The level squish absolutely butchered questing and exploring multiple zones across the continents before you hit max. Used to be able to play through lots of expansions now your lucky if you can complete two zones of quests
While I get it, it’s also pretty weird to run though a story line that you’ll never complete unless you choose to continue going and not gaining xp. Then you’re plopped into a completely different story line for the current expansion.
I mean it was happening via the old system before they did the level squish. I’d be 90 before I left Jade Forest, 100 by the time I finished Talador. The old system was completely broken, the new system made things slightly better but it still definitely needs work
Genuinely think chromie time should be reworked. Start it at level 10, then whatever expansion gets a “chromie time” that uses the main story quest markers, and the xp is set out so you finish the story around 70, then you go to the next expansion.
Turn off mob xp and stuff, just let people play through a story and get a mount at the end or somethin
I doubt the average player wants to level that slowly just to get caught up to the current expansion, which is why you level so fast in the first place.
What’s slow about it? A direct path with a streamlined story so you miss side quests and just get the story of an expansion? That takes the same amount of time as leveling the regular way??
Cut the fluff and just give it a reasonable time I don’t mean EVERY quest, christ
The content isn't really designed for it. Early expansions are less unified story-wise, while later ones are incredibly quest dense and most of them are on the main story line.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a complete storyline overhaul of the entire older game just to let players experience one whole expansion while they level up to current content.
I mean they have done that with different quest markers for campaign quests, but there is no real solution that will satisfy everyone. It’s a problem that can’t really be fixed
ok,so try keeping chromie time as is, and have standard leveling available, but add eternus time that streamlines expansions, they're even doing story mode raids, just do that for some old content so the story wraps up for people etc.
I know what you're saying though, if this place is anything to go by you just cant please everyone haha
I wish they’d write a new, streamlined leveling quest line that takes people through the old zones, but as part of the modern story. It’d be nice to check in on some of these places, even if they can’t do big sweeping updates.
If you enjoy questing, nothing keeps you from finishing all the quest lines.
If you don't enjoy it, you are free to stop the moment you hit max level.
If at any time you decide you want to know how a quest line ended, you can pick it up where you left.
If you want to experience everything "at the right level", you can level stop a character somewhere between levels 10 and 60. The world scaling will ensure you won't feel too overpowered.
If you want to play with someone else, but you are at a different quest stages, level or whatever, just form a group and set the whole group to the lowest character's progress level. You can even repeat whole quest lines that way.
There are almost no downsides to the current system. Everyone can play the way they like.
Having new players dropped into a storyline and yanked out for a different one before they finish it is a huge barrier to enjoyment for lots of players. Especially if they are interested in the stories.
Sure, but consider the tradeoff.
Most players get the tail end of a story cut off now partway through leveling. However, a lot of players don't care and a number of people have a ton of alts or have played in the past and have already seen the stories. If you're really interested in the story, you have the option to go back and finish it, or do more of it on an alt.
If you make it longer or go with forcing players through 3+ xpacs, you have to increase the time it takes to level to do all that, and everyone has to deal with it without a workaround.
Overall, the current system seems way better than forcing people to do a ton of xpacs, which is a known barrier to play.
It is, but there's nothing stopping them from continuing to quest there if they want to see the rest of the story, or coming back for it later. There is not a silver bullet that solves all of these problems at once, so they chose the one that does the least harm.
Actually there is. New players are put into chromie time to level and then immediately yanked out whether they consent or not for the newer expansion. And a new player usually won’t quite know how to get back or what they did wrong
I recall getting teleported to Stormwind at 50 multiple times, yeah. Maybe the kick out is at 61 like other people are mentioning, and I just got a warning at 60.
While not a problem for the overwhelming majority of the player base.
I like to play with different races and body types, so I find the WoW way better than FFXIV.
It's a "me issue" so you won't see me asking for a change on how it works in FFXIV.
I enjoy questing. always have. it's a major part of an MMO, and it boggles my mind why people when people complain about having to do a major portion of the content.
driving away (some) new players is a good enough reason, it's a filter. chances are if you can't stick around to do the leveling, you won't ever be competent at the rest of the game.
From a business standpoint, please explain your reasoning for wanting a filter in place to keep people from using your product.
Why would Blizzard care whether a player is competent?
Why do you think getting through leveling makes people competent?
because business isn't the only thing that matter in an MMO, it lives or dies on it's community, I mean look at the shit show LFR made of the game. questing makes you more competent because it forces you to interact with the game in a variety of situations, practice makes perfect.
Windstar was just, unfortunately, a shit game. it didn't know what it wanted to be, it pulled in every direction at once and it ended up on focused and un polished.
I don't disagree, but if you can't bring new people in, then they won't experience the story at all. For experienced players, there's things you can do to keep experiencing the stories on alts, including just staying there and questing if you want to.
Not only that, most players have a variety of alts.
Being forced to play in a very specific manner like that is a pain in the ass doing the same old quests again and again.
Especially for veterans at WoW, many zones are a CHORE to play through again.
I never want to touch Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, Tanaan Jungle or Hellfire Peninsula again in my life.
Yep, I've been playing since wrath and for a long time I would level an alt of every class, whether I actively played them or not, to the expansion max level. I have done the majority of quests for the majority of zones more times than I care to think about. And it gets real god damn old, real fast.
FFXIV says hi. I spent a year doing ARR, boosting to Endwalker, and doing it. It was draining and frustrating when I wanted to do dungeons and raids with my friends. Or even the MSQ with my friends, it turns into solo duties a lot. I like the ability to have as much story as I want and skip it when I just want to play with other people.
Yep, this is precisely it. I also play a lot of XIV, and while the story is way better than WoW's in my opinion, there is just so much of it. It makes it really hard to get new people to play, and then if they do get a skip, they're plopped into the middle of a story with characters talking to them in a familiar sense, talking about events the player has no knowledge of. It's tough, and I really hope with Dawntrail that they can section the first major story arc off to the side and make it easier for new people to join.
