World of Warcraft: Current Year

Aazrael said:

So he wants ffxiv ultimate raids? Seems the boi is cheating on wow!

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My guess is that he heard about Ultimates in FFXIV. I guess nobody explained to him that they are multiple tightly tuned bosses back to back, and that it takes around 15 minutes in total. Wipe once and you start again at the beginning.

Chris said:

Start with something from Cataclysm (keep first two expansions for Classic), scaled to lv60 with meaningful item level loot.

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You stumbled over the root of problem without realizing it, and I believe it's similar to my "interesting times" theory:

The old game developers at Blizzard have been replaced by fresh out of college kids, easily swayed by the Blizzard reputation to work for little money. But they are hungry to make a career and a reputation for themselves. They want to be the next rock stars. So they have all those "great" ideas for the game and want to implement them.

They don't want to readjust the loot, especially the items those boomer developers created a decade ago, which aren't even at the company anymore. Since then the overall gearing, stats and item strategy has changed multiple times, so you would have to "reinvent" all those items to make them meaningful and not break things.

And even if the old developers were still around, they wouldn't want to touch those old items, either. Because players have fond memories about them, especially those old school set bonuses and tier sets. Those changed the way how classes played, and that doesn't fit the borrowed power system of the month.

This is not "an easy win", but if they invested time and resources into it, then it would show a lot of goodwill to the players. It would also be the first time in a long time that they would acknowledge in some way that they remember the roots of the franchise--even if that is what the fans crave. And that would be a really hard and sour pill to swallow for them.

EDIT: missing words, I am tired

"In terms of the day-to-day player experience, the advantages of a rigid division between Covenants have diminished since Shadowlands launched, while the downsides (feeling disadvantaged in certain types of content, or having to choose between mechanical advantages and aesthetics) have only grown"

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I can already tell from the statement they are still high on their own kool-aid.

What would the "the advantages of a rigid division between Covenants" exactly be? That you could split your players into 4 segments, so they can have the illusion of "meaningful choice"? To have four sides of the story, so players would have to level 4 characters to experience it all?

Also the "the downsides (feeling disadvantaged in certain types of content, or having to choose between mechanical advantages and aesthetics)" were all brought up during beta, and they promised AGAIN that they would balance covenants. That hasn't worked out for how many expansions now?

Mist said:

There should always be some extra challenge to work towards

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Hot take: Warforging/Titanforging was something to work towards, even in its pure RNG form.

Now that you are all angry, I have your attention, and the bad joke is out of the way, let me explain a bit: The problem with WoW is it's underlying long-term gearing strategy. As in: there is none.

You don't have to invest time to make your character better in preparation for the next raid tier, as the next tier makes all your gear irrelevant overnight. So you just bang your head against the current raid tier as hard as possible. This is how the world first race looks from the outside.

This is all made worse by the fact that WoW relies on dps/gear checks to increase the difficulty.

Lunis said:

I'm wondering if maybe Ion is no longer the lead dev? That blue post basically says 'Ion was wrong about everything'.

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We theorized not long ago that Cory Stockton/Mumper was going to be the next game lead for WoW after he changed his role in his Twitter bio, but after "the lawsuit" he's has been put on leave.

Mist said:

It really doesn't, actually. One could even say that it doesn't rely on gear checks enough.

All of the content is beatable week 1 or week 2 without all the catchup gear, extra renown levels, corruption resistance, or whatever other soft barriers exist.

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Haven't you paid attention to the world first races recently? When the guilds looked for simps fans to funnel them gear, when raiders were benched because they couldn't get enough domination sockets (and the matching gems) for it?

Sure the content is beatable week 1 or 2, but only if you have sponsors and get hundreds of million in WoW gold for BoE epics, raw materials, and the character transfers to ship them around.

I am not kidding: