| Lessons hopefully learned from Legion & BFA Posted: 21 Feb 2020 10:04 AM PST TL;DRs are in bold at the beginning of each chunk. Each one has a paragraph (or two, but I couldn't figure out how to add a second paragraph and keep the numbering, so sorry for the blocks of text) of thoughts attached. - Having massive amounts of damage coming from passive sources does not feel good, whether or not Blizzard is happy that it shrinks the gap between good and bad players. By definition, if we're meant to do a certain amount of damage over a period of time, anything happening automatically means your actual button presses are less impactful. I would trade Twilight Devastation for hitting harder with remorseless/frostscythe, and I would trade Infinite Stars for hitting harder with obliterate.
- Enormous gulfs in power between random critical drops (azerite, legiondaries, corruptions) makes the systems feel bad and creates completely arbitrary disparity between players doing the same tasks. Yes, there has always been the issue of "Warrior gets a 30ilvl weapon upgrade and goes berserk", but that was more of a problem with how weapons used to scale for melee. There's an enormous gulf in the RNG hurdles when comparing getting a weapon upgrade in today's WoW with all the gearing avenues and getting that specific rarer drop. This also leads into my next point.
- Utility should not compete on the same tier as throughput unless we have access to everything and are making that choice for ourselves in niche situations. People wore Prydaz in M+, for example, as keys pushed higher to prevent getting one-shot. I sure didn't want Prydaz before I got a spec-defining drop, though. I thought they were learning from the utility/QoL-based Legiondary issues when they made the healing/cooldown inner ring on Azerite, but here we are getting %leech and avoidance corruptions in lieu of damage corruptions. If we had full access to all the corruptions and these were simply things we turned off and on at will, like how it felt at the end of Legion when you had everything, then that's fine. I loved my boots/Sephuz/trinket speed gearswap. The existence of these useless/niche corruptions also leads to very feelsbad moments - if you're opening a cache and get a 0 dps corruption when your friend gets rk3 Twilight Devastation, that's unacceptable. If caches are meant to be your guaranteed trickle of corrupted items and *uncorrupted* items can still drop because trinkets exist in caches, that's also unacceptable.
- Making gear more interesting is a great idea, especially in the wake of reducing the secondary stat gains from tier to tier; the gains just shouldn't be passive damage and randomly+rarely acquired. I will say that stat procs are okay. If you get a piece that gives you a mastery proc, you still need to push buttons to do damage, and players that utilize this window are rewarded, just like playing around cooldowns, except it's reactive play compared to the proactive nature of cooldown usage. Versatility needs to be more interesting. If haste adjusts global / attack+cast speed / certain low-CD rotational abilities, then let versatility affect major ability cooldown(s), for example. I absolutely understand the issue of starting low on crit and crit-triggering specs like fire mages feeling bad, as well as the fuss of constantly adjusting their passives as necessary to allow them to function at lower levels of crit. That being said, I think crit should do something for *everybody*. It doesn't need to be the key to your rotation like fire, but it should be more interesting than "I hit harder sometimes". Some masteries are inherently more interesting to experience, even if the end result is "20% more overall damage" - doing more global frost damage on a DK isn't as interesting as doublecasting for elemental or the rotation-defining windwalker mastery, though I will admit the times when element masteries have allowed mastery-stacking to unlock an entirely new rotation are conceptually neat.
- The people you worry would get confused by a steady stream of minor class adjustments are also the people that wouldn't notice these changes. If a class is massively stagnating in performance in M+, arena, or raids, PUSH SOMETHING OUT! Slap 5% here, 10% there. Only struggling in one avenue? Slap an area-based boost to performance. So what if multi-shot hits 10% harder in M+ than elsewhere? People already just google what to take, and the people writing said guides or at the top of leaderboards would see the changes as they occurred. Too much after a couple weeks pass? Dial it back a bit. There always is going to be a bottom performer, but it shouldn't be the same spec for an entire patch, let alone multiple patches. Afaik, there is NO way in-game to tell that Bursting Sores affects Necrotic Strike's absorb now. That's way more opaque than making Moonfire tick for 15% more with a corresponding tooltip adjustment and patchnote.
