how it works. The population falls over on its face and then the new season comes out and everyone returns. It's fine.
Stopped logging in because half of my guild quit to play Cataclysm. Not really in it for joining a pug group because I don't want to play with pugs on top of spending 2-3x longer, just to not roll on any loot. I was really only still running ST because my friends were. Seems SoD was just a waiting room for Cataclysm though. With how much they've been complaining about certain SoD changes I doubt they'll return, and if they don't I'm probably done as well. Kind of tired of being tied down to a raid schedule regardless.
SoD is fun (for me), but really only if my buddies are there to have fun with it as well. Plus with TWW so close on the horizon I doubt I'd keep playing it once that released.
They are leaving because there is nothing to do. I feel like they are heroes of the storming SoD. My personal opinion.. they should bring GDKPs back. I know so many people who left after phase 1 because of that decision.
The runes and class balance are just so stupidly broken it kind of ruins the fun for me.
The remake raids are neat but I would of preferred new horizontal content like the teased Karazan Cypts.
The PVP damage reduction thing was kind of like a splash of cold water to me. They can't fix this shit with massive blanket %nerfs on everything. It was so laughably bad that I just kind of logged out and haven't logged back in.
I keep reading that’s it’s dead but people still read the parses on you, I went to one raid and now I can not get into another one because they are saying my log are bad. Does my gear need to be super good to get into a raid.
Anyone out there still care about the logs even though they said it’s dead?
SoD was done with essentially the same seasonal style gameplay we have in retail. There isn't enough to do in the game though to justify waiting months before you can level again. These "dead" periods were just inevitable. Phase 3 is arguably the worst of the phases for various reasons and it also feels like it's taking forever for phase 4.
All that being said people will definitely come back for p4. While blizzard's focusing on cata/retail's season 4 is annoying for the SoD enjoyers, I also feel it will help with creating even more players to play phase 4 because they got their cata/retail desires fulfilled and will get burned out looking for the next "wow high".
I just find it really hard to care about sod anymore. It’s not that it’s all bad…just that I feel let down by runes/incursions/world. That sentiment seems pretty generally held amongst the community. Don’t necessarily hate the game, just underwhelmed by what they’ve been able to give us. I applaud the classic devs for trying
My entire guild stopped playing weeks ago. Everyone got bored. Raid logging gets old fast and there isn't much to do other than that or farming gold. A lot of them might not come back for P4, myself included.
They rushed phase 2-3, didn’t optimize the raids correctly, and caused a lot of ppl to quit. I think the majority will be back for p4, personally once I saw how hard it is to get p3 BiS raid loot/the bosses were initially so overturned I just maxed out my pvp rank / reps and I’m waiting for p4 to actually raid for some loot that will hopefully remain viable for more than a few weeks (assuming it’s a ~20% drop in a 20 man raid with a 1 week CD, could easily be 6+ weeks into the season you finally get it…)
Oh, and I totally forgot, not only was ST overturned, the loot sucked by contrast and then 6+ weeks in they buffed/added many more items, as if there wasn’t already enough time wasted chasing iLvL 58 loot…
I don’t know if anyone else has said this, but P4 has the largest chunk of content in Vanilla. Strat Scholo DM MC. Actual progression raiding will start. People are just playing other versions of WoW because they’ve done everything so far. I think most will come back. No one was excited about Cata 2 years ago. I think it’ll lose its appeal.
My reason for leaving was bad devs. I just constantly had to put up with their screw ups and I just couldn't see it work long-term. Their detached flamboyant attitude didn't help either.
Of course there were more reasons, the common ones, but the devs were the driving force for me.
If you need an example then I find their focus on 60 quite perfect. Gotta love the argument that everything pre-60 is unimportant because it'll change anyway. Just a giant middle finger to their playerbase.
People don’t take into consideration the difference between summer and winter gaming. IMO we won’t see much more of a bump until September or so. A lot of states that have to deal with real winters are probably out touching grass while it lasts.
Man just play whatever is fun rather than trying to plan it.
Bunch of us playing era on deviate delight at the moment which is a dead ass server but it’s just fun because the game mode is fun. Doesn’t really matter that no one is there.
Because cata classic just dropped like a week ago, and MOP remix just dropped as well. New season in retail, and D4.
Some argue it’s cuz P4 of SoD didn’t go so hot? But honestly think it’s a mix of new games dropping and summer time,
My assumption is raidlogging, alt burnout, not wanting to repeat the same steps for specific runes, P3 being a bit underwhelming in terms of raid loot(has been tweaked a bit now, but in some cases, "too little, too late") therefore people just decided to skip a phase or quit entirely because "if this is the way we're going what's the point?". Another thing could also be devs saying balance changes are gonna be minimal until next phase, so people that have a "bad" main currently don't wanna deal with being stomped in pvp/being underwhelming damage in pve.
I also hate the formula for getting runes. Phase 1 was organic. The second you start throwing shared giant quest lines and dungeon grinds behind runes I'm out. There's no catch up, and runes are annoying to get, so alts are out for me.
Yeah the runes are busy work now. Imagine going to the trainer for your next skill and him sending you on some busy work quest. That would get old quick. Well that's what we have with the rune system, only the quest giver is wowhead. It makes alting less desirable.
I’ve been running a warlock with a friend I got back into it, and man I’m feeling this. Hell do you mean my phase 1 rune needs me to kill 25 elites and 29-30 enemies? Alone, cause my guild is all offline? Guess I’m waiting till 30 to get this damn rune lmao
This killed SoD for me. I appreciate that it’s a multiplayer game, but let us quest solo if we want too.
