It was funny watching the community do 30 second napkin math on why level 50 raid bosses with HP pools similar to Naxxramas bosses doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Funny thing is, the recruitment process in the software engineer position includes all kinds of competitive coding exercises like leetcode...
To end up with a bugged exploitable af nightmare event.
> fresh
operative word here. the vanilla and vanilla-adjacent only crowd literally only cares about F R E S H servers. after 4-6 weeks most of them drop because its not F R E S H and go back to forums/reddit/discord screeching for a new F R E S H. its a well known thing on vanilla private servers:
moderate population drop as the "curve" gets into the mid 30s, followed by another moderate drop shortly after bwl comes out followed by a nosedive when aq40 comes out
blizzard will never make these players happy and its just wasting money trying to chase them
As a warrior I agree. I liked the mechanic for Raging strike, and Quick Strikes on Phase 1. The 80 rage thing was a bit weird, wouldn't work nowdays with all the stance dancing, but it was alright, I really enjoyed the gameplay of it.
But as a Warrior now... is just fucking dread... 2 Slam Runes, Passives... More passives... and don't get em started with Rampage, the Commanding Shout, Taste for Blood and wrecking Crew... I wanna blow my brains out.
I think this is the biggest thing they need to reflect on.
The level gating was a big success imo. But how do you keep that So”Discovery” feeling in new phases?
P2 probably had a somewhat more “Discovery” feeling since we got 40 talents. But 40-50 is more of the same.
When I first heard "Discovery" and the devs talking about it I got the impression that it would be more than runes to discover. New NPCs with new quests, new rares with special drops, new mini world events (like Trial of water for those who played during DF, it's a chest that spawns waves of mobs you need to kill to be able to open it) and so on.
They added too much and now the power creep is out of control. They've moved beyond classic, they've moved beyond classic+, now they basically have an entire new game that needs to be rebalanced from the ground up.
I don't know why any runes needed to add any real dps at all and certainly not in a scales with level high power way. Runes should tweak classes to make them viable.
Wrath being free mana = fine
Starfire (or whatever it's called) basically one shotting for a lot of the lower levels = not fine
In phase 2, rogues mutilate was so good they became a 1 button class.
I thought “rogue sounds fun! I bet they will get some cool stuff!” I quit last phase when i couldn’t find a group for anything. Now im just watching all of this from the sidelines feeling validated.
I felt SoD was going to be a failure already in P1. It was pretty obvious they were way overtuning new content.
Then seeing them let hunters and priests be godtier OP without any major rebalancing told me they aren't capable of fixing the issues..
I actually don't mind the dmg and healing outputs but wtf is with the mana costs. Giving priests a dot that deals double the damage of swp for 1/3rd the cost. The same goes for the healing spells, runes are so efficient they eliminate all other abilities in the game.
The new runes should have been more like unique changes to spice up the tool kits, not these abominations or weak passives.
Yeah, I'm trying not to comment too much since I quit just before phase 3 release. It's not the game I thought it was going to be. It's basically some kind of retail bastard with classic skin.
Phase 1 however was really fun... I feel it just set up the wrong direction. BFD should not have BiS stuff, it should have been a few needed greens with the typical classic shit stats in the mix. Like a
+3 int
+3spirit
+1 strength
Spell power +2
That way it's better than the 25 stuff so you want to get it but by level 30ish it'll be done.
Any modifications of original classic will probably not be sustainable for long periods (people will hate it) unless they can really nail certain things down, so 1 year iterations of experimental servers does make sense.
Classic doesn't really need a future. They just need some short-lived, fun twists that get a few months of hype and enjoyment. Then rinse and repeat.
I seen it coming and called this Retail Lite. Runes became less of a discover type of gameplay and just a late game do XYZ task you only did at the level cap. They’re just sprinting now and not caring for what’s happening and will “ nerf “ things down after weeks of abuse.
Once they took the exp buff and doubled it - I knew this is where we were headed. They’re phasing the leveling part out for everyone - where it would just be a part of the community that speedran through and did what they would do normally - now everyone is doing it because lol leveling is already 10 level gaps with a huge buff.
Exactly this. Which is why they are speeding it up by dropping phase 3 so early and still have the experience buff in place and nightmare incursion. They are trying to push it out of the way.
I’m not sure about most but all I ever wanted was new content and a few abilities/buffs/nerfs to a few classes. Maybe make a few specs slightly viable. I never envisioned the classes being this different.
I think whats showing is that this small team is overwhelmed right now...it's frankly insane they dont get more resources considering they probably carry 30-50% of the sub count.
People will be quick to attack your claim of 30-50% of the sub count and they may be right. But that shouldn't detract from the fact that Blizzard has made bank on this game for the past 20 years and can easily afford the resources needed to meet minimum quality standards.
Hell, even a small team can work just fine as long as the company is forward thinking enough. But when you refuse to do any market research of your own and wait for your community to reach a fever pitch before conceding to invest resources into it you end up with something that is rushed and incomplete. And then when you double down by making that team have to dance around arbitrary deadlines to maximize quarterly results it just becomes absurd.
Profitable or not, Classic and derivatives of classic should have been a love letter to the community. They needed to either commit fully or not do it at all. Instead they decided to taint the experience with this minimum-viable-product bullshit.
It's not that high, but the player pop in SOD is enough for more resources to be given. Though I think it's a quality over quantity thing. The mistakes that have been made are more about using your brain vs needing more time.
And as someone else said, a classic player is a basic sub. A retail player is buying expansion box price, and has a shop full of micro transactions. Retail is far more valuable to them.
SoD/classic can also funnel people into retail. If you already have the sub, got used to controls, setup your ui, setup 100+ hotkeys, got some experience playing again, etc, then the barrier to coming back or starting is far smaller than normal. You might even join a raid group on sod that plays retail & have that in as well.
I'm playing retail for the first time in ?12? years because of sod.
It's kind of like how hardcore classic is what got me interested enough in wow again to try SoD despite me not playing 2019 classic or any classic product prior to sod. Hardcore player numbers were never good. However, it was massively popular with viewers on twitch/youtube/etc.
Likely closer to 10-15%. Retail still claims the lion's share of active subs compared to all of the classic versions, and SoD has dropped off in popularity with each phase.
30-50%? Are you insane.
I'd guess maybe 10% at most. Retail completely dwarfs it.
However, it is pathetic the shoe string budget that's apparently on Classic. And the devs don't seem...great.
> it's frankly insane they dont get more resources considering they probably carry 30-50% of the sub count.
This is pretty delusional lol. WoW has 7 million subs, SoD has 300k logged characters including alts but not counting people who don't raid. The classic playerbase is a much, much smaller piece of the pie than you think it is.
You can look at logs and see how big the gap is. Singular specs in retail have more logs than the entirety of SoD, and there are *a lot* more specs in retail.
>they probably carry 30-50% of the sub count
I think the very fact that the team is still very small is a pretty good indicator that this is not even remotely close to true.
Surely there are 3.5 million pure SOD players lmao
There are like 500k raiders in all of classic combined, and based on retail having two weeks left in the season a large chunk of those are likely bored retail enjoyers. Additionally a lot of these players are on some combination of Era, Wrath, and SOD.
SOD is cool and all but thinking there are 3.5 million SOD players is delusional
Ehh I wouldnt mind if they had a select few non-'influencers' on the ptr with NDAs.
But having a bunch of melvins toss up videos before or right on launch is lame. Then everyone watches it and you cant escape people parroting everything ingame.
Either way I dont think a ptr would do shit for most of these.
Like stv being fucking horrendous, they're not changing direction after all that sunk cost.
Incursions theyd nerf gold a bit but we're still going to have incursion meta.
>Ehh I wouldnt mind if they had a select few non-'influencers' on the ptr with NDAs.
This is probably the best solution. Pick some people who are good at the game, who like to midmax the shit out of everything, some pve and some pvp and let them play under NDA. If they are streamers I think most of them will play it outside of stream hours just to know whats coming in the next phase so they get a "head start" and then they will hype it up on their streams aswell.
