World Of Warcraft: Legion

[buttongerald]

Greetings Citizens of Azeroth,

The release for the latest expansion for World of Warcraft is approaching fairly quickly. For those not sure of the date, it will release on the 30th of August, 2016. I am excited this time around for a new expansion. With Warlords of Draenor, the only real thing I was looking forward to was the new character models. This time around however there are a ton of features I am excited for.

Demon Hunters
At long last, a new hero class! Starting at near maximum level right out of the gate, Demon Hunters look to be a fun and unique class, with only 2 specializations. You have the tanking specialization, and the damage dealing specialization. Restricted to Night Elves for the Alliance, and Blood Elves for the Horde.

Artifact Weapons
Each specialization for each class will be getting its own artifact weapon. A weapon you earn early in the expansion, and will stay with you the entire journey. Having special ability trees as well as unique appearances that can all be unlocked by various means from PVE based content to PVP based content, they promise to be a unique take on our characters weapons.

The Broken Isles
Located to the south of Northrend, this new continent is where we will face the Legion head on. The zones look amazing, and utilize a new scaling system, so you can quest in any of them to level up to max level at 110.

Player Versus Player
There will be a new system in place for PVP combat. I have never been a big PVP person myself, but now that there are specific talents for PVP, plus a new prestige system, I am definitely going to try it out.

Class Order Halls
I really like this idea, and I hope Blizzard pull it off. I always wondered what it'd be like to be in an area with only other Priests, and now I finally will get to see this. I also hope they learned their lesson from the Garrison, and do not have us rely on the order hall as much as we did the garrison.


There is of course a ton more coming. New quests, raids, dungeons, pets, etc. etc.


Who else will playing or coming back for Legion? I've been thinking of heading to a new server to level some brand new characters between now and launch. Might even try to join a guild, as I have a more "normal" schedule for once.

We should use this as a discussion thread for the game going forward. I tried searching for a thread on the game, I got over a dozen pages back and nothing apart from a few questions and sale mentions came up.

Maybe we can share our Battle Tags as well, I will add mine when I get home from work.

See you in Azeroth!

 

[Plutonius]

I just left and I doubt I will be back.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Blizzard lost me at Cataclysm, due to all the hand holding.

 

[groove-agent]

Blizz lost me at Mists of Pandaria - patronizing me like a child with battle pets and cute little kung fu pandas. I agree with another poster - they make it too easy with the hand holding and spoon-feeding ... boring... oversimplified. I'm playing on a 3rd party Vanilla server (pre-expansions WoW) and am loving it (without the monthly subscription I might add). It's much more challenging, and you need to rely on most elements of the game (grouping with other players, professions) in order to survive. It's like the wild west - more risk, more rewards.

However I do appreciate the newer graphics and am quite curious about the performance of Metal under El Capitan.

Greetings Citizens of Azeroth,

The release for the latest expansion for World of Warcraft is approaching fairly quickly. For those not sure of the date, it will release on the 30th of August, 2016. I am excited this time around for a new expansion. With Warlords of Draenor, the only real thing I was looking forward to was the new character models. This time around however there are a ton of features I am excited for.

Demon Hunters
At long last, a new hero class! Starting at near maximum level right out of the gate, Demon Hunters look to be a fun and unique class, with only 2 specializations. You have the tanking specialization, and the damage dealing specialization. Restricted to Night Elves for the Alliance, and Blood Elves for the Horde.

Artifact Weapons
Each specialization for each class will be getting its own artifact weapon. A weapon you earn early in the expansion, and will stay with you the entire journey. Having special ability trees as well as unique appearances that can all be unlocked by various means from PVE based content to PVP based content, they promise to be a unique take on our characters weapons.

The Broken Isles
Located to the south of Northrend, this new continent is where we will face the Legion head on. The zones look amazing, and utilize a new scaling system, so you can quest in any of them to level up to max level at 110.

Player Versus Player
There will be a new system in place for PVP combat. I have never been a big PVP person myself, but now that there are specific talents for PVP, plus a new prestige system, I am definitely going to try it out.