At this point I unironically think the best move they could make when it comes to runes at this point would be adding a rune vendor or something for new players and alt accounts to catch up without needing to spend hours trying to find someone willing to group up or tediously solo-grinding quest lines intended to be done with a group. I know for damn sure that I am not going to be leveling any alts in P4 if it means I gotta spend all that time getting some of these runes with how bullshit some of them are.
Retail is pulling all this effort for being alt friendly with account wide unlocks. Why not doing the same with runes? You finished dark rider with you main? Cool now you will get the rune on all your current and future alts without the regrinding effort. This would make the game alt friendly again, and at least would make these hard to get runes a little more worthy of our precious time.
100% agree -- I want a middle ground between how hard p3 runes are to get and how easy gems are to get in panda:remix
I'm just skipping this phase as well. In normal classic, one of the most fun things to me was that even after new phases dropped, old raids still had BIS gear. So it was worth running MC while BWL was out. Also, you kinda required to have MC gear to clear BWL (for normal average players, your dps, healing or tanking would be lacking in blues). So a phase never felt useless. With the level jump each SoD phase, comes a big gear jump. Basically most items you get in raids now, is obsolete next phase. Or at best it's about on-par with dungeon drops. In P3 the basically free incursion gear was good enough to raid with, rendering a lot of Gnomer gear useless. There is no real incentive to raid now.
One of the biggest complaints is the lack of gear jump this phase. There are a few items from Gnomer that are BiS. The trinket from BFD might still be BiS for some specs. And a lot of the Gnomer gear was perfectly fine prebis with ST only offering small upgrades. This loot changes the other week fixed a little bit of that. But not much.
I'm really worried about them learning the wrong lesson from this. It's great that old raids items are bis. It's just odd because these are level up raids. If all of these raids were end game, it's a positive, not a negative, that many classes bis comes from gnomer. If you streamline gear too much so that all bis only comes from the newest tier, you get old forgotten content that no one does and the game feels so much smaller with much less to do.
A number of pieces of my bis as a prot paladin are from Gnomer/P2. One of the main complaints about ST is that the gear wasn't enough of a jump up. This thread is weird, it seems like a lot of people commenting didn't actually play SoD P2 or 3. >There is no real incentive to raid now. You are right, but for the wrong reasons. If each phase had the power jump you are talking about there'd be a real demand to get all the pieces to keep up, but because there isn't people don't feel the need to push for ST loot and are just waiting for P4.
There's also people like me who lost all interest in SoD with the incursion gold fuck up, even after the "fix" incursions still invalidated all your gold and shit you'd steadily built up in previous phases.
The prices are still close to the same.
Because the population has taken a nosedive, should a resurgence happen prices will skyrocket and the people sitting pretty on thousands of gold will have a massive advantage. Fact is one ill thought addition to P3 killed SoD for quite a few people, it's sad but can only blame blizzard for that one.
Firewater is 25g and squids are 10g on my server lol
Yah bro 1 is currently unobtainable and the other is a hunter farm.
understand that these in classic would have been around 1g a stack, GOLD was a harder thing to obtain, BOTs boosted the gold economy P1 then incursions inflated it to a ridiculous amount
It's wild you would arrive at incursion gold not inflating gold supply without any form of gold sinks. That's pretty alarming logic.
Yeah I have seen a lot of "checking logs" What is logs?? and parses??
Raidlogging is only loging in to do the raid then logout afterwards and wait for next reset to repeat it. What you're talking about is people checking your performance on earlier raids. Although logs doesn't reflect how well you're doing mechanics unless you really dig deep and analyze(which no one has time for if they are setting up the raid then and there). You could have an absolute gigachad pumper dps be the worst at doing mechanics and be the reason you're wiping, not sure how often that happens as i don't raid with randoms. Join a guild and you can avoid all that. Edit: good logs = did a lot of dps or healing compared to the average. I'm tanking as an example, if i go for a dps build and do a lot of damage the logs will say im a good tank, but now the healers have to pick up my slack because i am taking a lot more damage since i dont focus on damage negation. Which i would then say, that is not good tanking in traditional terms. But logs say good, therefore i must be good.
as one of the people who have quit I cant understand whoever thought that incursion spamming woudv been a good idea
I get what ur saying but this attitude is what lets blizzard bend us over fuck is in the ass and they make us thank them for half ass content they put out simply don’t play for awhile scare them and get good content
Another thing i think people underestimate is…the majority of classic players are 30+ dads, and with summer hitting, people are just finding better things to spend their time doing. People will be back for P4 without a doubt.
Jokes on you, the UK doesn't get any summer
I was away with work and other staff so missed phase 1 and pahse 2, started a rogue a month ago, got it to 50 questing and had a blast, got my lock picking and poisons to max for phase, professions to 300, I even did incursions to unlock my second last rune and st event for the dagger. What I have noticed is the pop has plummeted last 3 weeks, whoever was playing is now raid logging. Getting the world buffs was easy so people clearly raiding. But for example wild offerings farm, I spammed 2 hours straight yesterday and nothing, one group replied when I whispered the from a / who Check of maraudon, and they asked for my mains raid logs as he couldn't find my rogue on wcl, I replied I was new toon and hadn't raided yet. The reply I got was sorry not carrying dead weight.... For a mara princess run.... Trying my best here but despite me initial hesitation cata is looking better and better everyday
Laugh out loud, I can't believe anyone would ever log check someone for Mara wild offering runs as you do them as 10 people and are usually done in 30 minutes with your runs. This is either a made up story or you just happened to run into the 1 person in the world who did that and others shouldn't take this anecdote as normal.