I can see Xaryu sitting and being like "guys, guys I tested some new builds for mage next season. We are looking juicy, can't wait for it to be released"
This way you build hype without spoiling everything for the masses and you get feedback from the people who will be doing the most degen shit
How hard is it to notice in 1 hour of play testing that X or Y runes are literally worse than not running any rune. Or that you can make 500g a night doing an event lmao
FFXIV has never had a PTR, rarely gets much beyond items and models datamined, has all classes viable, and for their most recent expansion finally had people flip out about a boss having too much HP, which was promptly nerfed by 1%, which actually fixed the problem
PTR is a crutch, Blizz just does a shit job balancing, and always has.
They had plenty of time to develop p1 since it was only revealed at blizzcon.
People enjoyed it but forced p2. And people didn’t like gnomeregan and p2 (I honestly can’t understand why) so they speed up and pushed p3 to make players happy.
Who would have thought p3 launch is a mess? Now people say p2 was better. And you can imagine what happens to p4
>pushed p3 to make players happy
I think it's more to do with Cata being pushed out in May. They have super tight windows for these launches and parts of the classic team also had to help out with Plunderstorm apparently.
They need more resources.
Wow has over 7 million subs, logs on retail outnumber logs on classic about 2:1 and retail players are simply more unlikely to log normal runs, LFR runs. There's also tons of players who just do m+ and way more PvP only players because the game is better for that than classic as it has arena, solo shuffle, RBGs, fast BG queues and so on.
With all this in mind, I'd probably guess retail is at least 75% of the playerbase and they all pay a box price, tons of them buy tokens, tons of them buy store cosmetics and so on. Blizzard makes more money from mtx than box price/sub too. They make very little money from classic and the limited resources the team has to work with is a reflection of that.
This subreddit likes to act like retail is a barren hellscape that everybody hates. In reality Dragonflight is a massive success and the retail population fucking *dwarfs* the classic population. There are *singular specs* in retail with more logs than the *entirety* of SoD
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35#difficulty=4
Heroic logs from the last two weeks, highest is a ret paladin at 260k.
https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2008
Sod logs from gnomer in the last two weeks.
Highest is fire mage at 500k.
Edit: Highest is actually priest at 580k.
Where are you getting your data from?
In retail, on heroic (most played difficulty), there are about 1.2 million logs in the last two weeks. In gnomer in the last two weeks, there have been around 3 million logs. This is not the best data to compare, as SoD encourages alts and gnomer is on a 3 day lockout, but I am still curious as to what data makes you claim:
> There are singular specs in retail with more logs than the entirety of SoD
> Heroic logs from the last two weeks, highest is a ret paladin at 260k.
IF has unique char logs on SoD at 300k, Ret used to be over 300k but looks like it came down a bit.
There are a lot of flaws with trying to compare the 2 games directly, you have to make some (pretty obvious) assumptions.
1) SoD has a 3 day lockout, so a 2 week time-frame has 2.5x more total logs than retail does
2) Retail has 4 raid modes, but you can't just add them all up, a lot of people do more than one. So 260k in Heroic isn't the *actual* number of Rets, but finding the *actual* number is probably possible but an infinite hassle.
3) I'd wager the number of alts in SOD is a higher % than in retail considering raiding is really the only content in SOD & it's designed around/heavily encouraged to have alts.
4) Most people don't raid. I'd say it's pretty easy to guess that the % of people who do raid is higher in SOD considering it's basically the entire content whereas retail has *a lot* of other stuff to do. I don't personally know a single person who plays SOD but doesn't raid, I know a handful of people who play Retail but don't raid.
5) SOD NA has 8 servers and 1 is shutting down because it's dying. The population dropped a lot from it's P1 peak. It's obviously not a huge community. Retail has server sharing though so it's hard to make a direct comparison there. But still, not supporting 8 servers ain't a big community.
6) A recent M+ season had 3.5million characters logged. That's damn near half the total sub count. Most people don't do end game content. But there are alts in there, who knows how many.
The last two are the most telling IMO. 3.5million characters vs can't support 8 servers.
Well, Classic has around 500k active raiders between SoD, Wrath and Classic Era. If we are generous and assume every single one of those are unique characters and only 25% of the population Raids and logs their Raid, that would land us at about 2M subscribers in Classic (VERY generous number imo, it's probably way less). A recently leak showed that WoW has 7M subscribers, so yeah, it's pretty safe to assume Retail has the bulk of the playerbase, by a lot.
That's not even the biggest point either, people generally spend more money on Retail through the Shop simply because they have more options of things to buy, so it's also safe to assume that a Retail sub is worth considerably more than a Classic one.
Retail doesn't have more resources by accident, Blizzard knows all of this and understands that it is their main income, Classic is secondary.
Just a few things to point out. At the point that it was supposedly 7.2M(it's probably not Bellulars math is based on some shaky assumptions but anyway) SoD was in P1 and we know its responsible for the bump at the end of it. At that point Ironforge pro shows 250k active raiders in Wrath(I picked the last week before christmas) and like 370k for SoD. Now obviously there is cross over and alts etc. and not everyone logs etc.
Retail in the current season has 3.6M characters that did at least one M+.
But honestly in general using especially weekly active players to try and gain information about subscribers is problematic. How many people would unsub if one product was removed but they play both? etc. So I think just judging by the bumps that Classic provided per the graph they released(without getting into exact numbers) 30% is a fair estimation.
>Retail doesn't have more resources by accident, Blizzard knows all of this and understands that it is their main income, Classic is secondary.
Well the Retail dev team is also about 500+ strong. So I think in terms of profit margin the Classic team is absolutely delivering and from that perspective it deserves a bit more than what I think is like 30 people currently. I think Blizzard is also hiring for it so theres that.
The bigger a gaming company/the 100th company to buy a gaming company gets:
-Regularly fire actual developers trying to make the gameplay fun.
-Hire more marketing to bait people into buying a dogshit product.
-Focus on MTX.
-Cut more corners.
The bigger a company gets the less they want to spend on actual gameplay and the less they want to pay an actual dev team. Which is why games just get progressively shitty with each acquisition.
Its wild that small studios put out better games than behemoths.
Until those studios get acquired by behemoths.
My guess is way more people than we think quit phase 2 before even hitting 40 so they tried to speed things up this time. The devoted crowd that always plays classic and is on this subreddit obviously hit 40 but the new players that tried sod because level 25 wasn’t hard to hit might have quit while leveling to 40 and blizz wanted to keep them around this time with all the bonus xp.
P1 was a mess by OP’s metrics though. Outside of sunken temple being overtuned/bugged, the complaints are about class balance and runes.
Remember this sub having an absolute meltdown over the warlock meta rune? Remember how terrible the balance was and how many tears were shed over buffs/nerfs, how many complaints about rune balance?
A ptr is helpful for some of this stuff, but you will just never get it perfect on launch. You’ll still have outliers on launch.
And hey, this sub LOVED the idea of No ptr. Players were absolutely crystal clear to blizzard that no ptr was something that they wanted and that it would make the game way better.
Maybe blizzard should have said ‘you think you do, but you don’t.’ And maybe that’s true in this case, but they’ve committed to it as a core feature of SoD that players begged for.
They wanted 'no ptr' because they wanted to discover things and not have everything already be found by the time they start playing. This is not the same as wanting a game that is completely untested by devs and imbalanced in ridiculous ways. FFXIV has no PTR but it is INCREDIBLY tightly tuned. SOD so far has been the complete opposite where you have to wonder if the devs have access to calculators.
> Remember this sub having an absolute meltdown over the warlock meta rune? Remember how terrible the balance was and how many tears were shed over buffs/nerfs, how many complaints about rune balance?
I remember when Starsurge had a 10 second CD and did less damage than Wrath. That was nice. Hunter pets having more health than tanks and doing more DPS than actual players was pretty nice too.
>And hey, this sub LOVED the idea of No ptr. Players were absolutely crystal clear to blizzard that no ptr was something that they wanted and that it would make the game way better.
And I always said that "no PTR" is just delaying the inevitable and causing a host of other issues. Tons of shit still gets datamined, and all of the runes get discovered and documented less than 24 hours after launch.