Class Order Halls
I really like this idea, and I hope Blizzard pull it off. I always wondered what it'd be like to be in an area with only other Priests, and now I finally will get to see this. I also hope they learned their lesson from the Garrison, and do not have us rely on the order hall as much as we did the garrison.


There is of course a ton more coming. New quests, raids, dungeons, pets, etc. etc.


Who else will playing or coming back for Legion? I've been thinking of heading to a new server to level some brand new characters between now and launch. Might even try to join a guild, as I have a more "normal" schedule for once.

We should use this as a discussion thread for the game going forward. I tried searching for a thread on the game, I got over a dozen pages back and nothing apart from a few questions and sale mentions came up.

Maybe we can share our Battle Tags as well, I will add mine when I get home from work.

See you in Azeroth!

 

[MacAlien]

Basically you're just one of those who think Vanilla, if you ever played it originally was the bestest expansion is ever which most never did (TBC =/= Vanilla either). Vanilla was a god awful time that I and majority of those who played from the beginning were glad to be done with. The grinding, and more grinding. The bugged raids, the need for resist gear (hours and hours in Maraudon for AQ mats makes ones eyes bleed). It was fresh and new when it came out. People were playing things like EverQuest and such, which was already a grinding type of game so that aspect wasn't far fetched. Also, people claimed they felt like they were playing a cartoon then, too. You don't have to rely on grouping btw. Never did, minus one or two quests in EPL. I'll take modern wow, which doesn't force me to spend countless hours just traveling from one place to the next and pointlessly grinding mobs than ever repeating a Vanilla experience.


As I said, I started when the game was released. Actually started during the Alpha of it due to knowing the right people, but w/e. I raided every single zone from the beginning raid of MC/ZG clear up to SoO in MoP. I was there during the AQ gate openings and ending up in Stonetalon, along with hundreds of others...on a boat, trying to get to Silithus. I watched guilds implode when going from 40man raids to 25man. I've gotten 3 server first for leveling, as well as a slew for raids and such. I watched guilds fall apart during ToC and ICC. I wholly enjoyed my former guilds push through the first tier of MoP (BoT, To4W and Blackrock) and getting server first Sinestra, which was a buggy annoying encounter at best! I did like what they did in Cata, minus all the stupid cutscenes they threw in everywhere like a kid who just learned a new word and wants to use it in everything... To the person claiming hand holding, there really wasn't much of that. LFG wasn't introduced until DS. Prior to that, it wasn't the most casual friendly place. You leveled and then...I can't even think what people did without raiding as I don't recall much in the way of dailies, but was so long ago.

I went through MoP, really enjoyed most of it minus SoO to which is when my guild shut down and disbanded halfway through out of boredom. I've been around and have seen the game in pretty much every aspect if you want to question my experience. =P

LFG was a godsend for those who did not or could not raid. PvP will always be unbalanced, except maybe in Legion when they finally alter things like talents and spells when you PvP. Legions Class Halls will either be a hit or miss if they can clean them up. Classes are also currently in a bit of disaray. Artifact weapons will be a love/hate deal for everybody. The client for Macs needs to be optimized yet, and a lot of features they're adding for graphics... you can count them out if you're playing on a Mac. It's not going to be the most ideal setting for Apple computers this time around. But, there's another thread about the shortcomings happening nowadays so feel free to to go over there.

I'll neither endorse or complain about Legion until it goes Live. We'll see how that goes then.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

I don't see any reason to debate the relative virtues of vanilla vs current myself. It is okay for people to like what they like for whatever their reasons are.

Blizzard seems to now be seriously considering adding vanilla server(s) to accommodate those who'd like to return to the way things once were. This would not be the first game to provide that option to players. EverQuest has been doing it for years and with great success I might add. A lot of players really enjoy the original games, the challenge of them, the return to a life without the improvements and luxuries later added, etc.

I spent very little time in vanilla as my arrival was not long before TBC which I really loved. I've enjoyed the game ever since although I will say some expansions I've though better of than others. Even so, I have found things to enjoy in all of them myself. I was not too keen on the whole Pandas thing overall but it was okay. I still had fun but I'd rank it as worst expansion really second only to Cataclysm which I felt kinda sucked overall aside of the lower level stuff being fun to me. I did enjoy the quest series that was a take-off on Indiana Jones. That was fun.