I believe it. The elitism in SOD was more than I’ve ever seen.
I really really wish that was made up
Good thing you can play both cata and SoD, just like the devs want you to
Ehhh, they'd prefer just cata lol Can't further monetize era/SoD players I honestly won't be shocked at all if they introduce the wow token into SoD in p4 to "help" all the returning players catch up to the incursion-fucked-economy
Everyone is waiting for some news on SoD...some teaser, item changes, dungeon/raid changes, new stuff, anything. Like my guild is still hyped for p4 but nobody has anything to do. We parse once or twice a week and basically play different games until there is an announcement.
The fact that they couldn't tease anything substantial at all with the p4 update was pretty telling I think I'd think if they had *any* new raids or dungeons cooking like SM, Kara crypts etc they'd have announced it to somewhat maintain interest Feel like we're just gonna get SoM style raids at 60 with updated loot for months in p4
I think internally they got told to not release anything that could dampen the cata hype. If they don't announce anything in the next 2-3 weeks I'd agree with you.
Oh yeah, I have tried to look for something, but no one knows anything? How is this a thing?? Idk when P3 even released tbh haha (what is parsing?? btw)
There are websites (Warcraft Logs) that capture data about your raid performance and compare it to other groups. It looks at your ability use, damage, kill speed, etc. and then gives you a 1-100 rating score of how well you’re doing relative to other people playing your class overall. This is parsing.
To add to this though since the OP is new, someone needs to be running an addon to send the data to Warcraft Logs).
They said something about p4 being delayed after being quiet for weeks. After P3 being not really well received I think a lot of people lost faith in the direction the devs are taking sod. Parsing is your raid performance compared to others playing your same class. All of the information from every button you press during a raid is logged and can be looked up. So warcraft logs compiles all of that information and shows how you perform compared to everyone else who plays the same class as you. You get a score from 0 to 100 depending on where you are in the pack.
They are getting your money they are happy
Phase 3 was awful
I left p3 after a couple weeks into it. Couldn't find any groups to do content with, so I stopped logging in. Currently trying cata but can't find a decent raid group, maybe just time to end the sub tbh
I just cancelled after not logging in for a month
End the sub. Come back when they give us what we want. I was subbed from 2019 till tbc. Came back for hardcore then rolled into SOD. Unsubbed a month ago. I will GLADLY give blizzard 15 bucks a month when they give me Warcraft in a version that is fun to me.
I cancelled after being subbed uninterrupted since 2019. It's clear that Blizzard doesn't give a shit about any of the versions of Classic. I also just don't like the approach they've taken with SoD. So many design choices that go against the spirit of Vanilla. I went and found a private server more to my liking and I'm having a much better time for it. For free.
It's sloppy and releasing 4 versions of wow and compartmentalizing the community like they have is unreal.
I’d rather have had SOD than not have it.
Burnt out, cancelled my sub this morning, likely won’t be back for the following phases, they over committed and under delivered with the time frames
See you in the kara crypts
We are *leaving the door open, to the possibility of the prospect of* seeing you in the [kara crypts](https://youtu.be/fEJGPKC4aWE)
Somehow even that phrasing is optimistic compared to how they talked in interviews after the announcement.
its basically classic minus
Oh they will. People won't skip out on doing MC, Ony, BWL, ZG, AQ again. It was the prime of Classic Era and will be the prime of SoD. Cata servers will take a hit.
The moment they removed 10 man it absolutely destroyed guilds and more than half their player base. It won't be the same as the first few phases.
They lost half their player base when they still had 10 mans. 20 mans didn't help but the content was just bad.
That plaster had to be ripped off sooner or later. Simple fact is that all the main raids in vanilla are 40 man.
I don't think it will ever be popular again. My guess is Blizzard thinks the same and will present very lackluster content.
"BWL few weeks after MC" tells me the same. Honestly I'm not even expecting fully redone mechanics for future raids, probably end up getting the exact same raid but HP tuned and some mechanics tuned so you can do it with 20 people.
They will probably use the versions of the raids from SoM with more mechanics
WoW players are conditioned to follow the hype created by streamers at this point. They'll all play it and hype it up. P4 will be fine.
First 1-2 weeks for sure.
Will be the hotness for a month, then there'll be a lull again with other shit coming out soon after and so on and so forth. It's what WoW is now.
the community is why im not comming back. everyone is cosplaying world first speedrunners. there is no place for normal players. its all hardcore gatekeepers
Personally I will not be coming back. I'm not going to get baited into that mess again after watching then ditch the game because Cata and Mop remix came out. They killed it and to be honest I have no faith Classic + could ever be done by this WoW dev team. Such a sad L for everyone involved.
eh, thats not up to the devs. i agree its a terrible practice but its higherups trying to pump and dump blizzard stock. dont blame the devs, what they were able to do with the small team and allotted time they had was decent
I don't, SoD has been very chill now that the toxic players are over at Cata. I dread that they will hop back on to SoD when P4 hits, because these people will devour any new content like locust whether they actually like it or not and in doing so bring their negativity with them. Playing HC, Era or SoD now is amazing because the people there really want to be there.
Very true and locust-pill’ed
I have actually noticed this. Everyone I’ve been running into on lone wolf US is far my friendly and casual now. Also still seem to be enjoying sod.