I spent so much time watching these people with two hundred hours of memories I don’t have eat food in Endwalker. The pacing of the MSQ also refuses to admit it’s in an MMO. When the story got heavy, I took a week leveling hand jobs. Then the story wanted me to do something light that felt like a giant waste of time given the urgency of the surrounding sections. I understand the choice they made and their design goals, I just think it’s better suited to a different genre.
> The pacing of the MSQ also refuses to admit it’s in an MMO
Because they make the conscious decision to treat it as a story-heavy Final Fantasy game first and an MMO second. People can and have argued these points forever, but regardless, that is the current incarnation of it. It obviously isn't super hurting them, XIV continues to be just fine playerbase-wise, but I have to imagine they will eventually have to do something about it.
The equivalent to crafting professions is “Disciples of the Hand” jobs, and one character can have all of them. Cuts down on the gear you need if you keep them all in the same level bracket.
Being called champion/commander/hero with no context as for who these characters are, why these characters are here and where these characters are going is also a huge barrier to entry for many players expecting an RPG experience.
And Blizzard doesn't give a fuck about the story, so it's not forced on you like FFxiv does. (Which I actually like, not hating on ff14, just the priority is different)
Yeah, the approach that SE and Blizzard have to their respective MMOs is something I find very interesting. I certainly recognize that playing through the base game and soon to be 4 whole expansions and the post-patch content, just to be able to play what is current with your friends, is an insane time investment. It's not something I (or I imagine SE) have a good answer for as the story is both the driving force of everything that players engage with, as well as one of the biggest points in XIV's favor.
No, it's not a feature.
The new player experience is absolutely horrible in this game and that has nothing to do with them playing through multiple expansions. It actually is worse now than it was before.
If you have a new player, an actual new player who has never played WOW or really MMO's ever before, they go through the n00b zone and then they get dumped into Boralus. They get a breadcrumb quest to the story missions but the story missions weren't ever designed for xp. You don't get enough xp from the story missions to progress you. You also don't get any of the zone based breadcrumb quests when you land in Boralus. So you literally don't know where to go.
The fundamental problem with leveling is that they forced something like Chromie time to be needed. Every expansion they reduce leveling time to a point that it's turned into a complete joke.
Now, the problem is that they just reduced the amount of xp needed without doing anything to the quest chains. This means that no matter what, you won't actually finish any story at all. Quite literally, you will be level 60 before you can finish any one single expansion.
If you want to talk about that being a feature, then I would rethink what you are calling a feature.
This is why I quit ff14 all my friends where older players and already maxed and I played for two months and was still three expacs behind and couldn’t do the things I wanted to with them.
It's suffiently absurd they should just start players at like max level - 10. And then have 'story mode' that shows you quests from an xpac in a coherent order.
You are of course right, they can't have new players or new characters spending dozens or hundreds of hours getting to current content, but I can't imagine the game makes any sense to new players. I've been around since launch and even jumping in on a spec I don't normally play on remix was slightly confusing, I can't imagine a new player having an easy time.
> It's suffiently absurd they should just start players at like max level - 10
This is a really bad idea. As you noted, jumping onto a class you're not familiar with can be confusing. Imagine someone new starting the game and throwing these massive talent trees and 50 points to spend at them? That's why new players are sent through the leveling experience, so they can become familiar with the game and its systems as well as their chosen class over a period of time rather than at once.
The jolt of going from leveling to current expansion content is certainly jarring, but the alternatives are quite a bit worse.
I'd start them with most of the abilities pre set, or start them at max level -10 and then each level introduce them to one or two things at a time.
Gaining a level every few minutes with no idea what the hell you're gaining isn't helpful either.
Levels are almost a fiction in Wow at this point (insofar as they ever meant anything). You're either max level, or you're learning, or you're on an alt. That's it, having 10 levels or 80 serves no real purpose other than to confuse everyone and layer systems on top of systems.
I shared the feeling, but with time, I embraced it. Now, I level each alt on a different place, as to get loremaster. Different continent, different zones, until everything is completed. You level in a relaxed way in barely a week, so there's time to use multiple alts.
Isn’t there still an NPC in the faction capitals that lets you turn off xp gains from all sources? You could just stop at 59 and play whatever zone you want right?
>Used to be able to play through lots of expansions
The way I remember it, you used to start a zone, get like 1/3rd into it and leave for the next zone because you outleveled all the quests. Never finishing any quest chain wasn't particular fun, at least now you can complete the few zones you chose to level in.
What do you expect them to do of 20 years old game? Do every single possible quest in multiple expansions and still not be max level? Modern wow is about end game, not leveling. I completely get that it sucks, especially for new players, but yeah noone is forcing you not to do multiple campaigns and story lines after you hit the max level.
Said no one ever. They literally did the first squish because the engine couldnt handle numbers that big. Garrosh fight had to full ho reset 4 times. Tell me you havent played the game back then without telling me you havent played the game back then.
This pretty much.
Pretty sure our DPS would be in the trillions or more by now if they hadn't squished. Way past the point of being reasonable. Honestly we're already going to be pushing back into that territory with the next expansion: DPS will be measured in millions in season 1.
> Honestly we're already going to be pushing back into that territory with the next expansion: DPS will be measured in millions in season 1.
And it can't understand why we're at this point again already. Powercreep in DF has become absolutely insane but why though? They know excatly where this leads to and exactly what they'll will have to do again so why the fuck do they double down on numberbloating?
Because we have so many damn difficulties. Normal gear needs to be better than LFR gear. Heroic gear needs to be better than normal gear. Mythic gear needs to be better than Heroic gear. And when the new raid comes out, we need its gear to be substantially better than the last raid's so you're not stuck in the existing gear for long.
They want to have four raid difficulties where gear from each difficulty feels like a substantial improvement, and it means that each tier raises our power level *massively.*
Heroic dungeon gear at the start of Cataclysm was item level 346. Items off Heroic Madness of Deathwing were 416.
Heroic dungeon gear at the start of Dragonflight was 359. Some myth-track gear in Dragonflight S4 is up at *535* when fully-upgraded.
