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| Leveling and questing was deemphasized a long time ago. End-game content by Rafiki 09/21/2024, 4:32pm PDT | ||||
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| is now the focus. Max-level raiding and max-level dungeons. All of the leveling is just......I'd say a means to an end, but at this point I think it's just genre conventions. In vanilla WoW, yes leveling was much slower and much more difficult and time consuming. Dungeons also required you to move at a much slower and more measured pace, pulling 1 pack at a time, assigning specific kill orders, focus on one target at a time, and requiring crowd control to manage non-priority targets. The shift started in Burning Crusade with shorter dungeons and faster leveling, and it's just kept transitioning since then.
In original WoW, leveling from 1-60 took me about 5 months. In this new expansion, going from 70-80 took 8 hours total? If you're a reasonably skilled player, you can steamroll normal dungeons pretty effortlessly. Especially at lower levels just because of the way level scaling works. You can queue into dungeons at level 14 side by side with level 50 characters, and so everyone's attacks are scaled accordingly and lower level characters get massive bonuses. One major change over the years is that dungeons and raids now have multiple difficulty levels. Dungeons have normal, heroic, mythic, and mythic+. Underscoring Demons' Souls influence on everything in the last 15 years, mythic+ plus is the WoW dungeon version of New Game+. Kill all of the bosses and a certain percentage of the "trash" mobs within a time limit and you get an item that allows you to attempt a dungeon at a higher level. High levels mean everything has more health and does more damage, but you get better rewards up until +10. Past that, and you're just pushing to see how high you can go. I think there's a hard level limit, but no one has ever reached it because eventually it's just mathematically impossible to either complete a dungeon within the timer or survive attacks. The "pushing as high as you can go" may seem pointless, but it scratches that itch for mastery where you push yourself to your skill limit, so I think it's a good system. Raids also have 4 levels of difficulty: Raid Finder, which is just an auto-queue where you get dumped in with a random assortment of people, normal, heroic, and mythic. In old raids, it was only really realistic to clear them with a dedicated guild of people who didn't have their heads up their asses. In the new raids, it's common to PUG heroic and clear it. Mythic can only be attempted by guilds by design, but they're still challenging enough that you need a dedicated group. Higher difficulties not only give bosses more health and more damage, but the fights get more complex because all of the bosses have at least one extra ability. Just like M+, higher raid difficulties yield higher gear rewards. Compared to vanilla WoW, dungeon and raid encounters are dramatically more complex at higher difficulties. Elitist turbonerds pat themselves on the back because they think that fights are more complicated now because they're better players than past ones, but really, it's because the game gives you way, WAY more information in-game than it used. Ground effects, notifications and alerts, audio and voice cues, telegraphed attacks, etc. You can expect more of people when you give them more information to react to. Encounters require much more movement, coordination, and reaction than they ever did in the past, however at lower difficulties the damage output is forgiving enough that they're still not that difficult. At the highest ones, they can get pretty heart-attack inducing. I can't really argue whether the new system is better or worse. I mean, WoW's player base today is nowhere near what it was in its hey-day so that might speak for itself, but that could just be that the game and the MMO genre in general has completely stagnated since WoW was released, there's a lot more entertainment options available, and that, honestly, I think the game is kind of impenetrable for new players who are unfamiliar with MMOs. I do think Blizzard has at least tried to improve things, but I think new players would be completely lost and that the game has gone on so long that the story is just entirely phoned in because they've run out of ideas (Shadowlands, the worst expansion ever, was a ripoff of Infinity Wars where you had to collect the infinity stones, WHOOPS I MEAN, sigils, and the big bad at the end of the expansion literally was revealed to be a goddamn robot). Not that the original story was great, but it least it felt like they were trying to actually establish a cohesive world and narrative. I never did give fuck all about the story or lore, but I know a lot of people do and there's nothing to really rope them in. On the flipside, the game is more accessible to new players in that you're no longer basically required to join a guild to do most of the content. The group finder allows you to fairly effortlessly find groups for dungeons, raids, world content, etc, so there's that. It's probably more "pick up and play" now than "schedule a time for 4 friends or 39 people to be on so you can do anything." If you have no interest in M+ content or clearing heroic raid, unsubscribe now because you're going to be bored and utterly disappointed in the lack of challenge in all of the content below those difficulties. |
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Playing the new WoW by 09/20/2024, 10:48am PDT  I haven't done an instance yet, but this game is super super easy NT by 09/20/2024, 10:14pm PDT I heard the new WOW sucked but I wanted to give it a chance by 09/21/2024, 10:58am PDT Leveling and questing was deemphasized a long time ago. End-game content by 09/21/2024, 4:32pm PDT Thanks :) by 09/21/2024, 11:40pm PDT Oh yeah, did I mention it's a TV show by 09/21/2024, 11:03am PDT |