I've been in era 3 years now and locust analogy is spot on. Whenever era gets too popular it goes down in quality. When something shiny releases it goes back to normal medium server feel.
A lot of people gave it a shot hoping for classic +. What we have is retail- . Fun for a phase or two but not forever.
Man people calling this retail - are really the most brain dead gamers.
Short of taking place in the Classic world, there is almost nothing Classic about SoD. It utterly fails at recapturing the feeling of Vanilla, or even 2019 Classic.
ppl didnt return in the previous phases, so i dont expect anything now either once ppl quit, they never come back
Because it sux, season of dogshit. Incursions was The drop
Nah I'm done with SoD. I think the experiment was successful. We saw what people liked and disliked. Time to iterate and do better next time.
Blizzard went overboard as usual. Became such a chore to get new abilities, too many of them at that. PvP has been awful, Aggrends attitude on twitter defending premades broke my heart. 9 hour WSGs because they didn’t want to add a 20 minute timer, and yet had no problem adjusting overall damage and healing by wild ratios. Going from 10 to 20 in raids was awful, they can’t help themselves but change it. Guilds were set up for 10 for 2 phases then blizzard threw that wrench into the system. Gnomeregan has hilariously awful bugs like being stuck in combat indefinitely so no mage could use their new portals at 40. Last boss spawned directly and immediately on top of previous boss, something they could easily fix if they bothered to play their own game. STV PvP event was awful. Ashenvale PvP was kinda fun but had big problems. They just have no idea what they’re doing and we all fell for it.
The main reason me and my group called it quits was the move from 10 man raids to 20 and 40 man raids. The raids require more time and coordination and we were just looking to play casual goof off and have fun in raids.
At this point you better hope that p4 won’t be cancelled with SoD
I can’t speak for everyone but I know a lot of people are playing cataclysm and MoP remix. Half are guild went to each, only bcuz SoD content is dead atm. Most of us maxed our professions and are missing 1-2 items from raid. Also with absolutely 0 updates on what’s happening doesn’t help the situation. I expect them to make an announcement within 2 weeks of something. My theory is with the lay offs at Blizzard this pass year and how buggy cataclysm was at launch they needed help from the SoD devs and have been working on that to fix issues.
I think people were ready for 60 not 50. Also some of the classes are weird, but they said they will do a ptr and revamp some classes so it could work out
For me, SoD felt like Classic up thru p2, what the game was supposed to feel like, Classic with a twist of new moves, gear, content etc. When P3 came out, they completely shifted the balance to make the game play much more like retail. Leveling is an enormous part of Classic, and giving everyone crazy experience boosts and a way to power level repeating the same dull quests over and over was such a slap in the face to anyone that was playing Classic for Classic, all so players that wanted 9 alts could do so easier. I made it to 41 on day 1 of P3 and immediately logged out and never came back. Now with all of that said, I’ll potentially come back for p4 if they turn the ship around and bring it back to feeling much more like Classic, but if it’s more of the same BS catering to these weirdos that want to speed rush through everything then nope.
We aren’t lol
Ppl need max lvl end content to stay. Were all edging til phase4
Devs dropped the ball. Sod felt like it was abandoned as soon as cata was released. They shot themselfs in the foot. Blizzard have shown they don't care. Doubt I'll be back for phase 4 and I'm sure alot feel the same way.
Just chilling untill p4, p3 got extended. + summer
I went back to retail and haven't looked back. I enjoy actually having things to do. We'll see what phase 4 brings.
I’ll probably go back, but all my buddies who played up until raids changed from 10 to 20 man, they’ve moved on to other games and won’t be back. SOD probably lost most of its casual audience. Casuals aren’t addicts like a lot of people here, they play until it isn’t fun, then carry on to another game without looking back. Unfortunate that the game is just sorta left out in the rain to rot atm, because it’s surely going to have large lasting effects for later phases.
Sadly the vast majority won't come back. And I agree with you, I loved every second of SoD on P1 and P2 until Blizzard murdered SoD
Som was better that sod. They should have done level 25 then 60. All this muck around hast lost players.
Lmfao som died in the first month.
Nah, the good ones kept at it and we had so much fun in SOM version of Naxx and AQ40. AQ40 was actually fun in SOM with the crazy power boost, riding the fine line to doom the whole way, fuck yeah
I'm also a casual player, and the stuff you're supposed to do/grind at level 50 is the most soul draining content. These mara runs and inc for rep and gold are not what people wanted from classic. It's incredibly boring, and you can only raid ST every week. I thought I liked SOD until I actually got level 50 on 2 alts. Why would anyone play this unless you're levelling a new alt They also delayed p4 because they want people to enjoy other versions of wow right now
Idk after P3 alot of people lost faith in the team and moved on. They really, really have to deliver to make people come back
P3 was awful in all forms. Only good thing about it was being able to finish all the pvp grinds and then cancel sub until p4
People don't do dungeons or elite quests in SoD. Why do dungeons when incursions are much faster? Why do elite quests when just doing a couple quests makes them green in your quest log and you can just move to another more efficient zone? All that speed and convenience has a cost, people rush to max level and then hit a wall with progression and don't want to play because the dopamine rush ran off.
I’m planning on it but it unfortunately looks like they set it up to be a situation where people rush prebis and then will raidlog for MC because they won’t have anything else to do :(
If Blizzard would stop fucking releasing the raids as soon as the phase starts, we would have more weeks of content, farming prebis for real, lmao.