I don't think it's a matter of doubling down on it: I think it's more just planning workflow. We still have wonky things going on from previous squishes (someone posted an heirloom with negative stats just today), so it's not something easy to do well.
I agree that the start of TWW would be a better time to do it from a "needs to be done" standpoint, but there are more factors to this decision than just that sadly.
not really, people like getting stronger with every passing patch and expansion, sure you could make it so there is an 10ilvl jump from one expac to the next but it's just not how wow has been built over the years.
it's a necessary evil, either deal with squishes every few years or rebuild how the game progression is handled with itemization and leveling, and we know which one is easier to execute
It’s like cleaning your room by shoving everything in the closet. A bandaid so they could reach a baseline and address the underlying problem, but instead they just let it get even more messy, even faster and then tried to shove it all in the closet again.
I honestly wish there were more weapons and armor that had actual drawbacks and similarly larger buffs. It would make them a lot more unique and not just another stat stick #5 that has 2 of the same secondary stats as every other piece of armor.
They had Sakareth’s cloak last patch while it didn’t lower your stats per se it was the only cloak to give you no stamina in exchange for a proc that stole some secondary stats from your allies.
It was considered ‘bis’ in terms of raw numbers for most but, if you were working on progressing content like a tough raid boss or high key it wasn’t recommended to use.
Also a lot of trinkets seems to be kiss curse like storm eaters boon now adays
Yeah I'm not even talking about raid gear. Like even normal dungeon gear that has drawbacks make one helm feel different than another. Too long all of those effects where essentially stuck on trinkets.
You can tell a lot be someone you group with depending on if they use that cloak.
Mainly they just blindly follow guides and have no critical thinking. That cloak is garbage for any serious content.
They've been attempting that, but I'm unsure how successful it's been. Currently I know of Forgestorm, which is a 1hand weapon with no primary stat in favor of a proc. I don't think it was tuned well enough to be BIS though.
Beta has a polearm from a dungeon with a similar budget as well
Nah normalising weapon speed was a good idea. There was always a weapon speed that was just outright better for your class and all it did was make loot pools for good weapons much smaller.
That’s definitely one way to look at it, for me the issue was they just never balanced good weapons. You could easily have a 2.8 speed 2h with different stats or an on-hit effect to balance against a 3.6 speed one, or make one class favor the faster ones and one favor the slower ones, but they consistently rewarded having the slowest weapon for most classes. On the other hand, some of the most fun I’ve had in terms of itemization was when Enhancement Shaman had a short time where it could dual wield spell daggers and deal mostly spell damage, we were all looking for the fastest dagger with the highest spell power, or when they were iterating on death knight during original WoTLK and we had different builds looking for different weapons each patch (gorefiends grasp DK, diseaseless blood DK etc). A lot of people had issues with these things as well, but I just found the mad scramble for gear fun and had a lot of options already in my bank.
I’m not saying the way they had it was “good”, but having staves, 2h axes, 2h swords, polearms, 2h mace all at the same speed and the same stats with just variation in mastery/haste/crit is really, really boring. It makes everything feel the same and all you’re doing when you get a shiny new sword is getting a slightly bigger number and a transmog. A good example of a game that avoids this and keeps weapons fun is Destiny 2, but I doubt that perk system would work in a game like WoW. There’s gotta be something they can do to make the system fun though.
Yeah, I had a rogue through that time period, and I thought it was really cool that not every dagger was the same. I remember specifically when mutilate was shown for tbc being excited that I didn’t throw away the slower daggers I’d just upgraded from. I really enjoyed anything that had me collecting and thinking about my loot. It’s so sad nowadays that you go from a 2h sword with strength and 2 secondary stats to a 2h sword with the same speed, slightly more strength and slightly more secondary stats.
I miss the days of loot above green having fixed secondaries more than anything. Nowadays you have to worry not only about getting the drop but also that it rolls correctly for your build. And that it rolls at a higher ilvl. And that it rolls with a gem socket.
>Nowadays you have to worry not only about getting the drop but also that it rolls correctly for your build. And that it rolls at a higher ilvl. And that it rolls with a gem socket.
This seems accurate in... 2017?
"You could easily have a 2.8 speed 2h with different stats or an on-hit effect to balance against a 3.6 speed one, or make one class favor the faster ones and one favor the slower ones, but they consistently rewarded having the slowest weapon for most classes."
Yes, but that's still splitting the weapon pool. The whole purpose of normalization was to make a drop applicable to more classes.
Otherwise you get a fast 2h and you don't have anyone that can benefit the most from the fast 2h and it's a worthless drop.
You’ll always have someone who can benefit the most from a fast 2h (in classic, ret pally, some enhancement builds, and even fury warrior can build to take advantage of it) and having a fast 2h isn’t “terrible”, often it just requires speccing around. Things can be worse than other things, just within reason. Ex: a fast 2h weapon could drop from early BWL bosses and be useful as long as just it’s ever so slightly better than most slow molten core drops. It can be worse than every other BWL drop, and would still have its place. I’d argue the only way to make weapons interesting is to intentionally split the weapon pool, just have a bunch of overlap where most weapons are just alright for most classes and a handful are “god tier” chase items for their specific class. Could make a 2h mace that’s very fast but has a lot of strength and agility, and feral Druids will chase it, but everyone else could use it. With what you’re describing, there’s no need to have more than 1 2-handed weapon per tier. Just have it drop off multiple bosses, done. I miss warriors and rogues having axe/mace/sword spec. I miss gear choices mattering. There’s also a real market for the healers looking for weapons for soloing/off specs, and having a truly mediocre 2h weapon would just mean lots of holy paladins, resto shamans and resto Druids get to use it for soloing. There’s no downside except that some melee players will go “eh that’s not an upgrade”.
You're clearly looking for Classic and that's fine, it's currently also available.
IMO, retail does not need this feature and there's a reason why it was removed.
The whole purpose if normalization is to make ilevel the best stat. You want a system with a lot more nuance, which is fine, but I don't believe we need weapons treated like trinkets.