I liked the last expansion a lot and enjoyed building up my garrison and the benefits it offered. I enjoyed the instances and the easy mode raids too. I think it was finally the first time I had a full set of purples on my main since I started play, filthy casual that I've become.

I made a little guy who is a mage especially for pvp and I am looking forward to that this time around along with everything else.

That's just my take though. On the whole i love the game, ups and downs and all. I thought the pet battles were dumb until I tried them and then I found I liked them actually. I always did like collecting rare pets and scored some really good ones with old EQ camping skills. I can be very patient when I want something, crazy as it is admittedly.

I am excited about the new expansion also. I have an army of alts of varying levels from little to high levels that I enjoy playing, gathering, crafting, goofing off fishing, questing, exploring, instance runs and rarely easy mode raiding because I am not up for committing to serious raiding anymore. I had my fill of that in EQ, loved every minute of it but one time through doing that was good for me.

As for vanilla, if they do roll out a vanilla server I'll make a toon there for sure. I did it on the EQ old world server when they first did it also. It was fun I thought. It was scary too. Death had real consequences in the old game. I literally felt afraid running naked to find and loot my corpse hoping nothing would kill me again along the way and cause me to lose even more XP. I lost levels in that game to stuff like that but it was truly part of the core experience, the reason you felt that sense of fear. You just don't get that with easy mode not that I mind that a lot of the time either these days. I consider both experiences to be fun in their own ways. For me though, there's no doubt about it, doing the hardcore is exciting stuff. You might die and if you do it's gonna hurt. That changes everything. WoW took that away even in vanilla but I'm sure it has its challenges just the same.
[doublepost=1465148086][/doublepost]By the way, I watched an interview with someone from Blizzard WoW development recently about the upcoming expansion and he talked about how they are aware they've neglected the leveling game for a long time and also made some mistakes there that have trivialized it along with causing people to out-level areas before they can even complete the quests in them. They are planning to work on this and up the difficulty for one thing and probably tone down the rate of XP gain as well I think he said. I think that's good both to make it more enjoyable to play though and to create better players by giving them some challenge as they level up. He said they want to balance that so it doesn't suck difficulty-wise but also so it isn't god-mode like it is now with almost zero chance of death for quite a while. That's really not very fun.

Anyone who is all about the end-game can easily enough bypass all this with an instant high level character for what I consider to be a pretty reasonable cost which also serves the purpose of keeping everybody under the sun from doing that resulting in tons upon tons of people playing classes they are clueless about. I think experienced players can manage to figure out a new class pretty well with a little time but it isn't a good idea to hand that out to new players who will then be a liability at first anyway to groups they join. Of course, that is still a problem currently anyway but I never saw it as a big one so not really a big deal. You just help people like that along if you have somebody good to work with.

 

[DevNull0]

I just left and I doubt I will be back.

I played literally from launch day and I finally quit early in Warlords after buying the collector's edition. The entire xpac felt like you had to do your chores in game before you were allowed to play. Garrison quests, those dailys you pick up for apyxis crystals, daily cooldowns on crafting, etc. I think blizzard let the freemium designers create the entire xpac. With 2 million gold in the bank, I can play for free for many, many years, and it still just isn't worth it.

They also completely destroyed the crafting system, which was a huge part of the game for me.

There have been a lot of changes over the years, many I didn't like, many I did. They game has become a lot more simplistic than it used to be. But it was consistently a fantastic game, up until chorelords of draenor.

I don't know if I'll be back. I've tried out the beta, it looks decent with a new emphasis on crafting out of the gate, but Warlords was such a huge turn off.

 

[Plutonius]

I played literally from launch day and I finally quit early in Warlords after buying the collector's edition. The entire xpac felt like you had to do your chores in game before you were allowed to play. Garrison quests, those dailys you pick up for apyxis crystals, daily cooldowns on crafting, etc. I think blizzard let the freemium designers create the entire xpac. With 2 million gold in the bank, I can play for free for many, many years, and it still just isn't worth it.

They also completely destroyed the crafting system, which was a huge part of the game for me.

There have been a lot of changes over the years, many I didn't like, many I did. They game has become a lot more simplistic than it used to be. But it was consistently a fantastic game, up until chorelords of draenor.