I’m still enjoying SoD too but I’ve been playing pretty actively since p1. Have three characters at 50 now and I’m just gold/rep farming for p4. I’m certain people will come back for p4, especially first few weeks of launch to do new content. I’m just hoping Blizz knocks it out of the park enough to keep people for a prolonged period of time
Too late lol
As a cata player I hope they don't. SoD seems to have run its course, the "season" is over. Regardless of your view on SoD, it was never intended to be a long term mode (same with SoM).
Raid logging killed SoD
P3 extended and cata release isn’t helping SOD at all. Most of the runes in SOD come from cata changes, a lot of people are enjoying it more than they thought and are leaving SOD til p4 maybe
I would like to know what level range you are at the moment because I believe that will heavily impact your experience in SoD per the current situation. Assuming you’re not max level yet, then yes you are going to have a heck of a time getting a group for pretty much anything that isn’t (Alliance bias incoming) DM, Stocks, and/or SM. If you are max level, but only recently hit max level, then yes you are going to have hard time getting the “requisite” stuff done like RFD quest, WO farming, and BRD key quest. Most of the population (on CS-NA) have been 50 since week 1 of P3 and they farmed the Hell out of all that stuff already. Everyone either moved on to farming incursions for gold, honor farming, and/or raiding ST. I have been leveling alts lately and so I can empathize with the plight of players that have only now decided to give SoD a try. Very few people are in the lower level zones at the moment. Almost none of the dungeons are being run except for the 1st dungeon of your faction (dunno if Horde really do RFC much, but I assume they all love WC for the quest rewards) and maybe the 2nd (Stocks for Alliance and we’ll say SFK for Horde since it’s easier for them to access). No one is grouping for quests like the elite ones in Redridge and Duskwood. However, at least for alliance, at lvl 24-25 there are still groups doing Duskwood incursions every day. SM still has SOME activity because of quest rewards, decent loot, and skill books dropping off the bosses. Then it’s Ashenvale Incursions to 50. After that, GL getting RFD done, WO farming is practically dead, and the PvP grind takes a strong stomach. An active guild is the only way to survive at 50 right now.
I don't really have any expectations that they can make Molten Core into an interesting raid. That alongside this month having some pretty big releases I've been waiting for means I doubt I'll give much time to Sod next month.
What's coming out if you dont mind me asking
I think incursions killed it so hopefully they take those out!
SoD is fine. I’ll come back if they decide to dosomething to make holy paladin any good. I have played all the other classic classes to death and don’t feel like playing classic mechanics again. People will try out cata and hate it, and some will like it, and some will come back to sod once they’re raid logging cata.
Imo holy paladin is fine by the numbers but it's too close to how vanilla holy paladin plays.
To be honest they've spread themselves too thin with what the game has evolved into (can't count the current iterations of the game on one hand) and how much time and effort they put/are capable of putting towards each said version. SoD had massive potential, I think any phase 1 enjoyer will agree with me there, but they didn't do enough out of the box things to keep the replay ability and interest at high levels.
I won’t be doing my part
i loved p1 and got bis on 3 characters but i just couldn't be asked to level up any more characters for the subsequent phases. if reaching the max level of the current phase took the same length of time as p1, then i'd probably play again
what for? with their mentality of nerfing everything to the ground so groups full of fresh max lvl chars can clear everything there is no reason for me to invest any more time into this abomination of a game
I think it’s just burnout, and lack of content atm. It happened toward the end of p2, but not as extreme so hopefully they make p4 worth everyone’s time again
Phase 3 was awesome but too Long imo, a lot of people are gonna come back to P4, its gonna be huge with content creators picking it back up when Cata gets old.
If it’s fun I think people will come back. They definitely lost a few for sure, but reddit is so much doom and gloom.
Since cata launched and I see how much better it is than SoD in nearly all aspects of the game, I definetly won't come back to this random, untested shit.
raiding molten core again with new runes and stuff sounds cool but new game expansion such as ff14 dawntrail is too enticing
I hope they stop fucking arounf and gave you guys a proper Classic+ experience.
I still might, stopped about 2 weeks in p2, but highly unlikely. Not sure people are still leveling, but that foesnt scare me so much, its just the inflation shit that i dont feel like dealing with. Im also an altoholic, and really disliked the time you had to spend to get some of the runes. I know, i know, wow is a grind, the normal grinds i love, but the way of getting the runes was just very boring to me, not sure why.
I will. I'm only subbed for sod and I'm just leveling. Tried cata leveled up but got bored
Ofc they will. And after a month they will be gone again.
SoD was Cata waiting room for a lot of players
At this point, blizzard is just killing its own game modes by spreading its community launching more and more modes. People is leaving SoD? They may be in classic cata or remix
I just play regular Classic Era, Cata Classic, and Retail. Don't much care for SoD, HC, or Remix.
Give cataclysm classic a try
Cata will slow down in a few weeks and a new phase will drop, all good
Because instead of fleshing out Classic WoW content, SoD went the route of "let's make everything overpowered". That's fun, but only for a very limited amount of time.
I will 100% be back. I have loved SoD. If you focus on what’s wrong you’re gonna have a bad time. Phase 3 definitely killed my momentum but I’m just messing with Cata for now and having fun. The people saying they’re quitting while we are still level 50 is funny to me. But also going on forums to tell everyone how “you’re done with SoD” doesn’t really sound like someone that is done - normal people simply put something down and move on if they’re not having fun. Not go on forums and complain lol.
Same here. I quit halfway through phase 2 and just got back in to level for phase 4. Guild is gone, friends are gone, so I hope phase 4 can bring everyone back together again.
I’ll probably check it out, but the lack of content in p3 sent me to revisit retail for the first time since original MoP and I think I’m stuck boys. Dragonflight is kinda sick
They designed about 2 months of content and are letting it sit for 3-4 months, people have really stopped playing SoD in the past couple weeks. I'm hopeful that ppl will return once P4 finally arrives.
'Im a new player' Thats why youre still playing lol. P1 was fun, stuff to farm, honeymoon period. Ashenvale was meh but we could convince people to turtle and pvp sometimes. The quests were decent, the areas were cool. Also personally I feel like less is more with abilities. We had a few runes and a few spells. I didnt need 100 keybinds, which was really refreshing. P2 everyone I know hated STV. You didnt need to farm prebis, so nobody did dungeons past 'gotta zerg to 40 sm cleave woo'. Questing was also impossible. 30 people trying to kill 20 total mobs on a 5min respawn timer and not scaled at all? It was bad. Gnomer didnt have many pugs off the bat compared to how easy it was to find one in p1. A lot of people didnt like the bump up to gnomer mechanics. P3 we had an xp boost and incursions. Dungeons already killed open world, they did fix questing toward the end of p2. People hit 50 in a few hours, the meta was incursions and now the open world (mmorpg btw) was more dead than ever. Maybe this was an idea to congregate people in one zone for wpvp? But it was just boring, mindless postal quests that really dont fit. Sunken temple being 20 instead of 10 just destroyed whatever few guilds had stuck it out. A few merged, but a LOT of them just stopped playing. P1 difficulty 10 mans or flex is optimal. You want to casually find a pug? You can. This is classic, not mythic raiding. Retailers want a mythic challenge, a version exists for that. A lot of classic is easy and seemingly most of the players are just casuals who dgaf. Could easily join a pug if you want gear, join a parse monkey pug or guild if you want to parse. A few people 'really want 40mans'. The issue is most of the community was just 10 man tiny guilds. 40mans are also brutal to manage, a lot more awkward to pug fill vs 10. They also decicded to make st a 1 week lockout instead of 3days like other phases. So raid logging went from twice a week to once. Either way if all there is to do is raid log, gunna feel dead
Entire guild of 300+ stopped playing because pvp is completely ruined by shamans and other classes. The entire PVE content was ruined by slashing it to the ground so much so that no one even has to try at the game to kill the bosses. Just press your 3 buttons and its over! 0 ways to die or wipe the raid EVER. its like playing a childrens game now.... A very unbalanced childrens game. Dunno why if your alliance you would even consider coming back. Just to watch shamans continue to be the only class in the game getting attention from devs?
I will most likely be back, I was one of the people who really stuck it out towards it started dying off HARD. Cata just split the player base because people were bored with P3 and sunken temple. Eventually I just stopped logging on though because it doesn’t feel good playing a dead game. But I agree, the gameplay itself has been really fun. People complain but I enjoy SoD way more than classic.
As a returning player, SOD seems the least interesting version to play personally. I don't plan to try it
Multiple poor decisions by the SoD team, player burnout, other versions of the game to play that are more interesting. On top of all that, parse culture has yet again negatively impacted another version of Classic and will continue to do so.
My sub ends tomorrow, im not going to resub until p4, the reason is that its hard to get into groups for raids, dungeons and pvp. Its like playing a single player now.
I would pvp if the wsg nerf wasnt cheeks
Prob not for me. Rune has be underwhelming since P2. Blizzard has been trying to balance/improve classes through runes, instead they should have just balanced spells/talents. Runes are likely getting rebalanced again so I don't know whether the class/spec I'm playing going to become dogshit (I play shadow priest) so no incentive to invest in my character. P1 runes felt like a either a surprise, secret, or a journey. Half of P3 runes felt like a grind. Overall, Blizzard had some interesting ideas, but didn't think far/hard enough and plan ahead. Oh and complete lack of testing of their contents. Literally bug/exploit mess.
Nah, waiting for fresh vanilla. I'm done with the SoD rune powercreep.
I mean I’ll be back for p4 so long as it seems exciting.
I'm tired of spending $15 a month
Maybe swap servers? I am on lone wolf border and there are constantly groups for every level of content including wc sm etc.
Please don't be fooled by the comments here. I am glad you are enjoying the game and my honest advice (aka what I am doing) is to stick with it, use the downtime to make gold or prepare an alt, maybe play elden ring or dabble in some personal projects. Sadly, there are people who give up very easily without an obvious low-effort path before them, there is SO much to do in classic, even in p3 with only a fraction of content available its unreal! I guarantee not a single person in the comments here has accomplished all of the following: Revered+ with Argent Dawn Revered+ with Hydrax Waterlords Friendly+ with Timbermaw Hold Exalted with AB & WSG Farmed significant gold for p4 (5k+ is a realistic and sensible goal) Farmed Tidal Charm Farmed AGM Maxed Both professions Max level alt at least with runes crucial to raid role and take advantage of extra professions! Acquired significant patterns/recipe's for your main professions Farm special on-use trinkets/items (nifty stopwatch, luffa, skull of impending doom, etc) Farm materials for upcoming class quests (Such as Eye of Shadow for priests (my main)) Consumables/weakauras/keybinds/rotation/mechanics studies to get that 95+ parse average for raid!! The list goes on, this is not a uber-hardcore list, this is meant to be a sensible example of what the average semi-hardcore player should aim for. What's super cringe with the people doom posting is most of these guys know they're full of it, that's why you will see them sharing their reasons for quitting at every given opportunity to create an echo chamber and feel validated. Their egos can't handle just openly saying they are casual/tired and want to take a break, they have to blame an external source - so you get these crazy uninformed takes like nightmare incursions ruined the economy, runes ruined the game, pvp is broken, etc. Just ignore them, they will be back in p4 spreading their mental gymnastics about how its Cata/Mop/WWs fault they got bored, and if hypothetically not... Oh well! The longer these people are away from influencing the devs design choices, the better quality of game we can hope for in the future, which in turn will attract more likeminded people who are able to have fun without constant instant-gratification welfare/handouts. Its high time these people reached their mental breaking point and left, for the past months its been nothing but negativity and moaning about getting XYZ classes nerfed. These people went into a experimental twist on CLASSIC WOW with a design philosophy of "make everyone OP" and have been complaining that the game is not hyper balanced the entire time, leeching the devs attention and creative freedom away from doing what made p1 such a hit, which was to just experiment and have fun. Yes, the population has taken a hit, but these peoples incessant whining steered the design choices that made p3 underwhelming, I have a feeling that p4 is going to be peak SOD. Population will boom from p4 and if some of these guys who have sworn to never return really follow through I think we will see a steady incline in population and some content that truly feels like an expansion of vanilla WoW
Could be a hard sell for any that are doing remix or cata.