Yeah that was honestly was one of my favorite parts of old school WoW. Changing your play style or talents to meet your weapon. It allowed for a lot of interesting corner cases. I remember windfury being one of those in Vanilla that really had some interesting and fun use cases.
Nah more like.
"This 2h weapon goes into the bank despite being 2 tiers of ilvls above my current one, because it is 3,4 speed rather than 3,8"
In the world of classic with all the external buffs (so more AP/STR) they were stacking all the time. No weapon normalization would have been absolutely bonkers.
Well that’s just incorrect and a lot of secondary stats interact with class mechanics and do much more interesting things than change your auto attack timer from 3.6 seconds to 3.2 seconds.
They went already at its limit of squishing everyone and everything down to fit all the content. As you level up, the minus stats will be removed from the item.
OT: I do think thats the whole reason we do not get a stat squish in TWW beside the stats already being that high in DF. Its gonna be a mess for them to fix that in the near future. Too many valuables.
They already fixed their max number cap, though they'll still squish things because some people get scared of big numbers lol.
I'd love if they undid their previous squishes, but that'll never happen.
We're still nowhere near end of Legion dps though. I distinctly remember Antorus being in the 2-3M dps range on most fights.
Our mass aoe can touch on 1M dps right now, but our single target is around 500k at most right now.
I said starting TWW, as in like when we hit max level and begin raiding. They are going to be doing 1mil single target easily I believe. Thats imo approaching (for reference, Legion started around 200-300k)
However, health pools are like 4 million or something? Which is basically end of Legion right there.
Yeah they did, which is weird because we really need a squish right now. I do think that there are some technical difficulties behind it in the background which they dont wanna deal with yet.
When we have dps players with 1.5 million hp…. Dumbest shit I’ve ever heard that they’re not stat squishing for the release. Guess we’re gonna be at like 2-3 million at level 80 I guess
It's more than you'd think it will be, they're doing another round of "give everybody +x% health and make them take x% more damage to nerf healing" and the gear has way more stamina than it would at current ilvl scaling.
On beta dps in max season 1 gear have 7-8m hp. If TWW scaling is similar to DF that’ll place dps at somewhere around 15-20m hp depending on if we get 3 or 4 seasons.
The limit on where they can take HP is over 9 quadrillion as of Legion. We're not running into the Garrosh problem again, where 25m Heroic Garrosh had 3.8 billion health but split into four health bars because the game couldn't handle higher than 2.1 billion.
In a similar vein, I’m personally a big fan of the 3rd boss of MSV, who dramatically waxes poetry on and on after he “dies” until he (typically) gets interrupted by Lorewalker Cho loudly going “Aaahhhhh,” lmao
Probably the combo of the already mentioned squishes but also because it has gem slots, and those budget in reductions to stats. So when squished it did this before those reductions, and those reductions just ended up budgeted as more than the earliest stats on it.
Probably like 4 different roundings done in a row that just worked out this way.
Garrosh heirlooms always had a bit less of their stat budget on their stats because of the sockets, so this is just that coupled with ilvl squish acting weird
It’s a call back to patch 5.4 where brewmasters were so OP blizzard had to actually give them negative stats.
I remember my monk had red stats for much of a very long patch.
(I assuming the real reason is due to lvl squishing over the years.)
I havnt played wow since 2020, did they remove the old BoA heirlooms? If so will I get all of them replaced with the new ones? Someone please help 😭 about to subscribe again soon
The heirlooms are still there, but the effects changed so that they're far less beneficial for leveling: Wowhead post about the changes [here](https://www.wowhead.com/guide/heirloom-changes-shadowlands). (Note: This was due to Blizz increasing experience gains overall so the old experience bonuses from the heirlooms are sort of baked into everything)
Leveling speed has ramped up so much they’re only useful for not having to change your gear. I’m hoping at the end of remix they let us keep the back as an heirloom with the maximum XP boost it can give since nothing else really helps now.
since the stats increase as you level, all the stat squishes over the years have done some strange things to these items.
The level squish absolutely butchered questing and exploring multiple zones across the continents before you hit max. Used to be able to play through lots of expansions now your lucky if you can complete two zones of quests
This is a feature, not a bug. Having new players forced to play through all the expansions is a huge barrier to entry.
While I get it, it’s also pretty weird to run though a story line that you’ll never complete unless you choose to continue going and not gaining xp. Then you’re plopped into a completely different story line for the current expansion.
I mean it was happening via the old system before they did the level squish. I’d be 90 before I left Jade Forest, 100 by the time I finished Talador. The old system was completely broken, the new system made things slightly better but it still definitely needs work
Genuinely think chromie time should be reworked. Start it at level 10, then whatever expansion gets a “chromie time” that uses the main story quest markers, and the xp is set out so you finish the story around 70, then you go to the next expansion. Turn off mob xp and stuff, just let people play through a story and get a mount at the end or somethin
I doubt the average player wants to level that slowly just to get caught up to the current expansion, which is why you level so fast in the first place.
What’s slow about it? A direct path with a streamlined story so you miss side quests and just get the story of an expansion? That takes the same amount of time as leveling the regular way?? Cut the fluff and just give it a reasonable time I don’t mean EVERY quest, christ
The content isn't really designed for it. Early expansions are less unified story-wise, while later ones are incredibly quest dense and most of them are on the main story line. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a complete storyline overhaul of the entire older game just to let players experience one whole expansion while they level up to current content.
I mean they have done that with different quest markers for campaign quests, but there is no real solution that will satisfy everyone. It’s a problem that can’t really be fixed
ok,so try keeping chromie time as is, and have standard leveling available, but add eternus time that streamlines expansions, they're even doing story mode raids, just do that for some old content so the story wraps up for people etc. I know what you're saying though, if this place is anything to go by you just cant please everyone haha
That sounds like a really subpar idea.
The storyline isn't going anywhere. Feel free to check it out at max level.
I'd be all over Loremaster if I could Chromietime it on my lvl 70.