I don't know if I'll be back. I've tried out the beta, it looks decent with a new emphasis on crafting out of the gate, but Warlords was such a huge turn off.

I'm the same. I started 6 months after the game was originally released and played through the current expansion with one short break. I could also play a long time for free with the money I have in the bank but it just isn't worth it (i.e. no interest).

I also agree with all your complaints.

 

[wubsylol]

I've been in the Legion Beta (and Alpha) since one of the early invite waves and I'm pretty keen on what Blizzard are doing so far.

The scaling system kept levelling interesting; yes, I can totally understand people complaining about this, as it does slowdown kill times, but the opportunity for more varied max-level content is great. Whether this means long-term variation in content, or just the same 5 quests in each of the zones over and over remains to be seen.

The class changes really solidify the culling they've been working on for a while now. I think it keeps enough complexity in the rotation to prevent gameplay from becoming monotonous, however cuts back even further on the situational abilities you seldom use.

Crafting changes are great overall and obviously a huge improvement on the screwup that was Draenor-crafting.

Class halls are okay. I can see the Garrison comparison, but assumedly they'll remain on the sidelines. With that said, I didn't really have a problem with Garrisons.

People complained during Wrath that there were so few daily quests, so we got the Argent Tournament.

By Pandaria, people complained that there were too many dailies and they felt like chores, so Draenor introduced Apexis zones and people complained they wanted dailies again.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

I played literally from launch day and I finally quit early in Warlords after buying the collector's edition. The entire xpac felt like you had to do your chores in game before you were allowed to play. Garrison quests, those dailys you pick up for apyxis crystals, daily cooldowns on crafting, etc. I think blizzard let the freemium designers create the entire xpac. With 2 million gold in the bank, I can play for free for many, many years, and it still just isn't worth it.

They also completely destroyed the crafting system, which was a huge part of the game for me.

There have been a lot of changes over the years, many I didn't like, many I did. They game has become a lot more simplistic than it used to be. But it was consistently a fantastic game, up until chorelords of draenor.

I don't know if I'll be back. I've tried out the beta, it looks decent with a new emphasis on crafting out of the gate, but Warlords was such a huge turn off.

That was a very good post and I have to agree with your observations even though I said and I did like it. I think the reason why though is I would not let it become chorelords for me as I saw happen with a lot of people who burned out trying to run multiple garrisons, crafters, gearing multiple or even many high level toons, etc. I was the exact opposite. I screwed off doing whatever entertained me and just didn't do the grind. I did some of the dailies for crystals but just enough for a couple slots I wanted and I did not bother getting the highest level ones either. I'm not paying those kind of dues when I know very well that next expansion it all resets and is essentially worthless.

So, I built up a single garrison to the max and had fun messing with that and although I have multiple high level crafters as of the previous expansion I would not do it for this one. Instead, I rolled a new main just before it and leveled them up while the old main just did dailies for uber gear for the alt army to play in (I have a bunch of little ones too) and at launch he was gtg along with a few others who as of now sit at garrisons at the first quest to start them which they may or may not ever do. They probably will do whatever the minimum is to level whenever.

So that was how i had fun with that. I did what was a good time for me and stopped playing once i was done. Now I am coming back fresh for the new launch and I'll do whatever I feel like then. That's just me, a filthy casual who refuses to climb on the treadmill, at least for very long and finds other ways to have a good time. I find if you focus on one toon and do it up with them, maybe have some fun with others but make sure you never allow it to become a chore that works out pretty well.

I can easily see how doing even a second garrison, never mind more than that would have burnt me to a crispy critter and made me hate it. It is a shame how crafting got so screwed up. I was unhappy about that because I like it too. I hope they make it worthwhile again and doable without it being an unreasonable time sink for normal people who have lives outside of Azeroth - and I do play a lot but I am not living there. I think they need to tone down the design that is for people who do. They'd be better off also.

I forgot to mention, that new main was a druid and a gatherer because I had no intention of doing the crafting thing to mess up his life.