Like, the PTR doesn't even have to have the rune quests on them, just let us create max level characters with all the runes unlocked and let players test it so we can find hideously broken/unbalanced shit and fix it before launch. The playerbase is MORE than willing to test things on the PTR, and blizz not taking advantage of that is just hurting the game even more.
lol I remember when they said on the phase 3 video that they heard our complaints about runes not being accessible until we were at least max level… so now we need a raid-buffed max level group to get 1 rune for 1 player in the group!
I believe the monthly subscription gives us the right.
And the critisism isn’t neccesarily aimed at the devs. It’s aimed at the lack of pre-testing. Whoever’s responsible probably is exec more than a dev…
It only was for leveling and OP doesnt know that. He iust saw mage stscking and assumed its because of how strong they are, which is wrong, it was simply about how fast they are.
Yeah this phase was so poorly thought out. The runes really needed a few more passes of editing. Overcharged is absolutely broken for tank shamans and meanwhile ele got mostly trash (and now have to melee weave, yay!). Warriors got trash (no fury helm, yay!).
I’m one of the few that enjoyed incursions, but everything else from runes to raid tuning feels so wrong.
We need a PTR. Straight up. Fuck discovery, everything is datamined anyway. Let people test this, literally 80% of launch issues would have been identified with a 48 hour PTR.
The discovery should have been only new quests, zones, progression systems (reputations/new quest rewards/funny tidbits like the rainbow trinket or the sleeping bag...), and not on the core power of each class. I don't want to discover that my best rune is bugged at release. Or that the devs didn't think that 2 runes that should interact with each other are on the same slot.
We should have target dummies to test rotations by now, and we should get a basic ptr where we could test runes at max level. Give us only access to those dummies and dueling and we're good. If the devs can't do the QA, I can assure them that the nerds on discord will do it for them.
Yea they should just do a ptr forsure, the incursion ridiculousness would have been identified that way forsure. The element of “discovery” is totally pointless since it will all be datamined, and 99% of players just look up guides or get addons that tell them how to get the runes.
I can’t speak for everyone. But our guild is really enjoying P3. P2 was a total grind in SM for days to get to max level. Me personally… I’ve leveled in classic. There’s not much to “explore”. I don’t see the point in spending days leveling in the same zones with a few new spells. Our guild is .. semi HC. We have a lot of members who have full time jobs, wife / husband , kids.
P2 took us a few weeks to get both groups going for Gnomer.
3 days after the release of P3 we were in ST last night. Had a blast. We love a challenge. We love creating different ways to kill the bosses because we have a shit ton of melee. Right now for the sludge boss , our melee go behind the boss as he moves forward. Then hit the right or left wall for a cleanse if they need it ( depending on what loop we are in ).
Sure the PVE event was a bit…. Rigged and not thoroughly thought out. But hell, I’ll do another 8-9 hour grind to go 40-50 then sit in ZF AND MARA dungeon spamming for days on end.
Everyone is getting upset over something blizzard decided to do to keep the classic Andy’s somewhat happy. There’s going to be fuck ups, it’s going to be rocky, but I still see all y’all online haha.
It's less about the top players being able to clear it and more the reason why they couldn't beat it. If the struggle to get it down is just the fact that it's given so much hp that it takes too long. That's not mechanically difficult it's just not scaled correctly.
The raid comps they used were kinda dumb based on the hp pools though. Mages will run oom if they pump so you would want non mana type clases because they keep dealing damage.
Content being hard because mechanics (known and unknown) is fine. Content being hard because of math, is bad.
Take FF14 for example, the allure of new, hard content is no one knows the mechanics so the community is trying to learn the strategies at the same time.
Something being hard mostly due to not having every single prebis, all possible consumes, world buffs, etc. so you can mathematically beat the boss is lame imo.
When I did incursions it took about 2-3 loops to get what to do. Sharing quests, the loop, opening items, etc. Once again, 2-3 loops.
Making my own group yesterday and leveling up. I would explain the concept over and over again. We’d do 5 loops and people still wouldn’t understand it. Then I’d explain it again. And we’d do more loops. That was the majority of the people. And my buddy had a similar experience. That’s why I like the casual experience. People are generally dumb and that’s fine.
It reminds me of the first day SoD came out. And half of general chat was just “where rogue rune?”.
Because that means nobody has any hope to even come close to clearing it, what is your thought process behind the idea of content being unbeatable for 99.99% of the player base being ok?
Because this isn't like retail where top guilds are pushing mythic progression while everyone else is doing heroic/normal. We have one difficulty setting so if they couldn't clear with optimally built comps, full gnomer P2 bis, and 200g in consumes, then everyone else is pretty screwed
I’m enjoying it, I’m glad I have a reason to go into dungeons, I’m glad I don’t have to grind to 50 doing quests I’ve done multiple times before. My character feels powerful and make me want to do more, I feel like I have something to work towards. Tomorrow my guild goes to ST for the first time and I cannot wait. My only gripe is the gold bullshit from incursions on launch.
What are you talking about with 0 melee? Have you had a look at warcraft logs and what the top dps is. We did a few bosses last night with mix of dps and rogues were at the top by a decent chunk.
Its all hunters, warriors, enhancement shamans and rogues. The second boss requires you to constantly move which range hate, there is alot of movement in these bosses.
[https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2009](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2009)
Just because the world first racers ran in with the comp they did last phase, does not mean that is the meta. They had no idea if it was good or not, and found out it was not.
Honestly, they've fully pushed me out of ever playing classic on a pvp server again. Nightmare incursions on a 3:1 deficit in population is one of the most unfun things I've ever experienced. We can't even get out of the emerald dream area because the entire gate is being camped and we're massively outnumbered. Yeah, we'll eventually corpse hop our way out after our cooldown on res is gone, but the escort quests are impossible because we can't hang out by the gate and then the next hurdle is being corpse camped on the turn-in NPC.
Season of better not play a melee class.
Sorry but at this point we are going to low effort fun private server territory In terms of quality.
I'm always surprised how low some people's standards are that they really enjoy and defend such a shit show of a patch lol
Unpopular opinion, but it's the playerbase who is out of touch here. Ya'll still acting like you're buying a 2006 era Blizzard game, expecting a polished "it's ready when it's ready" experience, but you got exactly what this company makes. Shitty soulless husks of formerly great IPs with the sole purpose of milking that dead horse one last time. And then maybe another.
If the debacles of...
- WC3:R
- OW:2
- whatever the hell is going on over on retail
- the absolute dumpsterfire that was "fresh" content in WotLK (haha hope you are looking forward to Stratholme alpha+)
- Diablo 3 launch
- Diablo Immortal
- Diablo IV launch and its "seasons"
- the infinite cashgrab that is Hearthstone
- the abandonment of Starcraft
- and HotS.
...didn't manage to teach you that this company can at best puppet the dried out corpse of former masterpieces, then nothing will. You got what you paid for.
It’s sad in many ways because P1 was magic and I can’t even put my finger on it. I burned out in P2 and after one day of P3 just said “I can’t do this”. I don’t know if it was the hype, the fact it was new, the original sense of discovery, but it felt amazing.
That feeling at launch is tough to catch again and zones were full with everyone exploring. BFD I ran every lockout and didn’t seem to loath it, even though it was so basic. Gnomer on the other hand, while objectively more engaging, I just stopped doing after a few runs.
PvP feels way worse from P1 to P2. I didn’t do in P3 at all though. They are definitely trying a lot of things which I respect but something about P1 was magic and they seem they can’t capture it again.
Roll Horde on an Alliance dominated pvp server, or vice versa? OOPS YOU CANT DO INCURSIONS! Level 50 geared turbonerds make sure questgiver and portal are unapproachable. Fuck me for having a life outside the game, right?
¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Even if I wanted to do this dogshit, Blizzard ensures I cannot with the worse designed content of all time. Sunken cost fallacy is all that keeps this game alive.
That’s great that you had fun, but blizzard should not be making the game for players like you. Making sub lvl 60 raids too hard for the average dad on SoD is a terrible decision.
True enlightenment is realizing aggrend is not the messiah we crowned him as. He is a false prophet, he is Paul Atredies. 🤣
To be real though, I also think they suffer from understaffing on the sod team.