I wish they’d write a new, streamlined leveling quest line that takes people through the old zones, but as part of the modern story. It’d be nice to check in on some of these places, even if they can’t do big sweeping updates.
If you enjoy questing, nothing keeps you from finishing all the quest lines. If you don't enjoy it, you are free to stop the moment you hit max level. If at any time you decide you want to know how a quest line ended, you can pick it up where you left. If you want to experience everything "at the right level", you can level stop a character somewhere between levels 10 and 60. The world scaling will ensure you won't feel too overpowered. If you want to play with someone else, but you are at a different quest stages, level or whatever, just form a group and set the whole group to the lowest character's progress level. You can even repeat whole quest lines that way. There are almost no downsides to the current system. Everyone can play the way they like.
Having new players dropped into a storyline and yanked out for a different one before they finish it is a huge barrier to enjoyment for lots of players. Especially if they are interested in the stories.
Sure, but consider the tradeoff. Most players get the tail end of a story cut off now partway through leveling. However, a lot of players don't care and a number of people have a ton of alts or have played in the past and have already seen the stories. If you're really interested in the story, you have the option to go back and finish it, or do more of it on an alt. If you make it longer or go with forcing players through 3+ xpacs, you have to increase the time it takes to level to do all that, and everyone has to deal with it without a workaround. Overall, the current system seems way better than forcing people to do a ton of xpacs, which is a known barrier to play.
It is, but there's nothing stopping them from continuing to quest there if they want to see the rest of the story, or coming back for it later. There is not a silver bullet that solves all of these problems at once, so they chose the one that does the least harm.
Actually there is. New players are put into chromie time to level and then immediately yanked out whether they consent or not for the newer expansion. And a new player usually won’t quite know how to get back or what they did wrong
The last time I hit 60 I was asked if I wanted to leave Chromie Time. I think this was last week.
Must have updated it. Originally it just kicked you out lol
Iirc they ask you now but they're still like a 1 min timer that kicks you anyway.
You get 1 minute to finish things up if you hit 61, after the nerfed xp gains at that point, and then you get the boot.
I recall getting teleported to Stormwind at 50 multiple times, yeah. Maybe the kick out is at 61 like other people are mentioning, and I just got a warning at 60.
Sure but play FFXIV to see why it isn't a thing. 200 hours of boring af questing content is not fun if the game's primary fun is in the late game
At least you only really *have* to do it once... since you can do all the classes on a single character.
While not a problem for the overwhelming majority of the player base. I like to play with different races and body types, so I find the WoW way better than FFXIV. It's a "me issue" so you won't see me asking for a change on how it works in FFXIV.
if you find the questing boring, maybe it isn't the game for you.
You can't deny FF fetch quests are boring lol Even if you play for and enjoy the story it's boring af to do the quests themselves
I enjoy questing. always have. it's a major part of an MMO, and it boggles my mind why people when people complain about having to do a major portion of the content.
the barrier is there for a reason though.
A reason, sure, but not a good enough one to warrant driving away potential players.
driving away (some) new players is a good enough reason, it's a filter. chances are if you can't stick around to do the leveling, you won't ever be competent at the rest of the game.
From a business standpoint, please explain your reasoning for wanting a filter in place to keep people from using your product. Why would Blizzard care whether a player is competent? Why do you think getting through leveling makes people competent?
because business isn't the only thing that matter in an MMO, it lives or dies on it's community, I mean look at the shit show LFR made of the game. questing makes you more competent because it forces you to interact with the game in a variety of situations, practice makes perfect.
> because business isn't the only thing that matter in an MMO, it lives or dies on it's community Tell that to Wildstar.
Windstar was just, unfortunately, a shit game. it didn't know what it wanted to be, it pulled in every direction at once and it ended up on focused and un polished.
It's also a very sad way to experience storytelling.
I don't disagree, but if you can't bring new people in, then they won't experience the story at all. For experienced players, there's things you can do to keep experiencing the stories on alts, including just staying there and questing if you want to.
Not only that, most players have a variety of alts. Being forced to play in a very specific manner like that is a pain in the ass doing the same old quests again and again. Especially for veterans at WoW, many zones are a CHORE to play through again. I never want to touch Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, Tanaan Jungle or Hellfire Peninsula again in my life.
I guess we owe you one then. -kadgar
Yep, I've been playing since wrath and for a long time I would level an alt of every class, whether I actively played them or not, to the expansion max level. I have done the majority of quests for the majority of zones more times than I care to think about. And it gets real god damn old, real fast.
FFXIV says hi. I spent a year doing ARR, boosting to Endwalker, and doing it. It was draining and frustrating when I wanted to do dungeons and raids with my friends. Or even the MSQ with my friends, it turns into solo duties a lot. I like the ability to have as much story as I want and skip it when I just want to play with other people.
Yep, this is precisely it. I also play a lot of XIV, and while the story is way better than WoW's in my opinion, there is just so much of it. It makes it really hard to get new people to play, and then if they do get a skip, they're plopped into the middle of a story with characters talking to them in a familiar sense, talking about events the player has no knowledge of. It's tough, and I really hope with Dawntrail that they can section the first major story arc off to the side and make it easier for new people to join.
I spent so much time watching these people with two hundred hours of memories I don’t have eat food in Endwalker. The pacing of the MSQ also refuses to admit it’s in an MMO. When the story got heavy, I took a week leveling hand jobs. Then the story wanted me to do something light that felt like a giant waste of time given the urgency of the surrounding sections. I understand the choice they made and their design goals, I just think it’s better suited to a different genre.
> The pacing of the MSQ also refuses to admit it’s in an MMO Because they make the conscious decision to treat it as a story-heavy Final Fantasy game first and an MMO second. People can and have argued these points forever, but regardless, that is the current incarnation of it. It obviously isn't super hurting them, XIV continues to be just fine playerbase-wise, but I have to imagine they will eventually have to do something about it.
> I took a week leveling hand jobs. HUH
The equivalent to crafting professions is “Disciples of the Hand” jobs, and one character can have all of them. Cuts down on the gear you need if you keep them all in the same level bracket.
