World of Warcraft: Current Year

Itzena_sl said:

You should ask him about how he'd design it. His plans are very...entertaining.

Click to expand...

You're the biggest WOW defender on these boards. I can't imagine you think dungeons are actually fun outside the encounters that you get to do. Like I said there is so much room to put other interesting activities inside dungeons and give you room to build off them over time.

Here's another entertaining idea for you: Why not take the Garrison technology and put it in a raid? So you still have a raid zone that you can have fun progressing through encounters, but during the time you're not scheduled to raid, you're team/guild/pug is still in there doing Garrison or AQ-event like stuff to help progress through the raid. I won't spend time thinking of actual things you can be doing, but building things, doing quests, doing RTS-like stuff could be fun. Essentially the same daily quests/gathering/whatever you do on a normal basis, but it's not progression based inside a raid/dungeon.

Then the raid resets until you kill the last boss, and then you go up a level in difficulty (like Diablo3's Torment levels). During progression, you still can pop events/quests for groups/raids that reward normal raid drops which replaces your weekly farming runs to keep gearing up.

I'm sure you can even scale it so you can do it solo for the casuals. I'm sure you can even LFR it up too. Shrug.

Point is, Blizzard is still king in MMOville, I'm just disappointed they haven't tried anything more interesting on the dungeon/raid front, and have gone down the road with just simplifying things more and more as time goes on.

Slaythe_sl said:

Shit. People couldn't jump over that one ledge in Wailing Caverns way back at the start of the game.

Click to expand...

The sheer amount of QQ about fucktards failing that jump has always been entertaining.

Though beta/vanilla it was pretty much a given that some fool (usually someones gf or wife) would fail that fucking jump at least half a dozen times.

Slaythe_sl said:

Shit. People couldn't jump over that one ledge in Wailing Caverns way back at the start of the game.

Click to expand...

Hehe that ledge still exists and there amusingly enough they added a fail rope so as long as one person clicks it it throws a rope from the upper ledge to the lower one that can be clicked on to get to the top ledge for the leaping impaired.

Dandai_sl said:

They're not going to make huge departures from their previous 11 years of design because there's yet to be an MMO that's tried that and not lost a majority of their users (perhaps most notably, Star Wars Galaxies' "NGE"). I appreciate that you're bored with WoW and would like it to be the best it can be. Maybe we'll get one offs where they experiment with some of the ideas you've outlined, but I wouldn't bet on it.

By the way, trash is for pacing. Sure, there's other ways to throttle the pace, and a little variety would be nice. However, unless they added in some dungeons where they taught you the easiest version of the mechanic and then ramped up the mastery requirement, it's likely to be universally hated. For example, there have been a few bosses in the last few raid tiers where there's a vehicle mechanic that is unintuitive and requires practice that you can only get by doing the encounter... and, for the most part, they suck.

As far as jump puzzles, that sounds extremely frustrating for a dungeon, and very case-by-case (ie somewhat unpredictable) for pacing. The examples you gave (I don't know about GW2) were all single player experiences right? Imagine waiting at the next boss for five minutes because Dumar's old ass keeps failing the final jump and you need him to heal the group.

Click to expand...

I'll give you the 1,2,3:
1) I'm not calling for any more of a departure than adding in Garrisons or Archaeology or LFR or anything else like that. It's not significantly altering the style of play on any level close to NGE. To say so is disingenuous. I'm just looking for something different and interesting outside of hallway boss hallway boss design. I wouldn't expect a radical change from Blizzard, but like you said some experiments and small changes would be interesting to see.

2) Vehicle encounters do suck only because it takes you of your character and gives you 4 buttons. It's dumb. I have no problem with that statement. You can't, however, say just because one kind of gimmick is dumb that means anything else that could be different is shit too.

3) Jump puzzles are just an example of content some people like (and some people hate) that is different types of gameplay. Personally I wouldn't add shitty jump puzzles in games where you need 20 people to do it to progress and force everyone else to wait around and laugh. That's usually for smaller/solo group stuff in any case. I only brought it up to show you that there are different ways to do things.

Dungeons and raids are fine the way they are. Maybe they could bring back the sprawling BRD style dungeons, but not as a replacement for the current style of dungeon. Make it non-instanced and put Timeless Isle events and rares in it, but with a clear, main progression to an end point instead of just a bunch of random shit in every direction. Hell I could see them just revamping BRD itself into exactly that. There are tons of side areas, rares, bosses, and mini-events off the main path in there.