Blizzard actualy took a content break for sod so that people can to all the early things in cata without having to choose what game to play. When its back to raid logging in cata sod will get updates.
I'm a shadow priest main and blizzard refuses to do anything to make my class fun to play So until my class actually has decent DPS I won't be back
They will come back, obviously
I think the main reason for SoD's "Failure" is due to the devs focusing extensively on the RPG aspect of WoW to expand on classic. I personally dig all of the features that they've added, most notably this gigantic overarching quests were you obtain a powerful ability, or just more incentives into dungeon content. Incursions are chill farms that I can do whenever there's nothing else to do, and you also have the pvp events lets not forget. Maybe they winged it on dungeon xp farm but that's up for debate. The issue is that people reeally love raiding. So much in fact that most people only like to raidlog and be done with it, without interacting with the world around them in an RPG format (akin to swg, Ultima, EQ). The earlier phases weren't as punishing regarding this aspect since you could easily level up an alt. But not many people are willing to go through extensive quest chains and level to 50. So once they hit max, they raid, get the "levelling epics" from raid and that's it, when really SoD should be treated as a true RPG (if you don't look up stuff on wowhead and don't use addons, because if not then everything is going to be cake and there's no sense of "discovery"). And that's another issue, people just don't interact the same through WoW as they did before: there's all of these guides and info on how to min max and get your runes and what not...which undermines all of the RPG themes. Everyone just wants to rush in...when it should be experienced at a slow pace. But this is just my take :)
Quite disagree there! Only something like 10pct of wow players raid. And even those seem rather hellbent on making it take as little time as possible. I'd dare you to reward the most powerful gear through any endgame activity (questing, pvp, crafting etc) with a comparable time investment raiding would take you. How many folks would still go raid you reckon?
In SoD? Then I stand corrected, but everyone around me seemed to focus on raiding as a means to an end (gear) rather than something to enjoy alongside other RPG elements from the world of SoD
By the time I get my runes, get pre raid bis, do the attunements, and not get invited to groups, the season will be over and I'll have to say goodbye to my character.
By the time I get my runes, get pre raid bis, do the attunements, and not get invited to groups, the season will be over and I'll have to say goodbye to my character.
Runes make starting alts a huge chore. Not much endgame in s3 or anything to work toward. Idk why they designed it this way.
I was enjoying P3, but the population got too low, so I moved on to other things, I'll be coming back for P4 almost certainly. After 4 days in a row of spending 3+ hours idling looking in LFG chat for anyone wanting to do full Mara runs and finding nobody, I pretty much gave up. And yes, I know I could've just made a group myself, but the point is that in other phases, it was easy to find a group for almost any relevant content within an hour or so. Instead I'm playing MoP Remix, and other non-WoW games, until P4 launches.
Season of disappointment
I'm very concerned for "average casual" player returns. Catacylsm is good, but for Fairweather games it's technically a massive hamsterwheel loot grind for people that only player a set amount of hours a week. The path from 80 to heroic dungeons to raids is going to dull people from wanting to level in SoD. None of this should be taken as an attack against SoD or Cata. It's going to be a bad case of attrition.
It's indicative of the situation of most games now, unless you can sweat the fuck out of it and gatekeep, it'll become dull quick and will essentially dictate the game state for the rest
I got bad news for you
If it releases anywhere near elden ring dlc I won't be
The damage has been done. P4 will see an uptick in players but it won’t be like it was before. Plus with cata now and war within soon there’s a limit for how much time problem have to play wow
Phase got boring for some and they stopped doing any type of updates because the same team is running Cata. Now you just have a lot of the player base playing that instead and tbh absolutely killing the vibe. In the end it will be a big mistake Cata absolutely crushed their subs back in the day and it will do it again.
Honestly for me, I didn't make it to the end of P2 (I quit), I was over the elitism, the minmaxing, the constant "must be meta" attitude of people maxing their gear to minimize HAVING to do anything. I'm surprised more folks didn't catch on bail earlier. Now they just want to crush content, say they "did it" to themselves, and then move on. The dopamine hit is there, albeit small, but there for a short time before they have to move on.
I am so glad I quit when I did. The writing was on the wall from the start and now it's more like high definition flat screens.