Being called champion/commander/hero with no context as for who these characters are, why these characters are here and where these characters are going is also a huge barrier to entry for many players expecting an RPG experience.
And Blizzard doesn't give a fuck about the story, so it's not forced on you like FFxiv does. (Which I actually like, not hating on ff14, just the priority is different)
Yeah, the approach that SE and Blizzard have to their respective MMOs is something I find very interesting. I certainly recognize that playing through the base game and soon to be 4 whole expansions and the post-patch content, just to be able to play what is current with your friends, is an insane time investment. It's not something I (or I imagine SE) have a good answer for as the story is both the driving force of everything that players engage with, as well as one of the biggest points in XIV's favor.
No, it's not a feature. The new player experience is absolutely horrible in this game and that has nothing to do with them playing through multiple expansions. It actually is worse now than it was before. If you have a new player, an actual new player who has never played WOW or really MMO's ever before, they go through the n00b zone and then they get dumped into Boralus. They get a breadcrumb quest to the story missions but the story missions weren't ever designed for xp. You don't get enough xp from the story missions to progress you. You also don't get any of the zone based breadcrumb quests when you land in Boralus. So you literally don't know where to go. The fundamental problem with leveling is that they forced something like Chromie time to be needed. Every expansion they reduce leveling time to a point that it's turned into a complete joke. Now, the problem is that they just reduced the amount of xp needed without doing anything to the quest chains. This means that no matter what, you won't actually finish any story at all. Quite literally, you will be level 60 before you can finish any one single expansion. If you want to talk about that being a feature, then I would rethink what you are calling a feature.
This is why I quit ff14 all my friends where older players and already maxed and I played for two months and was still three expacs behind and couldn’t do the things I wanted to with them.
It's suffiently absurd they should just start players at like max level - 10. And then have 'story mode' that shows you quests from an xpac in a coherent order. You are of course right, they can't have new players or new characters spending dozens or hundreds of hours getting to current content, but I can't imagine the game makes any sense to new players. I've been around since launch and even jumping in on a spec I don't normally play on remix was slightly confusing, I can't imagine a new player having an easy time.
> It's suffiently absurd they should just start players at like max level - 10 This is a really bad idea. As you noted, jumping onto a class you're not familiar with can be confusing. Imagine someone new starting the game and throwing these massive talent trees and 50 points to spend at them? That's why new players are sent through the leveling experience, so they can become familiar with the game and its systems as well as their chosen class over a period of time rather than at once. The jolt of going from leveling to current expansion content is certainly jarring, but the alternatives are quite a bit worse.
I'd start them with most of the abilities pre set, or start them at max level -10 and then each level introduce them to one or two things at a time. Gaining a level every few minutes with no idea what the hell you're gaining isn't helpful either. Levels are almost a fiction in Wow at this point (insofar as they ever meant anything). You're either max level, or you're learning, or you're on an alt. That's it, having 10 levels or 80 serves no real purpose other than to confuse everyone and layer systems on top of systems.
I shared the feeling, but with time, I embraced it. Now, I level each alt on a different place, as to get loremaster. Different continent, different zones, until everything is completed. You level in a relaxed way in barely a week, so there's time to use multiple alts.
Isn’t there still an NPC in the faction capitals that lets you turn off xp gains from all sources? You could just stop at 59 and play whatever zone you want right?
There is! Although many players don't know about them and new players especially won't. Would be better to make it a menu option imo.
Really should be able to set it to a percentage, maybe from like normal to 10%.
Yeah but I shouldn’t need him when the old way I could do all the zones on the eastern kingdom before moving onto a new area for leveling
>Used to be able to play through lots of expansions The way I remember it, you used to start a zone, get like 1/3rd into it and leave for the next zone because you outleveled all the quests. Never finishing any quest chain wasn't particular fun, at least now you can complete the few zones you chose to level in.
What do you expect them to do of 20 years old game? Do every single possible quest in multiple expansions and still not be max level? Modern wow is about end game, not leveling. I completely get that it sucks, especially for new players, but yeah noone is forcing you not to do multiple campaigns and story lines after you hit the max level.
I remember when the first squish happened at the start of WoD, level 1 Blood Elves weren't able to kill the mobs in their starting zone
[удалено]
Said no one ever. They literally did the first squish because the engine couldnt handle numbers that big. Garrosh fight had to full ho reset 4 times. Tell me you havent played the game back then without telling me you havent played the game back then.
This pretty much. Pretty sure our DPS would be in the trillions or more by now if they hadn't squished. Way past the point of being reasonable. Honestly we're already going to be pushing back into that territory with the next expansion: DPS will be measured in millions in season 1.
> Honestly we're already going to be pushing back into that territory with the next expansion: DPS will be measured in millions in season 1. And it can't understand why we're at this point again already. Powercreep in DF has become absolutely insane but why though? They know excatly where this leads to and exactly what they'll will have to do again so why the fuck do they double down on numberbloating?
Because we have so many damn difficulties. Normal gear needs to be better than LFR gear. Heroic gear needs to be better than normal gear. Mythic gear needs to be better than Heroic gear. And when the new raid comes out, we need its gear to be substantially better than the last raid's so you're not stuck in the existing gear for long. They want to have four raid difficulties where gear from each difficulty feels like a substantial improvement, and it means that each tier raises our power level *massively.* Heroic dungeon gear at the start of Cataclysm was item level 346. Items off Heroic Madness of Deathwing were 416. Heroic dungeon gear at the start of Dragonflight was 359. Some myth-track gear in Dragonflight S4 is up at *535* when fully-upgraded.
I don't think it's a matter of doubling down on it: I think it's more just planning workflow. We still have wonky things going on from previous squishes (someone posted an heirloom with negative stats just today), so it's not something easy to do well. I agree that the start of TWW would be a better time to do it from a "needs to be done" standpoint, but there are more factors to this decision than just that sadly.