 

[DevNull0]

That was a very good post and I have to agree with your observations even though I said and I did like it. I think the reason why though is I would not let it become chorelords for me as I saw happen with a lot of people who burned out trying to run multiple garrisons, crafters, gearing multiple or even many high level toons, etc. I was the exact opposite. I screwed off doing whatever entertained me and just didn't do the grind. I did some of the dailies for crystals but just enough for a couple slots I wanted and I did not bother getting the highest level ones either. I'm not paying those kind of dues when I know very well that next expansion it all resets and is essentially worthless.

I also had several top level characters throughout all the expansions, so it was only natural that I did start on a second garrison. I burned out before I finished it though.

Your way is definitely better but that just shows how little the content is worth the effort. Everything was just such a grind. I never finished the auction machine (why does it have to be such a an epic amount of work to get that when I have a hearthstone and a garrison stone so the auction house is only a few seconds away?). I never unlocked all the ships for the shipyard. I didn't even attempt the garrison music system, I just said no way as soon as I saw the quest. Again, a major grind to unlock a minor distraction in the game. I feel like I barely did anything this time around and yet it's the first time I really felt burnt out by it.

I really think they were trying to make a freemium game with horrible tedious grinds and then forgot to add the part where you can just pay cash to speed it up.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

I also had several top level characters throughout all the expansions, so it was only natural that I did start on a second garrison. I burned out before I finished it though.

Your way is definitely better but that just shows how little the content is worth the effort. Everything was just such a grind. I never finished the auction machine (why does it have to be such a an epic amount of work to get that when I have a hearthstone and a garrison stone so the auction house is only a few seconds away?). I never unlocked all the ships for the shipyard. I didn't even attempt the garrison music system, I just said no way as soon as I saw the quest. Again, a major grind to unlock a minor distraction in the game. I feel like I barely did anything this time around and yet it's the first time I really felt burnt out by it.

I really think they were trying to make a freemium game with horrible tedious grinds and then forgot to add the part where you can just pay cash to speed it up.

I have to agree completely again here too. I bailed before the ships and the music thing is news to me so I'd bailed before that as well. I too was irritated by the ridiculous grind for the auction machine and simply decided to forgo that but I was not happy about it.

My greatest criticism of the expansion from the outset was that you could not build up a single garrison and then have all of your other characters benefit from it. This would have required enabling players to fully build out everything available for garrisons within one garrison so that for each character's crafting, etc. they could capitalize on the features appropriate to them but that ran counter to the design and its many time sinks. How that much stuff to do coupled with ideally more content out in the world would not have been enough to keep people busy for 10 to 20 hours a week along with everything else that game offers plus alts is beyond me. Do people really need to live there and does Blizzard really need to cater to this group at the expense of potentially many more players if they didn't? No company seems willing to find out about this except perhaps for ArenaNet with Guild Wars 2 and they certainly have done well for themselves two games in a row now for many years. Maybe their profits are not in the same league as the time sink subscription and freemium games out there. I have never bothered to look into that.

To some extent I blame the players who play these games in a way that gets into pathology as well as the companies that cater to them by erecting all sorts of barriers to gate their progress because otherwise they'd chew though an entire expansion worth of content in short order and leave. The side effect of this of course is that many other players either leave because they burn out and have lives outside the game or never even begin because of the reputation these games as a whole have developed for being grinds that are not fun to play. Mindless, boring dailies come to mind here as a classic example of providing a poor quality experience just to keep people busily running on a treadmill with a carrot out in front of them that requires a lot of running to finally gain possession of and this carrot is usually nothing more than some item that will be worthless at the next expansion reset. That is a lot of hours of human life flushed down the toilet and the hopelessly addicted seem unable to resist this. Even people who do not have issues can easily fall prey to this for a time until they burn out and give up on the game or that particular goal in it. There is something terribly wrong with that picture. That is no longer game or entertainment development. It has become something else, something that is not good.

If companies like Blizzard stopped catering to people who literally move in to these virtual worlds and spend inordinate amounts of time in them the quality of the game experience would improve tremendously. This problem first became evident in a big way when EverQuest launched and the developers were astonished at how rapidly users got to level cap in what was a very time consuming process with plenty of content for people who would play a sane amount of hours per week. The problem was many would login for very long periods of time every single day and burn through the content far faster than they'd anticipated. That problem has persisted in MMOs ever since and the ways companies have attempted to cope with it have brought us to where we are today with all the repetitive content and grind because nobody can afford to satisfy these people for 15 bucks a month in a world where players complain if freemium is not really free. They actually want an MMO to be free for real and seem surprised to find out that of course none of them are if you want to have any hope of enjoying them.