- Making "curated" gear acquisition paths for PVP based on the order people were buying pieces back in TBC/WotLK is pointless when there are so many gearing avenues now. Why in the hell would I buy a helmet when I already got one somewhere else? (Ignoring the temporary issue that it might not have traits I want, obviously). There is nothing confusing about a currency system with a vendor that allows you to buy a piece. Particularly baffling when a residuum vendor was implemented, which actually has much more complicated decisions to make than "what do I want first?". That being said, I do understand that Conquest is largely a catch-up mechanic now, and the actual upgrades are from the caches. However, considering the ilvl disparity between the (very rare) RNG drops and the caches, unless you're playing 2400+, you're really only using the cache drops, so the item frequency means it's fine for PVP to be back on a "pick your item" system.
- M+ is a massive success, but a decent amount of the affixes are disliked not because of difficulty, but because the "forced" playstyle runs almost directly against the timed nature of M+ runs *and* certain dungeon designs. If you want to have swarmy packs of weak mobs in dungeons that have a fraction of an ordinary trash mob's health, then they just cannot trigger mechanics like bolstering and bursting. Can you play around this, sure, but it's so much extra fuss, and much different than contrasting, say, big elites like giants with normal elite packs. Some mechanics, like sanguine and necrotic, feel much more reasonable when encountering these same packs.
- M+ affix generalizations: The 4+ affixes have more issues than 7+. Bolstering and bursting feel bad (and bursting is very much an "lol good luck" issue for healers, though obviously DPS can control what explodes when, and people can pop personals to help), sanguine feels fine *unless* you're in cramped dungeons (and dungeons got very cramped going from Legion to BFA), raging and teeming feel fine (although BFA dungeons got trash-heavy and teeming piles on to that). Comparatively, necrotic feels surprisingly fair on bosses, which would be its scariest potential balancing hiccup, though I'm not in love with how tanks are encouraged to just start kiting after a certain point on trash. Skittish is... still a nothing mechanic, and it's not great that it's a big "bring a rogue!" week when rogues have been M+ all-stars all expansion long. Volcanic's a great affix, if relatively undertuned. Quaking post-changes is fantastic and an absolutely model affix - proper play makes it do NOTHING now, though it does punish very cramped quarters and melee-heavy groups (but casters have the kick portion to suck up, so overall fine). Grievous just doesn't play well with others by unfairly amplifying any group-wide damage while doing effectively nothing at other times, and putting a large extra burden on the healer relative to the other affixes. Plus it really, REALLY sucks for Disc post-fight. And then there's Explosive, which is really just caught in a weird spot. It does nothing but slow DPS as people swap to orbs, and targeting them is fiddly (either tab RNG when it's working, or trying to click into a pile). It's also unnecessary pressure on the tank/healer (which are already in high demand compared to DPS) to stomp them since it's so much more efficient for the group to have the DPS not losing damage switching off.
- Routing places a large extra burden of previous research/experience on tanks for M+. How is this fixable? Should it be fixed? I appreciate the time investments and creativity in determining how to more quickly and efficiently clear a dungeon, I absolutely do. I also think the current seasonal affix is very clever - not only does it allow for completely bonkers route possibilities, it directly addresses the shroud/invispot meta by letting everyone port in and out. That being said, I do think I prefer when it's simply a matter of knowing whether you can handle pack A + pack B together, which packs are dangerous enough you're popping a defensive on the pull, and so on. There were already people that didn't want to learn how to tank because they felt like they're expected to know so much in addition to handling their character, and it's only gotten worse. I joined a group on an alt that had a very undergeared tank. I (foolishly) assumed it was an alt that knew what he was doing. He did not. He was also clearly nervous because in addition to pulling stuff you could just walk past, he was overpulling into bolsters as stuff was nearly dead (because tanks need to go fast, right?). People quickly figured this out and tried to steer him where possible, but it was a messy run. It was just a reminder of how big the knowledge gap is between me and some fresh, inexperienced tank, and the huge gap between me and the people building the optimal routes. I'm still not comfortable doing all the dungeons as a tank in 10+s with the new season in pugs, even with MDT, because I don't want to poorly route the group. I think the biggest problem here is that the routing for 10+ can only be learned *IN* 10+, and in a 10+ the group expects you to know what you're doing.