Its a good example as to how terrible scaling is though.
not really, people like getting stronger with every passing patch and expansion, sure you could make it so there is an 10ilvl jump from one expac to the next but it's just not how wow has been built over the years. it's a necessary evil, either deal with squishes every few years or rebuild how the game progression is handled with itemization and leveling, and we know which one is easier to execute
Bro. Scaling literally makes you feel weaker as you level up. 💀
It’s like cleaning your room by shoving everything in the closet. A bandaid so they could reach a baseline and address the underlying problem, but instead they just let it get even more messy, even faster and then tried to shove it all in the closet again.
The axe is heavy so you are less agile when you wield it
I honestly wish there were more weapons and armor that had actual drawbacks and similarly larger buffs. It would make them a lot more unique and not just another stat stick #5 that has 2 of the same secondary stats as every other piece of armor.
They had Sakareth’s cloak last patch while it didn’t lower your stats per se it was the only cloak to give you no stamina in exchange for a proc that stole some secondary stats from your allies. It was considered ‘bis’ in terms of raw numbers for most but, if you were working on progressing content like a tough raid boss or high key it wasn’t recommended to use. Also a lot of trinkets seems to be kiss curse like storm eaters boon now adays
Yeah I'm not even talking about raid gear. Like even normal dungeon gear that has drawbacks make one helm feel different than another. Too long all of those effects where essentially stuck on trinkets.
You can tell a lot be someone you group with depending on if they use that cloak. Mainly they just blindly follow guides and have no critical thinking. That cloak is garbage for any serious content.
Unrelated, but from where originated the kiss curse metaphor?
I am not sure, but if I were to take a guess most things trail back to shakespeare
They've been attempting that, but I'm unsure how successful it's been. Currently I know of Forgestorm, which is a 1hand weapon with no primary stat in favor of a proc. I don't think it was tuned well enough to be BIS though. Beta has a polearm from a dungeon with a similar budget as well
Yeah, one of the biggest thing for me is when they normalized weapon speed they killed a lot of what makes different weapons compelling
Nah normalising weapon speed was a good idea. There was always a weapon speed that was just outright better for your class and all it did was make loot pools for good weapons much smaller.
That’s definitely one way to look at it, for me the issue was they just never balanced good weapons. You could easily have a 2.8 speed 2h with different stats or an on-hit effect to balance against a 3.6 speed one, or make one class favor the faster ones and one favor the slower ones, but they consistently rewarded having the slowest weapon for most classes. On the other hand, some of the most fun I’ve had in terms of itemization was when Enhancement Shaman had a short time where it could dual wield spell daggers and deal mostly spell damage, we were all looking for the fastest dagger with the highest spell power, or when they were iterating on death knight during original WoTLK and we had different builds looking for different weapons each patch (gorefiends grasp DK, diseaseless blood DK etc). A lot of people had issues with these things as well, but I just found the mad scramble for gear fun and had a lot of options already in my bank. I’m not saying the way they had it was “good”, but having staves, 2h axes, 2h swords, polearms, 2h mace all at the same speed and the same stats with just variation in mastery/haste/crit is really, really boring. It makes everything feel the same and all you’re doing when you get a shiny new sword is getting a slightly bigger number and a transmog. A good example of a game that avoids this and keeps weapons fun is Destiny 2, but I doubt that perk system would work in a game like WoW. There’s gotta be something they can do to make the system fun though.
Be a rogue pre-standardization, you want two identical weapons but one has to be 1.4 and the other has to be 2.6.
Yeah, I had a rogue through that time period, and I thought it was really cool that not every dagger was the same. I remember specifically when mutilate was shown for tbc being excited that I didn’t throw away the slower daggers I’d just upgraded from. I really enjoyed anything that had me collecting and thinking about my loot. It’s so sad nowadays that you go from a 2h sword with strength and 2 secondary stats to a 2h sword with the same speed, slightly more strength and slightly more secondary stats.
Man I still remember running Blackrock Depths for the Barman Shanker, because it was so slow it outperformed epic daggers for a while.
I miss the days of loot above green having fixed secondaries more than anything. Nowadays you have to worry not only about getting the drop but also that it rolls correctly for your build. And that it rolls at a higher ilvl. And that it rolls with a gem socket.
Honest question have you played Retail WoW since at least Shadowlands at all?
>Nowadays you have to worry not only about getting the drop but also that it rolls correctly for your build. And that it rolls at a higher ilvl. And that it rolls with a gem socket. This seems accurate in... 2017?
dude has absolutely not played this game in years and he's tossing out gripes in public lmao
"You could easily have a 2.8 speed 2h with different stats or an on-hit effect to balance against a 3.6 speed one, or make one class favor the faster ones and one favor the slower ones, but they consistently rewarded having the slowest weapon for most classes." Yes, but that's still splitting the weapon pool. The whole purpose of normalization was to make a drop applicable to more classes. Otherwise you get a fast 2h and you don't have anyone that can benefit the most from the fast 2h and it's a worthless drop.
You’ll always have someone who can benefit the most from a fast 2h (in classic, ret pally, some enhancement builds, and even fury warrior can build to take advantage of it) and having a fast 2h isn’t “terrible”, often it just requires speccing around. Things can be worse than other things, just within reason. Ex: a fast 2h weapon could drop from early BWL bosses and be useful as long as just it’s ever so slightly better than most slow molten core drops. It can be worse than every other BWL drop, and would still have its place. I’d argue the only way to make weapons interesting is to intentionally split the weapon pool, just have a bunch of overlap where most weapons are just alright for most classes and a handful are “god tier” chase items for their specific class. Could make a 2h mace that’s very fast but has a lot of strength and agility, and feral Druids will chase it, but everyone else could use it. With what you’re describing, there’s no need to have more than 1 2-handed weapon per tier. Just have it drop off multiple bosses, done. I miss warriors and rogues having axe/mace/sword spec. I miss gear choices mattering. There’s also a real market for the healers looking for weapons for soloing/off specs, and having a truly mediocre 2h weapon would just mean lots of holy paladins, resto shamans and resto Druids get to use it for soloing. There’s no downside except that some melee players will go “eh that’s not an upgrade”.