Something I have always liked about World of Warcraft in the past was how alt friendly the game had been up until this last expansion overall. When I say that though I am operating on the assumption that one does not even attempt to gear out all the alts and run on the various treadmills with them aside of crafting if that was more reasonable to do time wise but it hasn't been for some time now preceding this expansion unfortunately. Once they introduced the garrison feature with the requirement that each crafting alt would need to go through that whole thing just to level crafting it became untenable for people with lives outside of the game which I sure hope is most people. Maybe it isn't among players but I hope it is.

Blizzard does a lot of things right in my opinion but they keep failing to take it to the next level with WoW and dare to be different with bold moves to make an MMO for mere mortals that keeps everything fun and ditches everything that sucks. I'm sure Guild Wars is not perfect either but looking at their way of doing things and taking what is best from it might be a good start.

With the end of this expansion I think one thing they need to do it if isn't already built in, is to allow players with alts to pretty much short-circuit the entire garrison thing while still being able to level their crafting at a reasonable pace and gathering/resource availability needs work to support that. Whether that happens or not in some way I don't know but it is going to be a problem for people with multiple crafters if it does not. Maybe it is time to allow mains to craft everything for themselves and their respective crew of alts but this of course requires completely rethinking time sinks by giving up a big one to players. Even the mighty time sink EverQuest with its thousands of Alternate Advancement points to earn via XP gained out in the world killing stuff (so mini levels basically if you never played it) allowed one character to do it all for crafting and that was still plenty time consuming. Faults and all it was at least in that way a lot better than WoW. When I came to WoW from years of EQ, I was surprised and not so pleased that I had have this, that and the other alt just to craft stuff and I had to level them to do it instead of having a main who could provide useful stuff for them as they could use it and all of it would have taken less time making it considerably more doable and even fun hopefully. Splitting this out was just another creative way of slowing people down who have problems that game designs should not be trying to address in my own opinion. Those folks need therapy, not games that exacerbate their problem.

It's hard to say but I like to think MMOs could be vastly improved by the kind of changes in general I'm talking about here, not just WoW. It is disconcerting to see the game evolving towards freemium with the design decisions they make. I note that whenever I take a break, they always ask if money was the issue among other things. I always say no and tell them time was. So far, I must not have enough company in telling them that. It is only a matter of time if things do not change and realistically I doubt that they will very much before the numbers slowly decline to the point where the switch to freemium happens. WoW cannot command 15 bucks a month forever and it shows as the user base shrinks just as it does with every MMO as people burn out on games which by their poor designs burn them out.

That was all pretty negative but the bright side is nobody has to play the way I talked about here. One can make their own choices in a theme park like WoW enjoying whatever they find fun and bailing out when they've exhausted that until another expansion comes along. I think I have a lot of company in doing this as I see within my own guild that numbers really die down halfway into an expansion's life and then everybody comes back when a new one launches.

 

[MacAlien]

You had a portal that took a minute to the Auction House. Robot AH in the Garrison was optional at best.

I disagree, WoD turned into the more alt-friendly expansion to date. It was certainly easier to gear them up, as well as level professions. You had to take 5 minutes to open the Garrison, then turn in a profession quest item, retrieve one or two things and that provided all the recipes (which you can level with 0) as well as your level 1 profession building. Mats, well that's always been a grind alt or no alt in every expansion dating clear back to MC. The difference is, and this began in MoP were the BoP crafted items. Though they've always existed. In fact, you could bypass all this with one of the very first quest you get in your garrison sending you to Stormshield where every profession trainer can train you to your hearts content. Pretty sure that's how I leveled any professions any of my alts had. Think one looted an engineering item and never even turned it in. And it took all of like 20 minutes to max it out... And max recipes, much like every other expansion are held behind a daily cd. Which is better than previously when they were always behind rep grinds which were behind dailies... So, I don't know what you're on about how it's difficult to level a profession on alts. >.<

It wasn't the silly AH or some ruse about the expansion being alt-unfriendly. There were a lot more reasons to why WoD turned out so bad, and hilariously enough players requested most of what you do and do not see in WoD. Same with Legion, which is why I'm going to wait and watch what happens when it goes Live before passing judgment.