- Tiresome daily/weekly "chores" give me less time to do stuff I'd prefer doing while actively working against maintaining alts. There have been dailies and weeklies for a long time, but Legion and especially BFA have taken things to another level. Gosh, I'd love to just hang out in BGs all night, but I haven't done my islands yet, the emissaries are AP, the daily vision needs to get done, I'd like an extra trip through the Horrific Visions and don't have the rk3 essences so I should do those dailies too, and I never finished the 90 days of dailies to get the mount from Nazjatar, and gosh- Oh wait, time for bed. There is a happy medium between WoD's "log in for the raid, see you next week" and today. There is a wealth of side activities in the game now. Between mount/pet/transmog/achievement collecting, that itself is an entire lifetime of hunting. If you don't want that, you have M+. Don't want that, there's arena / RBGs / BGs. You can still raid, of course. That's a lot of different activities before even touching alts, and none of them involve controlling a bleeping turtle that has fuck-all to do with my character. I want AP gone, and I want paragon caches gone. It's absolutely fine to be done with SOME parts of the game. The never-ending treadmill of optimal stuff to do BEFORE you "have fun" has gotten bad. I quit actively trying to farm AP back in 8.0 and decided to coast a couple weeks behind people pushing hard, but I don't think people should be incentivized to do any of that.
- Sockets are way too strong to be random, and they shouldn't be rare. Tradeskills have wallowed of late and could use some boosts. Restrict sockets to a certain # of slots (maybe slots that don't have an enchant or a special function like Azerite or the HoA) and give each profession a belt buckle equivalent for that slot. Some professions really don't get the constant consumable stream, which this helps balance out. Tailoring could do cloak sockets, LW for boots, alchemy for belts, and so on, or however you'd distribute things. JC can just make the gems, and enchanting can just have enchants. If you skip the gathering professions, this gives you 6 sockets, or 7 if you'd want JCs to make a socket too (8 if the JCs do rings). That feels like a good number. This gives more work to JCs than right now, and it wouldn't retain the "oh jesus" gearing requirements of MoP with multiple gems per slot + a lot of enchants + reforging. As for the rarity issue, the reason I think they should be readily available is simply that reforging's gone. We get some semblance of control over our stats in the face of RNG, and it's a material sink compared to the raw gold sink of reforging.
- Cooldowns feel horrible on the global. Am I used to it? I already was after a couple weeks. Do I like it? No, no I don't. Just by design, all mega cooldowns feel like they say "HERE! WE! G- ... wait for it- OOOOOOOO!" It feels the absolute worst for healing cooldowns. Oh, I need to suddenly do more healing, time to spend a global not healing so I can heal more soon! Can you anticipate healing needs? Sure, if a big pack is about to all trigger bursting, you know what's coming. This boss phase does a thing, you know what's coming. People massively fuck up - you're now behind. It's a bit murkier in PVP, as enemies could be hitting buttons a microsecond after Swiftying, and it's a matter of reaction time regardless of whether it's "they hit a global-inducing DPS CD, now I'm hitting a global-inducing HPS CD" or "OH GOD BURST INC, HPS SWIFTY INC". But I still don't like it. It feels completely out of place in a game that's always had such a smooth combat system. The biggest selling point of WoW is that intangible behind its combat system, don't bog it down. If a class had too many CDs to Swifty together, just tweak the cooldown # or disallow their stacking like the universal separate CD that trinkets share. It'd be fine to have 3 separate / impactful cooldowns on a specialization built around altering playstyle based on the CD running. That sounds quite neat. Imagine Ele with a fire phase, then a lightning phase, then an earth phase.
- It feels silly to restrict flight access until after the mass exodus of players over the course of the first year. I don't stop to smell the roses before flying, I plow through herds of mobs in an attempt to go in a straight line towards my destination. Locking flight behind reputation grinds also seems silly. Tie flight behind (relatively simply) completion. Have you fully explored every zone? Yes. Have you finished each zone's questline (which would likely complete the former anyway)? Yes. Have you completed every dungeon as well? Yes. Congratulations, you saw everything; take to the skies! If a zone needs flying disabled for specific mechanics to work, like Timeless Isle, that's fine. Mechagon is an example of a zone that *could* have remained flightless (if jetpacks were permanent acquisitions without the constant crafting); Nazjatar is an example of one that *never* should have been.