My biggest disappointment in WoD is from the garrison 'army' that you supposedly mustered to battle the Iron Horde. You never get to see them in action. How the fuck did they not end the garrison campaign with a solo scenario where you fight alongside your followers in a mini flex raid? The only similar implementation of actually using your followers, bodyguards, is so lame they shouldn't have even put it in as is. You only get to choose from 5 followers, they don't scale with their gear, 90% of them absolutely SUCK at their role, and to unlock their only real use you have to slog through the worst grind in this expansion. (except for fishing)

DavivMcD_sl said:

Dungeons and raids are fine the way they are. Maybe they could bring back the sprawling BRD style dungeons, but not as a replacement for the current style of dungeon. Make it non-instanced and put Timeless Isle events and rares in it, but with a clear, main progression to an end point instead of just a bunch of random shit in every direction. Hell I could see them just revamping BRD itself into exactly that. There are tons of side areas, rares, bosses, and mini-events off the main path in there.

My biggest disappointment in WoD is from the garrison 'army' that you supposedly mustered to battle the Iron Horde. You never get to see them in action. How the fuck did they not end the garrison campaign with a solo scenario where you fight alongside your followers in a mini flex raid? The only similar implementation of actually using your followers, bodyguards, is so lame they shouldn't have even put it in as is. You only get to choose from 5 followers, they don't scale with their gear, 90% of them absolutely SUCK at their role, and to unlock their only real use you have to slog through the worst grind in this expansion. (except for fishing)

Click to expand...

I like your idea of making non instanced dungeons/areas like Timeless Isles/Jungle. They probably should get rid of quest style leveling and just give people a progression path through that kind of gameplay. WOW meets GW2? That's bringing a new kind of gameplay into a very old game. I think even Blizzard has the metrics to say the Isle/Jungle "catchup" mechanic is more popular that running shitty 5 man dungeons over and over for loot. Combining the two ideas is a good one imo.

The reasons why nobody runs WoD dungeons isn't because they're inherently bad, it's because the rewardssuck. Even when the expansion launched you ran them once or twice and then didn't need them after that, now you just run to Tanaan and stock up on Baleful gear instead.

Rewards is the key, even in mop you had a reason to run an occasional dungeon even if it was just for valor cap so that you could upgrade your item level on your epic gear.

They really do need to give more than 1 or 2 reasons for running dungeons, rep helps but its not the be all end all. For example, Make some of the better gear drop from a triggered dungeon or i dont know make a dungeon where you race against another group and whoever kills the last boss first gets better rewards.

Blizzard for whatever reason thinks its a good idea to just dumb down the game and its dungeons over and over again, the excuse is so that they can keep their casuals. This excuse doesnt really hold water anymore though as its driving even the casuals away, as their subs have shown, from dungeons and the game in general.

Dandai_sl said:

However, unless they added in some dungeons where they taught you the easiest version of the mechanic and then ramped up the mastery requirement, it's likely to be universally hated. For example, there have been a few bosses in the last few raid tiers where there's a vehicle mechanic that is unintuitive and requires practice that you can only get by doing the encounter... and, for the most part, they suck.

Click to expand...

Until Socrethar this tier, I can't think of any until going back 4 tiers to the Klaxxi raid. They really haven't used it that often.

Going to level a toon from level 1 this weekend on Mal'Ganis, chain dungeons. If anybody is interested in joining, shoot me a PM.

Foggy_sl said:

Going to level a toon from level 1 this weekend on Mal'Ganis, chain dungeons. If anybody is interested in joining, shoot me a PM.

Click to expand...

I've thought about doing this on a fresh server, like an RP server, but I already have a 100 of every class and I just can't get myself to decide what I would level again.

My wife likes to play low level priests in BG's, so she'll create toons on RP servers and it's hilarious how nuts people go after they look up her alts. She gets all kinds of people trying to get her to server transfer and shit, it's pretty funny.

Draegan_sl said:

Why do people do jumping puzzles in GW2? Most of the time people are doing them to either be completionists or just love doing them.

Click to expand...

People do them once for achievements/fun, twice if they are showing someone else, and daily if they are serious (re: crazy) about getting a precursor. Nobody, ever, runs through jumping puzzles without looting that final chest.

Draegan_sl said:

Blizzard should have enough brain power to think of something more to do other than pushing through a hallway to get to the next encounter right? If the attraction is the boss fights, why hasn't Blizzard just cut out all the art and building for dungeons/raids ... Why not just repeating encounters? Why else build these huge zones just to house encounters.

Click to expand...

They DID do this! The Coliseum in WoTLK, and look how well that turned out for them? The most hated raid zone of the entire xpac and the one thing that nobody talks about, or even remembers when we talk about how good Wrath was. It's always Ulduar -> ???? -> ICC. Now, think about it for awhile, I mean, really think about it, and then tell me why the player base didn't like it. There's no trash! there's no hallways! there's nothing but boss fight after boss fight and loot chests at the end of it.