No, they made the expansion too casual unfriendly for the majority of players and casual non-raiders are the majority of their player base. It is silly when you can gear up better in Taanan Jungle than doing LFR, which has never been the case before, let's not start on how ill conceived it was they made LFR gear so bad and dumbed it down to the point a monkey would get bored. PvP was a train wreck at best with the failed Ashran BG that took hours to in queue to even get in (alleviated by a recent change allowing players to queue as opposing faction). The only player base who were happy with WoD were raiders since regular non-LFR raids were put together well. And let's forget the sheer lack of content for anything other than raiding is phenomenally stupid on Blizz, but again players didn't want dailies or rep grinds (Current reps were literally a last minutes addition).

Especially the current expansion, the main reasons people quit is boredom or not enough time to do what they want so they get frustrated and quit. WoW is going on 11 years now. It's quite long in the tooth especially since the MMO genre isn't flourishing as much as it did 10 years ago, even 5 years ago. Better games out there with better graphics and such. This was the first expansion I quit for the majority part of last year from being bored and tired. Bad design all around. I've not bothered to log in for the last month. It's end of the expansion, so there's never much reasons to log in no matter your play style. We shall see how Legion is.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

You had a portal that took a minute to the Auction House. Robot AH in the Garrison was optional at best.

I disagree, WoD turned into the more alt-friendly expansion to date...

Well, you can say that about anything in the game. Everything in WoW is optional. I do not see that as any reason or excuse to make any optional activity suck and a lot of people felt the activity in question there sucked, myself included.

I'll just agree to disagree with you on how alt-friendly or unfriendly we want to view this past expansion. I don't consider running multiple garrisons to do crafting and having to check in and do what feels like chores in each one to have been all that friendly for running multiple characters at least in that respect. I know you are right and I agree with you on other counts you note where improvements were made so I'll concede it was in some ways a mixed bag. For my own play style though it turned into more hassle than I felt it was worth and thus my departure after primarily focusing on a new main who did not craft at all. He just gathered mats and banked them for the others to use at some future time.

For the first time since i started playing the game I also didn't bother playing what I call the AH game and I imagine others do too. I used to make a lot of cash that way but I couldn't be bothered this last time around in no small part due to a variety of changes over time not worth going on about. In other words I am sure you can still make money but I could not be bothered with doing it. Money is WoW is optional too like everything else. That's actually good in my opinion.

I did like the expansion despite my critique of what I felt was wrong in it. I just wanted to acknowledge someone else's well taken criticism and then some I guess because I felt they had good points even though on the whole I found plenty to like anyway myself. I find that a good thing about WoW. Depending on someone's play style and the flexibility of that, there are so many options and things to do that you can skip stuff you don't like and still have a great time. I did.

In any event, having to run a bunch of characters through garrison building and all that went with that was more than I was up for and I was hardly alone in that. A lot of my guild mates departed on account of that but like me they will be back now for the new stuff. It's a cycle we go though. I've been in this guild for near a decade now. We're not going anywhere by any means but a lot of us take breaks or move between games when either boredom, burnout or both strike.

Lastly, I think MMOs are doing pretty well overall. They don't have to be blockbuster hits to make decent profits and stay in business which is why there is an abundance of them and also why even Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and even Asheron's Call still have servers up and running. There's no question WoW will keep bleeding users until it goes free to play at some point but the game is going to be around for another decade easily and probably beyond.

 

[antonis]

I've always thought (and still do) that garrisons were a very bad idea for an MMO game; especially on one with such a big social side. Isolating each player in an instance where only the slightest and most restricted cooperation is allowed. Making the player worry about the garrison's daily micromanagement needs instead of forcing him to go out to the open world and interact with NPCs and players on the maximum possible degree (where the most unpredictable - hence the most interesting - things can happen). Nope, not good.