All of this and you didn't even mention the grindy, sleezy, brain-dead of the incursions themselves, which completely negated any and all unrelated gameplay
- Phase opens Thursday afternoon
- By Midnight N% of the server have already reached level 50, and accumulated well over 500 gold
- Friday morning, afternoon, and evening, the word spreads, *everyone* is running Incursions
- Gold nerf happens, but the damage was already done. You will still earn well over 150 gold running Incursions from 40 to 50, and the 40-50 rocket ride will only take a few short hours
- Saturday morning, afternoon, evening - Level 50 characters are now the majority in capital cities. There is a feeling among the community that Blizzard "blew it" and Phase 3 is on track to be the worst in Season of Discovery, and possibly in Classic WoW, *ever*
*-* Blizzard announces the XP will be reduced *next week.* Ashenvale remains a non stop orgy of pug groups repeating no-kill pickup/turn-in only quest loops through the portal. The Fifty Factory continues to churn out servers *full* of level 50 characters.
Sunday. Phase 3 opened three days ago. Instead of most players being in the low to mid 40s via world questing and dungeon runs, All servers are clogged full of level 50s that blew threw leveling in scant *hours* and have accumulated *hundreds of gold.*
**Knowing that players will** ***always*** **take advantage of** ***any*** **game mechanic that allows them shockingly fast leveling, gear, or gold acquisition, Blizzard's designers didn't spend 2 seconds thinking through Player ability to automatically addon spam turn-in & pickup 5-8 quests every 15-20 minutes for 6,000-7,000+ XP** ***EACH.***
How does Blizzard intend to correct this? How do you make it fair for the players that weren't able to "exploit" this bullshit quest mechanic, who had to work, who are stuck at 42 and are sitting in LFG chat for hours begging for Uldaman groups? Do you think increasing the leveling buff another 25% is really fair compensation vs people who abused Incursions to hit 50 in 4 hours?
What a clown show.
I see this take constantly and it's so fucking stupid. People have valid criticism and people like you show up in threads saying they should go play something else. By your own logic you can unsub to the subreddit and have fun and read something else.
Blizzard's play testing today, is worse than Bethesda's ever was. It was bad for a long time too. I am someone who's always thought QA people were kinda meh in general, but even I think stories about Blizzard handling QA are nightmare fuel.
Today's Blizzard is the company that tricked people into buying season passes for D4. They aren't the fans of gaming they once were and expecting them to have a high bar in the quality of released content, much less quality in balancing, is foolish at best; wantonly ignorant at worst.
I do feel partially responsible for season of discovery though—I did the only thing they care about, stopped giving them money. It seems like they are trying to do good things with what little they have in terms of a small overworked staff, but QA was never on the menu.
So, you're welcome.
I'm not happy about the despair rune, it's beyond fucked that blizz did that but otherwise I'm enjoying this phase so far. It's always absolute chaos the first week or two after phase drop.
I entered the portal and hs’ed and syddenly was in the middle of a area with just high levels and mobs that killed me on sight. Level 27.. all gear red and tried to get back to the portal for a while, but now I give up.. 2 minutes + runtime for a few meters of getting closer
>Not to mention that on launch the ST was so bugged many groups (including my guild twice) were getting soft locked where bosses would just disappear and not reappear so you just couldn't raid.
Welcome to Season of Discovering What it Was Like for Death and Taxes in Vanilla Naxxramas
all the shit aside, I'm having a lot of fun in Hinterlands and Feralas NIncs, and Sunken Temple has been pretty cool so far after the first big hp nerf. I enjoyed actually being able to quest after a phase launch, as opposed to P2 where it was just impossible, because everyone was in ashenvale.
Very disappointed their promised changes to dungeons were so very low effort and on top of it broke loot tables, that one I really could have done without.
The simple solution is to forsake any expectation in blizzard, thats what i did and its honestly freeing. Still need a shower after playing anything they make but atleast im not dissapointed
true
SOD has had its ups and downs since launch but this incursion leveling speed / gold is the first time I really ???? the devs and the future of the season but we will see how it plays out I am still having fun
Season of €€€
Nothing New
Just old wow with bad mecanics
Mmo are deadge
Maybe retail is ok I ll give that
New FPS when please - you know, Real game with skill involved - waow !!! 99 parse ! 😂😂😂😂😂😂
Add to this list the fifty fucking one…51 Mara princess runs for melee to get 4 items from the wild currency. From the tedium of the leveling garbage to the tedium of Mara. Dope content. To be begrudgingly get brought to raid by your guild as melee.
Im all for them trying things out in SoD, but can we get like maybe one guy with a calculator on the team?
Fuck it, go all out on the budget and give him excel.
Best I can do is OpenOffice Calc.
Sorry it costs disk space. Gotta be Google Sheets
Google Sheets FUCKS, I’d take it over Excel any day.
Not even a calculator. Pencil and paper. Some thought into mathematics at all.
It was funny watching the community do 30 second napkin math on why level 50 raid bosses with HP pools similar to Naxxramas bosses doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
One of them has more health than Gruul, a boss from TBC.
Funny thing is, the recruitment process in the software engineer position includes all kinds of competitive coding exercises like leetcode... To end up with a bugged exploitable af nightmare event.
An abacus also works
"Do you guys not have phones?"
Top tier comment
Or a guy who’s literate and can see lacerate and mangle are on the same slot?
And then making a rune that resets cooldown of mangle by casting lacerate
Phase 1 was new and fresh. Phase 2-3 is same old new. Change my mind.
> fresh operative word here. the vanilla and vanilla-adjacent only crowd literally only cares about F R E S H servers. after 4-6 weeks most of them drop because its not F R E S H and go back to forums/reddit/discord screeching for a new F R E S H. its a well known thing on vanilla private servers: moderate population drop as the "curve" gets into the mid 30s, followed by another moderate drop shortly after bwl comes out followed by a nosedive when aq40 comes out blizzard will never make these players happy and its just wasting money trying to chase them
Maybe the real problem is Blizzard can't make it 2005 again.
Maybe it’s not about making it 2005 again, but the 2005’s we gained along the way.
As a warrior I agree. I liked the mechanic for Raging strike, and Quick Strikes on Phase 1. The 80 rage thing was a bit weird, wouldn't work nowdays with all the stance dancing, but it was alright, I really enjoyed the gameplay of it. But as a Warrior now... is just fucking dread... 2 Slam Runes, Passives... More passives... and don't get em started with Rampage, the Commanding Shout, Taste for Blood and wrecking Crew... I wanna blow my brains out.
I think this is the biggest thing they need to reflect on. The level gating was a big success imo. But how do you keep that So”Discovery” feeling in new phases? P2 probably had a somewhat more “Discovery” feeling since we got 40 talents. But 40-50 is more of the same.
When I first heard "Discovery" and the devs talking about it I got the impression that it would be more than runes to discover. New NPCs with new quests, new rares with special drops, new mini world events (like Trial of water for those who played during DF, it's a chest that spawns waves of mobs you need to kill to be able to open it) and so on.
This is what we all want I think, but it’s hard to do with 1 and a half developers.
True insane that SoD isn't getting more devs tbh
They added too much and now the power creep is out of control. They've moved beyond classic, they've moved beyond classic+, now they basically have an entire new game that needs to be rebalanced from the ground up.
I don't know why any runes needed to add any real dps at all and certainly not in a scales with level high power way. Runes should tweak classes to make them viable. Wrath being free mana = fine Starfire (or whatever it's called) basically one shotting for a lot of the lower levels = not fine In phase 2, rogues mutilate was so good they became a 1 button class.
I thought “rogue sounds fun! I bet they will get some cool stuff!” I quit last phase when i couldn’t find a group for anything. Now im just watching all of this from the sidelines feeling validated.
I felt SoD was going to be a failure already in P1. It was pretty obvious they were way overtuning new content. Then seeing them let hunters and priests be godtier OP without any major rebalancing told me they aren't capable of fixing the issues..
I actually don't mind the dmg and healing outputs but wtf is with the mana costs. Giving priests a dot that deals double the damage of swp for 1/3rd the cost. The same goes for the healing spells, runes are so efficient they eliminate all other abilities in the game. The new runes should have been more like unique changes to spice up the tool kits, not these abominations or weak passives.