I was burnt out already from wotlk raiding and p2 wasn’t as fun as p1 for me so I was happy to just ultimately quit wow altogether. I was considering coming back for Cata though but not sure
Why would I come back for P4? It was said that the intention is to make P4 more "classic" and not change as much. As it seems, the biggest change will be the raidsize downscaled to 20 and some loot changes (which have been mega tame in P3). I already played classic. I dont need to do it again.
I myself won't.
Of course everyone's coming back. AV will be happening. These phases are working like seasons in Diablo games or something. This is how it works. The population falls over on its face and then the new season comes out and everyone returns. It's fine.
Stopped logging in because half of my guild quit to play Cataclysm. Not really in it for joining a pug group because I don't want to play with pugs on top of spending 2-3x longer, just to not roll on any loot. I was really only still running ST because my friends were. Seems SoD was just a waiting room for Cataclysm though. With how much they've been complaining about certain SoD changes I doubt they'll return, and if they don't I'm probably done as well. Kind of tired of being tied down to a raid schedule regardless. SoD is fun (for me), but really only if my buddies are there to have fun with it as well. Plus with TWW so close on the horizon I doubt I'd keep playing it once that released.
They are leaving because there is nothing to do. I feel like they are heroes of the storming SoD. My personal opinion.. they should bring GDKPs back. I know so many people who left after phase 1 because of that decision.
There are many, many threads detailing the state of SoD.
U just need to look at this numbers and all ur fear will vanish : —> https://ironforge.pro/population/sod/?
The runes and class balance are just so stupidly broken it kind of ruins the fun for me. The remake raids are neat but I would of preferred new horizontal content like the teased Karazan Cypts. The PVP damage reduction thing was kind of like a splash of cold water to me. They can't fix this shit with massive blanket %nerfs on everything. It was so laughably bad that I just kind of logged out and haven't logged back in.
Thought this said ps4 so clicked out of interest, then saw it was another phase-related SODfest
Phase 4 will be the same content and player behavior as phase 3.
I keep reading that’s it’s dead but people still read the parses on you, I went to one raid and now I can not get into another one because they are saying my log are bad. Does my gear need to be super good to get into a raid. Anyone out there still care about the logs even though they said it’s dead?
SoD was done with essentially the same seasonal style gameplay we have in retail. There isn't enough to do in the game though to justify waiting months before you can level again. These "dead" periods were just inevitable. Phase 3 is arguably the worst of the phases for various reasons and it also feels like it's taking forever for phase 4. All that being said people will definitely come back for p4. While blizzard's focusing on cata/retail's season 4 is annoying for the SoD enjoyers, I also feel it will help with creating even more players to play phase 4 because they got their cata/retail desires fulfilled and will get burned out looking for the next "wow high".
I just find it really hard to care about sod anymore. It’s not that it’s all bad…just that I feel let down by runes/incursions/world. That sentiment seems pretty generally held amongst the community. Don’t necessarily hate the game, just underwhelmed by what they’ve been able to give us. I applaud the classic devs for trying
My entire guild stopped playing weeks ago. Everyone got bored. Raid logging gets old fast and there isn't much to do other than that or farming gold. A lot of them might not come back for P4, myself included.
They rushed phase 2-3, didn’t optimize the raids correctly, and caused a lot of ppl to quit. I think the majority will be back for p4, personally once I saw how hard it is to get p3 BiS raid loot/the bosses were initially so overturned I just maxed out my pvp rank / reps and I’m waiting for p4 to actually raid for some loot that will hopefully remain viable for more than a few weeks (assuming it’s a ~20% drop in a 20 man raid with a 1 week CD, could easily be 6+ weeks into the season you finally get it…) Oh, and I totally forgot, not only was ST overturned, the loot sucked by contrast and then 6+ weeks in they buffed/added many more items, as if there wasn’t already enough time wasted chasing iLvL 58 loot…
Come back to p4 so I have to grind out even more world buffs before raid? No thanks, I'll pass.
Locking abilities behind grp content was a huge mistake.
I don’t know if anyone else has said this, but P4 has the largest chunk of content in Vanilla. Strat Scholo DM MC. Actual progression raiding will start. People are just playing other versions of WoW because they’ve done everything so far. I think most will come back. No one was excited about Cata 2 years ago. I think it’ll lose its appeal.
My reason for leaving was bad devs. I just constantly had to put up with their screw ups and I just couldn't see it work long-term. Their detached flamboyant attitude didn't help either. Of course there were more reasons, the common ones, but the devs were the driving force for me. If you need an example then I find their focus on 60 quite perfect. Gotta love the argument that everything pre-60 is unimportant because it'll change anyway. Just a giant middle finger to their playerbase.
People don’t take into consideration the difference between summer and winter gaming. IMO we won’t see much more of a bump until September or so. A lot of states that have to deal with real winters are probably out touching grass while it lasts.
Man just play whatever is fun rather than trying to plan it. Bunch of us playing era on deviate delight at the moment which is a dead ass server but it’s just fun because the game mode is fun. Doesn’t really matter that no one is there.
I never got into SoD, because as I assumed; it just boiled down to cookie cutter builds and no real substance.
Because cata classic just dropped like a week ago, and MOP remix just dropped as well. New season in retail, and D4. Some argue it’s cuz P4 of SoD didn’t go so hot? But honestly think it’s a mix of new games dropping and summer time,
CATACLYSM
People said they wanted classic+ but it just turns out they just wanted Cata.
The Cataclysm has arrived. Deathwing is destroying Azeroth, we need your help adventurer!