Flatting out and oversimplify the classes, the gear, the skills and all this hand-holding guidance didn't work for me, either. After a certain point, it looked like game's target group average age went down by a significant degree.

There was also another thing I've noticed on the WoD. Blizzard's cinematics quality took a dive, and cinematics has always been a trademark for blizzard. Although not a deciding factor whether leaving or staying, this alone says a lot.

 

[joemod]

I stopped playing WoW nearly two and half years ago. Recently I got the opportunity to play Warlords for a week and find out whether the leveling hype was justified. I managed to reach a character to 100 and I think that I have just grown old and my tastes have changed. Also I think that since I am already playing Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch plus Diablo waiting in the background, I can't justify paying the monthly subscription. It will feel more like an obligation than fun.

 

[asoksevil]

I've tried giving WoW a couple of shots but it just doesn't click on me... while Guild Wars 2 did it right away. The game is actually fun to level, discover and interact. GW2 is free to play and has a Mac client (although a poor one but development for a native client is underway).

 

[Khalanad75]

I pre-ordered and am looking forward to it.

With the garrisons, it honestly should have been one per account per server per faction. All your alliance or horde alts all work on the same garrison.

So anyone who has looked at the alpha, what if any changes to healing are coming? I have always been a healer at heart, even played a healing pali in vanilla (that was pure torture,) but I know each expansion some dev states, "we think healers have it too easy so they need to work harder" and then just throw random damage in all the dungeons. Am I going to hate it to start the expansion on my Disc Priest?

 

[Dirtyharry50]

I've been having such a good time this past week as I've checked in with my guild, visited with each member of the alt army, got back up to speed a bit with my Feral Druid and other stuff. I ran some classic low level dungeons with my little Monk and had fun at that. Whenever I take a break and come back, everything old is new again and I really get immersed in the world and the huge number of things available to do.

I bought the expansion and decided to boost my Enhancement Shaman alt to 100. Catching a free ride from level 60 to 100 will be nice and getting engineering 700 to go with it will be sweet also. The mining is easy to level up in the new expansions. Just mining in his garrison daily for the next two months will take care of that.

 

[buttongerald]

I've been catching up on my Priest for the time being. For Legion I hope to have a few max level characters. I'm on track with that now. Hopefully we get an XP Boost Week like we did prior to the launch of Warlords.

 

[MacAlien]

I've been catching up on my Priest for the time being. For Legion I hope to have a few max level characters. I'm on track with that now. Hopefully we get an XP Boost Week like we did prior to the launch of Warlords.

I was so confused by this but then realized, you're talking about how when you pre-ordered WoD you could boost a toon to level 90, cause they've never had an xp boost week in the 10-11 years of the game. If you pre-order Legion, you can 'boost' one of your toons to 100.

 

[buttongerald]

I was so confused by this but then realized, you're talking about how when you pre-ordered WoD you could boost a toon to level 90, cause they've never had an xp boost week in the 10-11 years of the game. If you pre-order Legion, you can 'boost' one of your toons to 100.

No, I'm fully aware of the character boosts.

I could have sworn we had a week prior to Warlords launch where there was a buff that increased the XP we gained on top of the other items we have. Then again, I could be remembering the old Darkmoon buff, because I haven't gone to that place since the launch of Warlords.

 

[MacAlien]

I'm 100% positive there's never been a +xp type week one finds in other games. They've never done such thing. Dunno if Pilgrim's Bounty was before, but could've just been the DM faire stuff.

 

[Huntn]

I just left and I doubt I will be back.

WoW is without doubt one of the greatest games ever created, but for myself the BTDT factor is just too strong, while acknowledging that repetition exists in all games to varying degrees. Kill X, Collect X, Escort, played from beta, every expansion with breaks through Mists, but did not finish that one.

 

[Number-Six]

No, I'm fully aware of the character boosts.

I could have sworn we had a week prior to Warlords launch where there was a buff that increased the XP we gained on top of the other items we have. Then again, I could be remembering the old Darkmoon buff, because I haven't gone to that place since the launch of Warlords.

There is also the Midsummer Fire Festival which offers XP boosts for 1h at a time when dancing around festival poles

But that is at the end of June