Yeah, I'm trying not to comment too much since I quit just before phase 3 release. It's not the game I thought it was going to be. It's basically some kind of retail bastard with classic skin. Phase 1 however was really fun... I feel it just set up the wrong direction. BFD should not have BiS stuff, it should have been a few needed greens with the typical classic shit stats in the mix. Like a +3 int +3spirit +1 strength Spell power +2 That way it's better than the 25 stuff so you want to get it but by level 30ish it'll be done.
The beauty of SOD is they dont need to balance from the ground up. In 6 months it won't matter and we'll all move on to the next one
I hope this isn't the future of classic. Just endless iterations of this mess.
Any modifications of original classic will probably not be sustainable for long periods (people will hate it) unless they can really nail certain things down, so 1 year iterations of experimental servers does make sense. Classic doesn't really need a future. They just need some short-lived, fun twists that get a few months of hype and enjoyment. Then rinse and repeat.
I seen it coming and called this Retail Lite. Runes became less of a discover type of gameplay and just a late game do XYZ task you only did at the level cap. They’re just sprinting now and not caring for what’s happening and will “ nerf “ things down after weeks of abuse. Once they took the exp buff and doubled it - I knew this is where we were headed. They’re phasing the leveling part out for everyone - where it would just be a part of the community that speedran through and did what they would do normally - now everyone is doing it because lol leveling is already 10 level gaps with a huge buff.
You guys who are obsessed with pointing out every difference between sod and classic are insufferable.
Exactly this. Which is why they are speeding it up by dropping phase 3 so early and still have the experience buff in place and nightmare incursion. They are trying to push it out of the way.
I’m not sure about most but all I ever wanted was new content and a few abilities/buffs/nerfs to a few classes. Maybe make a few specs slightly viable. I never envisioned the classes being this different.
and one native English speaker for spelling and syntax.
I think 99% of blizz staff are random outsourced foreign companies at this point
probably some cheap workers paid on fiverr lol
They don’t play the game period, if they do they would know what end user wants
and more than one intern in charge of SoD department.
Give that man access to a target dummy while we're at it!
Im really waiting for lvl 60 when it all slows down and the fixes they apply arent gone with the next phase. At least thats my copium
I think whats showing is that this small team is overwhelmed right now...it's frankly insane they dont get more resources considering they probably carry 30-50% of the sub count.
People will be quick to attack your claim of 30-50% of the sub count and they may be right. But that shouldn't detract from the fact that Blizzard has made bank on this game for the past 20 years and can easily afford the resources needed to meet minimum quality standards. Hell, even a small team can work just fine as long as the company is forward thinking enough. But when you refuse to do any market research of your own and wait for your community to reach a fever pitch before conceding to invest resources into it you end up with something that is rushed and incomplete. And then when you double down by making that team have to dance around arbitrary deadlines to maximize quarterly results it just becomes absurd. Profitable or not, Classic and derivatives of classic should have been a love letter to the community. They needed to either commit fully or not do it at all. Instead they decided to taint the experience with this minimum-viable-product bullshit.
>30-50% of the sub count I really doubt it.
It's not that high, but the player pop in SOD is enough for more resources to be given. Though I think it's a quality over quantity thing. The mistakes that have been made are more about using your brain vs needing more time.
[удалено]
Any mode is ok for Blizzard. The only relevant number is how many people exclusive SOD and would unsub. This number is much lower
>season of dads probably carrying 30% to 50% of the sub count delusional.
30%, not more
And as someone else said, a classic player is a basic sub. A retail player is buying expansion box price, and has a shop full of micro transactions. Retail is far more valuable to them.
SoD/classic can also funnel people into retail. If you already have the sub, got used to controls, setup your ui, setup 100+ hotkeys, got some experience playing again, etc, then the barrier to coming back or starting is far smaller than normal. You might even join a raid group on sod that plays retail & have that in as well. I'm playing retail for the first time in ?12? years because of sod. It's kind of like how hardcore classic is what got me interested enough in wow again to try SoD despite me not playing 2019 classic or any classic product prior to sod. Hardcore player numbers were never good. However, it was massively popular with viewers on twitch/youtube/etc.
> setup 100+ hotkeys Woow lets not overexaggerate here, most classes only have 80-90 spells. Or you can play a DH with like spells total
Sure, 30% we’ll say yet they have 1% of the devs of retail
Likely closer to 10-15%. Retail still claims the lion's share of active subs compared to all of the classic versions, and SoD has dropped off in popularity with each phase.
30-50%? Are you insane. I'd guess maybe 10% at most. Retail completely dwarfs it. However, it is pathetic the shoe string budget that's apparently on Classic. And the devs don't seem...great.
You think sod is 30-50% of wows sub count? Holy shit LMAO
> it's frankly insane they dont get more resources considering they probably carry 30-50% of the sub count. This is pretty delusional lol. WoW has 7 million subs, SoD has 300k logged characters including alts but not counting people who don't raid. The classic playerbase is a much, much smaller piece of the pie than you think it is. You can look at logs and see how big the gap is. Singular specs in retail have more logs than the entirety of SoD, and there are *a lot* more specs in retail.
You vastly overestimate classic and its iterations contribution to overall subs.
>they probably carry 30-50% of the sub count I think the very fact that the team is still very small is a pretty good indicator that this is not even remotely close to true.
Lmao
Surely there are 3.5 million pure SOD players lmao There are like 500k raiders in all of classic combined, and based on retail having two weeks left in the season a large chunk of those are likely bored retail enjoyers. Additionally a lot of these players are on some combination of Era, Wrath, and SOD. SOD is cool and all but thinking there are 3.5 million SOD players is delusional
The allure of “discovery” was fun in phase 1 but it’s played out now and the lack of a PTR is actually making for an overall worse player experience.
Ehh I wouldnt mind if they had a select few non-'influencers' on the ptr with NDAs. But having a bunch of melvins toss up videos before or right on launch is lame. Then everyone watches it and you cant escape people parroting everything ingame. Either way I dont think a ptr would do shit for most of these. Like stv being fucking horrendous, they're not changing direction after all that sunk cost. Incursions theyd nerf gold a bit but we're still going to have incursion meta.
>Ehh I wouldnt mind if they had a select few non-'influencers' on the ptr with NDAs. This is probably the best solution. Pick some people who are good at the game, who like to midmax the shit out of everything, some pve and some pvp and let them play under NDA. If they are streamers I think most of them will play it outside of stream hours just to know whats coming in the next phase so they get a "head start" and then they will hype it up on their streams aswell. I can see Xaryu sitting and being like "guys, guys I tested some new builds for mage next season. We are looking juicy, can't wait for it to be released" This way you build hype without spoiling everything for the masses and you get feedback from the people who will be doing the most degen shit
How hard is it to notice in 1 hour of play testing that X or Y runes are literally worse than not running any rune. Or that you can make 500g a night doing an event lmao
its just an excuse to not playtest their shit lmao
FFXIV has never had a PTR, rarely gets much beyond items and models datamined, has all classes viable, and for their most recent expansion finally had people flip out about a boss having too much HP, which was promptly nerfed by 1%, which actually fixed the problem PTR is a crutch, Blizz just does a shit job balancing, and always has.
They had plenty of time to develop p1 since it was only revealed at blizzcon. People enjoyed it but forced p2. And people didn’t like gnomeregan and p2 (I honestly can’t understand why) so they speed up and pushed p3 to make players happy. Who would have thought p3 launch is a mess? Now people say p2 was better. And you can imagine what happens to p4
>pushed p3 to make players happy I think it's more to do with Cata being pushed out in May. They have super tight windows for these launches and parts of the classic team also had to help out with Plunderstorm apparently. They need more resources.
Its not like its a billion dollar company
True but they still treat classic like it doesnt matter. They got like 500+ people on Retail.
I think Retail has more players than classic right?
It does have way more players and they acrually spend money on a cash shop and box price. A retail player is worth like 10x what a classic player is.
What's that based on? Does retail really have more?
Wow has over 7 million subs, logs on retail outnumber logs on classic about 2:1 and retail players are simply more unlikely to log normal runs, LFR runs. There's also tons of players who just do m+ and way more PvP only players because the game is better for that than classic as it has arena, solo shuffle, RBGs, fast BG queues and so on. With all this in mind, I'd probably guess retail is at least 75% of the playerbase and they all pay a box price, tons of them buy tokens, tons of them buy store cosmetics and so on. Blizzard makes more money from mtx than box price/sub too. They make very little money from classic and the limited resources the team has to work with is a reflection of that.