You're clearly looking for Classic and that's fine, it's currently also available. IMO, retail does not need this feature and there's a reason why it was removed. The whole purpose if normalization is to make ilevel the best stat. You want a system with a lot more nuance, which is fine, but I don't believe we need weapons treated like trinkets.
Yeah that was honestly was one of my favorite parts of old school WoW. Changing your play style or talents to meet your weapon. It allowed for a lot of interesting corner cases. I remember windfury being one of those in Vanilla that really had some interesting and fun use cases.
> talents to meet your weapon "Nice, I got a new weapon, time to spend 70% of my net worth changing 2 talents again."
Nah more like. "This 2h weapon goes into the bank despite being 2 tiers of ilvls above my current one, because it is 3,4 speed rather than 3,8" In the world of classic with all the external buffs (so more AP/STR) they were stacking all the time. No weapon normalization would have been absolutely bonkers.
I dunno about you but I’ve always been rich in classic wow off of just fishing. Respecs were never anywhere near 1% of my net worth in game.
The same could be said for secondary stats, should we remove those too?
Well that’s just incorrect and a lot of secondary stats interact with class mechanics and do much more interesting things than change your auto attack timer from 3.6 seconds to 3.2 seconds.
Tbf the way secondaries are right now, they might as well.
They went already at its limit of squishing everyone and everything down to fit all the content. As you level up, the minus stats will be removed from the item. OT: I do think thats the whole reason we do not get a stat squish in TWW beside the stats already being that high in DF. Its gonna be a mess for them to fix that in the near future. Too many valuables.
I forget which one but they said at blizzcon there will be another stat squish either after TWW or Midnight
there kind of has to be, because TWW is literally starting with some numbers near where Legion ENDED. Shits going to be insane at the end of TWW.
Maybe someday they’ll switch to floating point so we can start seeing silly idle game numbers.
They already fixed their max number cap, though they'll still squish things because some people get scared of big numbers lol. I'd love if they undid their previous squishes, but that'll never happen.
I see no problem here...lemme see them 1 mil #s!
We're still nowhere near end of Legion dps though. I distinctly remember Antorus being in the 2-3M dps range on most fights. Our mass aoe can touch on 1M dps right now, but our single target is around 500k at most right now.
I said starting TWW, as in like when we hit max level and begin raiding. They are going to be doing 1mil single target easily I believe. Thats imo approaching (for reference, Legion started around 200-300k) However, health pools are like 4 million or something? Which is basically end of Legion right there.
Yeah they did, which is weird because we really need a squish right now. I do think that there are some technical difficulties behind it in the background which they dont wanna deal with yet.
When we have dps players with 1.5 million hp…. Dumbest shit I’ve ever heard that they’re not stat squishing for the release. Guess we’re gonna be at like 2-3 million at level 80 I guess
Level 80 characters on beta had over 4.5m hp and potions heal for that much too
It's more than you'd think it will be, they're doing another round of "give everybody +x% health and make them take x% more damage to nerf healing" and the gear has way more stamina than it would at current ilvl scaling.
On beta dps in max season 1 gear have 7-8m hp. If TWW scaling is similar to DF that’ll place dps at somewhere around 15-20m hp depending on if we get 3 or 4 seasons.
Player HP is probably less of a concern than boss HP which could actually start to push against the limits of the engine.
The limit on where they can take HP is over 9 quadrillion as of Legion. We're not running into the Garrosh problem again, where 25m Heroic Garrosh had 3.8 billion health but split into four health bars because the game couldn't handle higher than 2.1 billion.
there kind of has to be, because TWW is literally starting with some numbers near where Legion ENDED. Shits going to be insane at the end of TWW.
It means you’re completely unhinged!
News to no one mmn3m
Lor'themar's deadpan delivery always sends me.
In a similar vein, I’m personally a big fan of the 3rd boss of MSV, who dramatically waxes poetry on and on after he “dies” until he (typically) gets interrupted by Lorewalker Cho loudly going “Aaahhhhh,” lmao
Elegon sounding like a whining dog before instantly being annihilated.
"You are not worthy"
Probably the combo of the already mentioned squishes but also because it has gem slots, and those budget in reductions to stats. So when squished it did this before those reductions, and those reductions just ended up budgeted as more than the earliest stats on it. Probably like 4 different roundings done in a row that just worked out this way.
It's mostly the socket bonus. It currently has 1 agi, but 2 of them is deactivated without gems, so it's -1.
Garrosh heirlooms always had a bit less of their stat budget on their stats because of the sockets, so this is just that coupled with ilvl squish acting weird
well, u r a panda and its garrosh's heirloom, so its working as expected :)
this looks like an Alliance inn. it says Hellscream's item. why would Garrosh create a weapon that would be an adventage for Alliance?
Just roll with it!
Its the panda tax.
Isn't it obvious, pandas are fat and even with + agility they remain in the negatives. At least this is my theory, make sense if you ask me.
Beacuse scaling is garbage?
Monks use their fists, equipping weapons actually lowers your stats
It’s a call back to patch 5.4 where brewmasters were so OP blizzard had to actually give them negative stats. I remember my monk had red stats for much of a very long patch. (I assuming the real reason is due to lvl squishing over the years.)
Some intern forgot to program in a boundary check.
Must be the void ... they’re corrupted by nzoth
Pandas don't deserve these blessed blades
I havnt played wow since 2020, did they remove the old BoA heirlooms? If so will I get all of them replaced with the new ones? Someone please help 😭 about to subscribe again soon
The heirlooms are still there, but the effects changed so that they're far less beneficial for leveling: Wowhead post about the changes [here](https://www.wowhead.com/guide/heirloom-changes-shadowlands). (Note: This was due to Blizz increasing experience gains overall so the old experience bonuses from the heirlooms are sort of baked into everything)
Leveling speed has ramped up so much they’re only useful for not having to change your gear. I’m hoping at the end of remix they let us keep the back as an heirloom with the maximum XP boost it can give since nothing else really helps now.
Garrosh hates Pandaren.
YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!