- There is an enormous amount of potential for alternative gameplay modes (and possibly even alternative gear sets). Challenge Modes, Mage Tower, Horrific Visions, all great successes. Islands were an interesting concept, but ultimately an implementation failure given expectations of what they were compared to the "pull the world, AE, repeat" nature of the content. The current caches are finally a good system for rare acquisitions, and content purely as a source of transmog/pets/mounts is a great idea. The roguelike inspirations for some of the new content (Visions and then Torghast) have so many possibilities in front of them. More, more, more of this type of stuff. I have long thought WoW could have stolen and adopted two repeatable gameplay modes from other genres - the dungeon races from Path of Exile, and battle royales. Every game doesn't need to be a battle royale, especially now after that enormous initial surge, sure. However, imagine a character starting with even stats, and enemies drop not only gear, but abilities. You start with a club, but oh look, a staff and a lightning bolt! Guess I'm going caster! It sounds like it could be tremendous fun. I keep envisioning players spawning in a large area like STV and building up their characters while getting into scraps along the way. I also love the idea of ARPG-style dungeons you travel through, building your character as you go. Perhaps you unlock passives that allow later runs to delve deeper (like Horrific Visions already have), perhaps the mode has gear you maintain and grow stronger with (that stays in the mode, no need to bog down bags more), or maybe you're racing like in old PoE. I do think that most content should be built for your character to actually *be* your character, but I'd rather have me "not playing" my character in this sort of stuff than doing it playing WQ minigames. Leave those for Darkmoon's new arcade.
- Losing class set bonuses was fine with me (even if there would be options to fit them in better in today's game, like accessibility from M+/PVP in addition to raids instead of forcing raids for set bonuses). I'd rather potentially integral abilities weren't tied to gear. However, losing SO MANY ARMOR SETS was not okay. Some BFA sets have been neat, a lot have been mediocre at best. Obviously every set isn't for everybody, and it's not like I loved every previous set ever made. However, Legion took a big step forward in aesthetic quality for sets, and a lot were very pretty. We went from unique class sets for both PVE and PVP to *four* sets that are *shared* between PVE and PVP. I'm okay with fewer sets that look cool instead of a bunch of mediocre ones. I'm okay, for example, with not having PVE+PVP sets, especially if Mythic/Elite look spectacular. However, not only have I disliked most of the sets, there's just... one. If I hated the DK set before, maybe I'd like the warrior set and build it from offset pieces. Now it's just the one. Redo 'remastered' versions of all the old sets if you want, I like the option of actually looking like my class. And it's absolutely possible to make a set themed off the zone + class. Ny'alotha sets with class themes could have been spectacular.
- COVENANTS SHOULD NOT AFFECT PLAYER POWER OR GAMEPLAY IN ANY WAY. This one's early, I can just see it coming. There *will* be a best, there also likely *will* be a *different* best for different gameplay modes. I just see this being an enormous problem. Let Covenants be purely aesthetic. If it's transmog gear, obviously doesn't matter. If you need to give them all the same ability, just skin them with different, suitable particle effects. Besides the obvious "pick the one you like" vs "pick the one that's optimal" issue, there's also my last point.
- It's not fun for damage sources to be things my class/spec isn't supposed to do, WHETHER OR NOT they're passive. It is the antithesis of class fantasy for Cyclotronic Blast to have been my most impactful button for the longest time. It's stupid to see Warriors and Mages both chucking yellow-and-blue lasers everywhere. My main's a DK; I want to obliterate things and blast them with frosty death. I do not want to azerite them to death. Now, I will say, there is hope on this front. The covenant abilities are class-based, from what I can tell. However, they are still covenant-themed. DKs, for example, have a shackle from Kyrians. Okay, conceptually sounds interesting. However, it's *ARCANE*! DKs don't do that! Warriors throw a spear. That's cool. But it's a magical ARCANE spear! Warriors don't do that! It's not so much that some arbitrary damage typing is the problem, it's that everyone will be doing the same *types* of sparklies, except instead of *everyone* doing yellow/gold, now it's arcane sparklies for this covenant, and shadow for this one, and so on. Let the covenants give us abilities that 100% feel like something our class would do, not something borrowed, *EVEN IF* the abilities technically are borrowed.
There's plenty more, but that's stuff off the top of my head. I'm hopeful that Blizzard's taking lessons to heart as Shadowlands heads into Alpha (and REALLY HOPEFUL that we don't have the "it'll be fixed in Beta" -> "it'll be fixed before release" -> "it'll be fixed next patch" -> "lol just wait for next xpack" disaster of BFA)... but I'm not *confident*. I'm quite concerned about the game's trajectory and relative lack of foresight/polish of late. I very much hope Shadowlands doesn't launch until October or even early November with an extended, extensive set of sweeps for mechanical improvements, feedback utilization, and bug fixing. And, as always... at least the world art department keeps knocking it out of the park. submitted by /u/Vakhir [link] [comments] |
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