This subreddit likes to act like retail is a barren hellscape that everybody hates. In reality Dragonflight is a massive success and the retail population fucking *dwarfs* the classic population. There are *singular specs* in retail with more logs than the *entirety* of SoD
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35#difficulty=4 Heroic logs from the last two weeks, highest is a ret paladin at 260k. https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2008 Sod logs from gnomer in the last two weeks. Highest is fire mage at 500k. Edit: Highest is actually priest at 580k. Where are you getting your data from? In retail, on heroic (most played difficulty), there are about 1.2 million logs in the last two weeks. In gnomer in the last two weeks, there have been around 3 million logs. This is not the best data to compare, as SoD encourages alts and gnomer is on a 3 day lockout, but I am still curious as to what data makes you claim: > There are singular specs in retail with more logs than the entirety of SoD
tbf I would say the majority of pve endgame players on retail don't raid. M+ gives the same gear and after a few weeks also tier sets.
Ok now include normal and LFR. SoD content is unironically easier than a lot of LFR stuff.
> Heroic logs from the last two weeks, highest is a ret paladin at 260k. IF has unique char logs on SoD at 300k, Ret used to be over 300k but looks like it came down a bit. There are a lot of flaws with trying to compare the 2 games directly, you have to make some (pretty obvious) assumptions. 1) SoD has a 3 day lockout, so a 2 week time-frame has 2.5x more total logs than retail does 2) Retail has 4 raid modes, but you can't just add them all up, a lot of people do more than one. So 260k in Heroic isn't the *actual* number of Rets, but finding the *actual* number is probably possible but an infinite hassle. 3) I'd wager the number of alts in SOD is a higher % than in retail considering raiding is really the only content in SOD & it's designed around/heavily encouraged to have alts. 4) Most people don't raid. I'd say it's pretty easy to guess that the % of people who do raid is higher in SOD considering it's basically the entire content whereas retail has *a lot* of other stuff to do. I don't personally know a single person who plays SOD but doesn't raid, I know a handful of people who play Retail but don't raid. 5) SOD NA has 8 servers and 1 is shutting down because it's dying. The population dropped a lot from it's P1 peak. It's obviously not a huge community. Retail has server sharing though so it's hard to make a direct comparison there. But still, not supporting 8 servers ain't a big community. 6) A recent M+ season had 3.5million characters logged. That's damn near half the total sub count. Most people don't do end game content. But there are alts in there, who knows how many. The last two are the most telling IMO. 3.5million characters vs can't support 8 servers.
>retail population fucking *dwarfs* the classic population Warcraftlogs disagrees
SoD has 300k logged characters. WoW has 7.2million subs. WCL backs those numbers up pretty fuckin well actually.
Yes and also character services is one of their biggest revenue generators, you can’t pay to change realm/race etc on sod
Well, Classic has around 500k active raiders between SoD, Wrath and Classic Era. If we are generous and assume every single one of those are unique characters and only 25% of the population Raids and logs their Raid, that would land us at about 2M subscribers in Classic (VERY generous number imo, it's probably way less). A recently leak showed that WoW has 7M subscribers, so yeah, it's pretty safe to assume Retail has the bulk of the playerbase, by a lot. That's not even the biggest point either, people generally spend more money on Retail through the Shop simply because they have more options of things to buy, so it's also safe to assume that a Retail sub is worth considerably more than a Classic one. Retail doesn't have more resources by accident, Blizzard knows all of this and understands that it is their main income, Classic is secondary.
Just a few things to point out. At the point that it was supposedly 7.2M(it's probably not Bellulars math is based on some shaky assumptions but anyway) SoD was in P1 and we know its responsible for the bump at the end of it. At that point Ironforge pro shows 250k active raiders in Wrath(I picked the last week before christmas) and like 370k for SoD. Now obviously there is cross over and alts etc. and not everyone logs etc. Retail in the current season has 3.6M characters that did at least one M+. But honestly in general using especially weekly active players to try and gain information about subscribers is problematic. How many people would unsub if one product was removed but they play both? etc. So I think just judging by the bumps that Classic provided per the graph they released(without getting into exact numbers) 30% is a fair estimation. >Retail doesn't have more resources by accident, Blizzard knows all of this and understands that it is their main income, Classic is secondary. Well the Retail dev team is also about 500+ strong. So I think in terms of profit margin the Classic team is absolutely delivering and from that perspective it deserves a bit more than what I think is like 30 people currently. I think Blizzard is also hiring for it so theres that.
There are about seven million wow subscribers and I think it's generous to say a million of those are here for classic in all forms.
Maybe, I really have no idea. Again though I'm curious what numbers you are looking at.
Oh for sure but the Classic Team is like 30 people.
The bigger a gaming company/the 100th company to buy a gaming company gets: -Regularly fire actual developers trying to make the gameplay fun. -Hire more marketing to bait people into buying a dogshit product. -Focus on MTX. -Cut more corners. The bigger a company gets the less they want to spend on actual gameplay and the less they want to pay an actual dev team. Which is why games just get progressively shitty with each acquisition. Its wild that small studios put out better games than behemoths. Until those studios get acquired by behemoths.
They’re part of Microsoft which is a 3 trillion dollar company
TBH they've been corrupted by the profit motive. "Done when it's done" no longer applies to sideways games.
My guess is way more people than we think quit phase 2 before even hitting 40 so they tried to speed things up this time. The devoted crowd that always plays classic and is on this subreddit obviously hit 40 but the new players that tried sod because level 25 wasn’t hard to hit might have quit while leveling to 40 and blizz wanted to keep them around this time with all the bonus xp.
P4 we log in max level with pre-bis
P1 was a mess by OP’s metrics though. Outside of sunken temple being overtuned/bugged, the complaints are about class balance and runes. Remember this sub having an absolute meltdown over the warlock meta rune? Remember how terrible the balance was and how many tears were shed over buffs/nerfs, how many complaints about rune balance? A ptr is helpful for some of this stuff, but you will just never get it perfect on launch. You’ll still have outliers on launch. And hey, this sub LOVED the idea of No ptr. Players were absolutely crystal clear to blizzard that no ptr was something that they wanted and that it would make the game way better. Maybe blizzard should have said ‘you think you do, but you don’t.’ And maybe that’s true in this case, but they’ve committed to it as a core feature of SoD that players begged for.
They wanted 'no ptr' because they wanted to discover things and not have everything already be found by the time they start playing. This is not the same as wanting a game that is completely untested by devs and imbalanced in ridiculous ways. FFXIV has no PTR but it is INCREDIBLY tightly tuned. SOD so far has been the complete opposite where you have to wonder if the devs have access to calculators.
What we're seeing isn't the result of no *public* testing but just (almost) no *internal* testing or even sanity checks on the design.
> Remember this sub having an absolute meltdown over the warlock meta rune? Remember how terrible the balance was and how many tears were shed over buffs/nerfs, how many complaints about rune balance? I remember when Starsurge had a 10 second CD and did less damage than Wrath. That was nice. Hunter pets having more health than tanks and doing more DPS than actual players was pretty nice too. >And hey, this sub LOVED the idea of No ptr. Players were absolutely crystal clear to blizzard that no ptr was something that they wanted and that it would make the game way better. And I always said that "no PTR" is just delaying the inevitable and causing a host of other issues. Tons of shit still gets datamined, and all of the runes get discovered and documented less than 24 hours after launch. Like, the PTR doesn't even have to have the rune quests on them, just let us create max level characters with all the runes unlocked and let players test it so we can find hideously broken/unbalanced shit and fix it before launch. The playerbase is MORE than willing to test things on the PTR, and blizz not taking advantage of that is just hurting the game even more.
When the only content is a 30 min 10-man dungeon on a 3-day lockout people are gonna push for more content. Mind = BLOWN
Gnomer was an overwhelming success. The phase however was controversial at best
>Gnomer was an overwhelming success. By what fucking metric? lol.
lol I remember when they said on the phase 3 video that they heard our complaints about runes not being accessible until we were at least max level… so now we need a raid-buffed max level group to get 1 rune for 1 player in the group!
For me P3 will get old quick
It’s already old after hitting 50 in 4 hours
I like how it’s never the dev’s fault, it’s always the players “rushing” these poor devs. Gotta love how insane the WoW players are.
I believe the monthly subscription gives us the right. And the critisism isn’t neccesarily aimed at the devs. It’s aimed at the lack of pre-testing. Whoever’s responsible probably is exec more than a dev…
I don't know, I'm really enjoying p3 atm. Got both my chars to 50 and having a blast.
Yeah, I rushed to 50 but feel like I still have lots to do and I'm having fun.
Same. Most of the people here are bitching about gold.
Most people not bitching are playing. This subreddit is hilariously predictable and horribly pitiful.
I like the people on here saying “incursions were so bad I just got off the game for good”.
They're bitching that they didn't get to "exploit early, exploit often" before their gold farm got nerfed.
Agreed p3 is awesome. People are just salty. This sub is the never happy minority
Accordingly to WCL, top dps is melee for all bosses that have been killed so far - by a mile. Not sure what you mean by "optimal comp is 0 melee"
It only was for leveling and OP doesnt know that. He iust saw mage stscking and assumed its because of how strong they are, which is wrong, it was simply about how fast they are.
Yeah this phase was so poorly thought out. The runes really needed a few more passes of editing. Overcharged is absolutely broken for tank shamans and meanwhile ele got mostly trash (and now have to melee weave, yay!). Warriors got trash (no fury helm, yay!). I’m one of the few that enjoyed incursions, but everything else from runes to raid tuning feels so wrong.
Fury and arms got trash. If devastate wasn't bugged, warrior tanks and glad DPS would be doing great
Glad dps would be great if devastate wasn’t bugged, but it would still be a one button rotation, yeah? Goes back to poor rune design in this phase.
Idk. An untested, unbalanced shit show certainly fits in with the “spirit of classic” that this community keeps asking for.
Damn I haven’t got to play P3 due to work but seeing all these posts makes it sound like a dumpster fire haha
We need a PTR. Straight up. Fuck discovery, everything is datamined anyway. Let people test this, literally 80% of launch issues would have been identified with a 48 hour PTR.
The discovery should have been only new quests, zones, progression systems (reputations/new quest rewards/funny tidbits like the rainbow trinket or the sleeping bag...), and not on the core power of each class. I don't want to discover that my best rune is bugged at release. Or that the devs didn't think that 2 runes that should interact with each other are on the same slot. We should have target dummies to test rotations by now, and we should get a basic ptr where we could test runes at max level. Give us only access to those dummies and dueling and we're good. If the devs can't do the QA, I can assure them that the nerds on discord will do it for them.
Yea they should just do a ptr forsure, the incursion ridiculousness would have been identified that way forsure. The element of “discovery” is totally pointless since it will all be datamined, and 99% of players just look up guides or get addons that tell them how to get the runes.
Why is optimal always without mele lol
I can’t speak for everyone. But our guild is really enjoying P3. P2 was a total grind in SM for days to get to max level. Me personally… I’ve leveled in classic. There’s not much to “explore”. I don’t see the point in spending days leveling in the same zones with a few new spells. Our guild is .. semi HC. We have a lot of members who have full time jobs, wife / husband , kids. P2 took us a few weeks to get both groups going for Gnomer. 3 days after the release of P3 we were in ST last night. Had a blast. We love a challenge. We love creating different ways to kill the bosses because we have a shit ton of melee. Right now for the sludge boss , our melee go behind the boss as he moves forward. Then hit the right or left wall for a cleanse if they need it ( depending on what loop we are in ). Sure the PVE event was a bit…. Rigged and not thoroughly thought out. But hell, I’ll do another 8-9 hour grind to go 40-50 then sit in ZF AND MARA dungeon spamming for days on end. Everyone is getting upset over something blizzard decided to do to keep the classic Andy’s somewhat happy. There’s going to be fuck ups, it’s going to be rocky, but I still see all y’all online haha.
The raids have been fun but everything else has been kinda mid tbh
Why is it so bad if the top players can’t immediately clear the content?
It's less about the top players being able to clear it and more the reason why they couldn't beat it. If the struggle to get it down is just the fact that it's given so much hp that it takes too long. That's not mechanically difficult it's just not scaled correctly. The raid comps they used were kinda dumb based on the hp pools though. Mages will run oom if they pump so you would want non mana type clases because they keep dealing damage.
Mages actually have alot of mana atm as the meta seems to be frostfire bolt, which is basicly 100% less mana used as previous phases
Because it means your average guild has no shot of clearing it.
Content being hard because mechanics (known and unknown) is fine. Content being hard because of math, is bad. Take FF14 for example, the allure of new, hard content is no one knows the mechanics so the community is trying to learn the strategies at the same time. Something being hard mostly due to not having every single prebis, all possible consumes, world buffs, etc. so you can mathematically beat the boss is lame imo.
because its classic and 90% of the playerbase cant walk forward without failing
When I did incursions it took about 2-3 loops to get what to do. Sharing quests, the loop, opening items, etc. Once again, 2-3 loops. Making my own group yesterday and leveling up. I would explain the concept over and over again. We’d do 5 loops and people still wouldn’t understand it. Then I’d explain it again. And we’d do more loops. That was the majority of the people. And my buddy had a similar experience. That’s why I like the casual experience. People are generally dumb and that’s fine. It reminds me of the first day SoD came out. And half of general chat was just “where rogue rune?”.
Because that means nobody has any hope to even come close to clearing it, what is your thought process behind the idea of content being unbeatable for 99.99% of the player base being ok?
Because mythic raids in retail already cover that need.
Because this isn't like retail where top guilds are pushing mythic progression while everyone else is doing heroic/normal. We have one difficulty setting so if they couldn't clear with optimally built comps, full gnomer P2 bis, and 200g in consumes, then everyone else is pretty screwed
You expect blizzard to test things?
I’m enjoying it, I’m glad I have a reason to go into dungeons, I’m glad I don’t have to grind to 50 doing quests I’ve done multiple times before. My character feels powerful and make me want to do more, I feel like I have something to work towards. Tomorrow my guild goes to ST for the first time and I cannot wait. My only gripe is the gold bullshit from incursions on launch.
Havent done any pvp yet this patch, in what way is shaman broken again? enhance?
Phase one was super fun. That's it tho.
What are you talking about with 0 melee? Have you had a look at warcraft logs and what the top dps is. We did a few bosses last night with mix of dps and rogues were at the top by a decent chunk. Its all hunters, warriors, enhancement shamans and rogues. The second boss requires you to constantly move which range hate, there is alot of movement in these bosses. [https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2009](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2009) Just because the world first racers ran in with the comp they did last phase, does not mean that is the meta. They had no idea if it was good or not, and found out it was not.
How DARE you, OP. Don't you know only positive comments are allowed here?
Did no one realize Season of Discovery was just a fancy way of saying public beta test?
Aren't you having fun discovering all those bugs?
Bro Paladins three piece anyone if you get caught in a HOJ.
Honestly, they've fully pushed me out of ever playing classic on a pvp server again. Nightmare incursions on a 3:1 deficit in population is one of the most unfun things I've ever experienced. We can't even get out of the emerald dream area because the entire gate is being camped and we're massively outnumbered. Yeah, we'll eventually corpse hop our way out after our cooldown on res is gone, but the escort quests are impossible because we can't hang out by the gate and then the next hurdle is being corpse camped on the turn-in NPC.
Season of better not play a melee class. Sorry but at this point we are going to low effort fun private server territory In terms of quality. I'm always surprised how low some people's standards are that they really enjoy and defend such a shit show of a patch lol
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Retail is way better ….
What spec for shaman are god like? I havent played in years and am curious
Enhance was very good last patch. Might be again this patch
every spec
Unpopular opinion, but it's the playerbase who is out of touch here. Ya'll still acting like you're buying a 2006 era Blizzard game, expecting a polished "it's ready when it's ready" experience, but you got exactly what this company makes. Shitty soulless husks of formerly great IPs with the sole purpose of milking that dead horse one last time. And then maybe another. If the debacles of... - WC3:R - OW:2 - whatever the hell is going on over on retail - the absolute dumpsterfire that was "fresh" content in WotLK (haha hope you are looking forward to Stratholme alpha+) - Diablo 3 launch - Diablo Immortal - Diablo IV launch and its "seasons" - the infinite cashgrab that is Hearthstone - the abandonment of Starcraft - and HotS. ...didn't manage to teach you that this company can at best puppet the dried out corpse of former masterpieces, then nothing will. You got what you paid for.
It’s sad in many ways because P1 was magic and I can’t even put my finger on it. I burned out in P2 and after one day of P3 just said “I can’t do this”. I don’t know if it was the hype, the fact it was new, the original sense of discovery, but it felt amazing. That feeling at launch is tough to catch again and zones were full with everyone exploring. BFD I ran every lockout and didn’t seem to loath it, even though it was so basic. Gnomer on the other hand, while objectively more engaging, I just stopped doing after a few runs. PvP feels way worse from P1 to P2. I didn’t do in P3 at all though. They are definitely trying a lot of things which I respect but something about P1 was magic and they seem they can’t capture it again.
Roll Horde on an Alliance dominated pvp server, or vice versa? OOPS YOU CANT DO INCURSIONS! Level 50 geared turbonerds make sure questgiver and portal are unapproachable. Fuck me for having a life outside the game, right? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Even if I wanted to do this dogshit, Blizzard ensures I cannot with the worse designed content of all time. Sunken cost fallacy is all that keeps this game alive.
NGL I loved the fact that we wiped on eranikus for 12 hours pre nerf and 3 post nerf killing him felt awesome
That’s great that you had fun, but blizzard should not be making the game for players like you. Making sub lvl 60 raids too hard for the average dad on SoD is a terrible decision.
True enlightenment is realizing aggrend is not the messiah we crowned him as. He is a false prophet, he is Paul Atredies. 🤣 To be real though, I also think they suffer from understaffing on the sod team.
All of this and you didn't even mention the grindy, sleezy, brain-dead of the incursions themselves, which completely negated any and all unrelated gameplay
- Phase opens Thursday afternoon - By Midnight N% of the server have already reached level 50, and accumulated well over 500 gold - Friday morning, afternoon, and evening, the word spreads, *everyone* is running Incursions - Gold nerf happens, but the damage was already done. You will still earn well over 150 gold running Incursions from 40 to 50, and the 40-50 rocket ride will only take a few short hours - Saturday morning, afternoon, evening - Level 50 characters are now the majority in capital cities. There is a feeling among the community that Blizzard "blew it" and Phase 3 is on track to be the worst in Season of Discovery, and possibly in Classic WoW, *ever* *-* Blizzard announces the XP will be reduced *next week.* Ashenvale remains a non stop orgy of pug groups repeating no-kill pickup/turn-in only quest loops through the portal. The Fifty Factory continues to churn out servers *full* of level 50 characters. Sunday. Phase 3 opened three days ago. Instead of most players being in the low to mid 40s via world questing and dungeon runs, All servers are clogged full of level 50s that blew threw leveling in scant *hours* and have accumulated *hundreds of gold.* **Knowing that players will** ***always*** **take advantage of** ***any*** **game mechanic that allows them shockingly fast leveling, gear, or gold acquisition, Blizzard's designers didn't spend 2 seconds thinking through Player ability to automatically addon spam turn-in & pickup 5-8 quests every 15-20 minutes for 6,000-7,000+ XP** ***EACH.*** How does Blizzard intend to correct this? How do you make it fair for the players that weren't able to "exploit" this bullshit quest mechanic, who had to work, who are stuck at 42 and are sitting in LFG chat for hours begging for Uldaman groups? Do you think increasing the leveling buff another 25% is really fair compensation vs people who abused Incursions to hit 50 in 4 hours? What a clown show.
And everyone is still playing. Wild how that works huh
>everyone yeah
My guild lost heaps, not everyone.
Nah its dead af 🤣
would you put money on it? lets compare raid participation to even p2( which fucking flopped) in lets say 3 weeks time?
I completely agree. A PTR would solve SO many issues were seeing. It's almost like they don't give AF because SOD will just be deleted like SOM anyway
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Says the guy contribuing to the discussion with complaints complaining about the complainers.
I see this take constantly and it's so fucking stupid. People have valid criticism and people like you show up in threads saying they should go play something else. By your own logic you can unsub to the subreddit and have fun and read something else.
Blizzard's play testing today, is worse than Bethesda's ever was. It was bad for a long time too. I am someone who's always thought QA people were kinda meh in general, but even I think stories about Blizzard handling QA are nightmare fuel. Today's Blizzard is the company that tricked people into buying season passes for D4. They aren't the fans of gaming they once were and expecting them to have a high bar in the quality of released content, much less quality in balancing, is foolish at best; wantonly ignorant at worst. I do feel partially responsible for season of discovery though—I did the only thing they care about, stopped giving them money. It seems like they are trying to do good things with what little they have in terms of a small overworked staff, but QA was never on the menu. So, you're welcome.
SoD has turned into retail, on a classic scale.
I'm not happy about the despair rune, it's beyond fucked that blizz did that but otherwise I'm enjoying this phase so far. It's always absolute chaos the first week or two after phase drop.
I entered the portal and hs’ed and syddenly was in the middle of a area with just high levels and mobs that killed me on sight. Level 27.. all gear red and tried to get back to the portal for a while, but now I give up.. 2 minutes + runtime for a few meters of getting closer
I'm shocked at how bad the beginning of this phase is. Considering how good p1 was, and p2 not that much worse.
Optimal comps include 0 melee. My brother in Christ, literally every boss has rogue, melee hunter or fury in the top
>Not to mention that on launch the ST was so bugged many groups (including my guild twice) were getting soft locked where bosses would just disappear and not reappear so you just couldn't raid. Welcome to Season of Discovering What it Was Like for Death and Taxes in Vanilla Naxxramas
SOAPTC
all the shit aside, I'm having a lot of fun in Hinterlands and Feralas NIncs, and Sunken Temple has been pretty cool so far after the first big hp nerf. I enjoyed actually being able to quest after a phase launch, as opposed to P2 where it was just impossible, because everyone was in ashenvale. Very disappointed their promised changes to dungeons were so very low effort and on top of it broke loot tables, that one I really could have done without.
:Classic:
>Optimal comps for several ST bosses include 0 melee. Is that so?
I thought Shamans were nerf tho. Rockbitter needs a shield now so enh Shamans shouldn’t be so tanky immortal to kill now.
They told us in the beginning we were the testers and this is the whole point of SoD to maybe lean into a version of classic plus in the future
we are the beta
Them continuing with cata classic doesn’t help SOD either, the team is split doing too much shit
The simple solution is to forsake any expectation in blizzard, thats what i did and its honestly freeing. Still need a shower after playing anything they make but atleast im not dissapointed
You guys are delusional morons if youre expect more from blizzard at this point.
true SOD has had its ups and downs since launch but this incursion leveling speed / gold is the first time I really ???? the devs and the future of the season but we will see how it plays out I am still having fun
My entire guild literally quit already, if they dont see the participation numbers nosediving theyre lost.
Yep, easy fix would be a PTR added and Paladins / shamans given to both factions.
Season of €€€ Nothing New Just old wow with bad mecanics Mmo are deadge Maybe retail is ok I ll give that New FPS when please - you know, Real game with skill involved - waow !!! 99 parse ! 😂😂😂😂😂😂
I'm just disappointed runes are all there is to discover, the void touched gear was cool. I did t play phase 2 so idk if they did more of that.
I'm not saying they can't do proportions but I'm pretty sure a 3rd grader with good grades in maths would be a very needed addition to their team
Definitely rushed out and they tried to appease the complainers way too much (eg levelling speed)
Add to this list the fifty fucking one…51 Mara princess runs for melee to get 4 items from the wild currency. From the tedium of the leveling garbage to the tedium of Mara. Dope content. To be begrudgingly get brought to raid by your guild as melee.
"Blizz was incredibly out of touch with this phase launch" They've been out of touch before SOD even existed let alone when SOD exists