The whole problem with "we can't enough people for mythic" isn't that the number of people is 20, it's the mythic lockout system. It needs to be removed when HOF is filled at the very latest.
@@Kyzarusty What ppl forget you only bring 14 specific classes on high tier mythic guilds, after i lets say top 300 it legit doesnt really matter what you bring, ofcourse there are some bosses who need a certain class but thats 80% of the time warlock cuz of gate and lets be real, you have atleast 3 ppl in the guild who would play warlock.
@@MrSnowgamer meh, i think its more than that though. Imagine your dk player is sick or w/e and dont have bench member who plays dk. And you need to prog a boss where dk grip is mandatory(maybe not mandatory but make it extremely more difficult), you just cant raid that night without a dk. Same thing can be applied to other situation that having specific class just make the fight so much easier. Its good thing that certain classes bring advantage to certain encounters but being mandatory to have those classes make it so much harder. Like last expansion we did mythic anduin without dks on one night, the fight is completely different and so much harder. Now we have augmentation to deal with which completely changed everything in raid/m+. Its already hard to have 20 people to participate 6-9+ hours everyweek and if you include benchs its more than 25+. Accessibility and barrier to the contents is higher than you think. Also more requirements/raid buffs/mustbringclass getting added to raid is just bringing the barrier higher and higher.
@@Kyzarusty Also, having to coordinate 20 people to be there consistently throughout the tier is rough. And then hoping you have a solid few for bench just in case something happens. Life happens, and 10 man raiding would be amazing and would have a TON more mythic clears and make the best gear available to more players. Just my personal opinion.
I think a major "Thing they need to fix" isn't classes/professions/raids/dungeons. This stuff is all in an ok place to me. It's actually new player experience. It feels like WoW in its current state, is just slowly losing current players over time for a variety of reasons, but not bringing in many new players. I think doing something to make the game actually bring in new players would be great for the long term experience.
No irony. Have Dorki intro/outro each episode. Those dulcet tones deserve to be the first and last sound waves to enter our ears. (He's also just going to get better at it over time.). Great job, great selection of complimentary personalities and game knowledge. Any coincidence these 3 main tanks? I think not.
Something I would love to see is cosmetics for spell effects, like what PoE does. This is nearly endless potential on Blizzards end that would be AMAZING.
When we got AOTC G'huun the screams on discord were as loud as anything you've heard from RWF. I know my place, I am not mythic quality or skill. Heroic IS an actual challenge and accomplishment for me, and many other players.
There is absolutely fulfilment in heroic if your skill level as a guild is at that level. It took us ages to kill jailer for example and when we did we felt good
I think LFR has its place as a stepping stone for getting /something/ at least. I came back to Dragonflight like 2-3 weeks ago (taking another short break before the patch). I think if you're popping into the expansion really late, it does help with getting some things and getting the foot in the door. Key scaling is a lot different from when I last played in Shadowlands Season 1, but I do think LFR helped a little as a stepping stone to make starting M+ a little easier. 2 weeks later we got Keystone Hero, did Dawn of the Infinite and sitting on a nice ilvl of 443 to go into 10.2 to start things off.
Speaking as someone who uses lfr raiding. I started in SL. So me being able to lfr a raid helps me be confident enough with the raid content to do normal and heroic. For people at dorkis level and high end players don't need it. But it helps the lower end guys
As a person that only does LFR, removing it would eliminate me from doing raids. I don't see any reasoning that would be for taking content from players.
@@jasonbrown1201 There is nothing preventing them from doing a story difficulty where casual players get to "experience" the raid zone and story. IDC what anyone says but LFR is not raiding. There is little to no communication, griefers, people who afk or die on purpose to get free loot. For people who only do LFR this should not be an issue, they still get to see the raid, maybe get some reward, and Blizzard gets to save the work and diminish the total ilvl increase.
@@connor654 Actually I agree with what you are saying. I believe if they removed the story context from raid and removed LFR, that would be the best result. I find it weird how the raid is filled with story conclusions that most of the raid community doesn't even care about: that was obvious with Dorki and Max's comment in the video, and yet the lore (story) players don't care about doing raids. Wouldn't it make more sense to have story content outside raids and raid not have any story content? Then LFR wouldn't be needed and raid dev's would have more freedom. BTW, I am not really just a casual player in the conventional sense. I do only LFR, and very low level Mythic+ (under 7- don't get into affixes), but I do watch RWF, MDI and AWC every season.
I have cleared the raid on mythic and I still see LFR as an essential difficulty . It got me into raiding back in cata . And I still do LFR . It’s has its own fun !
I would even say they should tune down LFR a bit as we’ve always wiped on last boss in both raz and sark. And it just ends up with people fighting , people kicking . And people leaving . And I don’t think that form of toxicity should exist in LFR
@ 22:26 Here's the thing with removing LFR argument. As mythic raiders, you are not seeing the problem LFR creates because you're not facing the same struggles that Normal and HC guilds are facing. LFR creates the problem that you do not need a guild to experience the end game, which has always been a pivotal part of WoW and will continue to be. There are lots of Normal/Casual guilds and HC guilds struggling to recruit players because there is not a need to be in a guild to experience end content. Casual guilds essentially started dying after LFR was introduced. This is why there has been a fight to remove LFR and bring back guilds (I'm sure you've heard this argument discussed before). If you want guild numbers to go back up and bring back the sense of community, you have to remove the accessibility to do every piece of content without a team. It's the same problem with Mythic Plus (pugging). Everyone complains about pugging in Mythic Plus is an absolute dogshit experience. M+ is meant to be done with friends and guild members, not through pugging. As a player who has done it both ways, I can attest that playing with guildies is a 200% better experience. I absolutely refuse to pug into M+ now. The grass is way greener and healthier on the other side.
Imo borrowed power is fine as long as it’s not the constant grind and fomo when you are busy for a week. When missing a week feels like you are just behind from that point on is bad
As far as Dorki wanting something related to the old characters. The issue is they basically went down a checklist of all the villains and didn't build up anything new along the way, which was a huge mistake. There isn't really a great way to fix that without building up new villains and not completely throwing everything away this time around. I thought Arthas was going to be their "get out of jail free" card in Shadowlands but they completely fucked up that whole thing.
Dorki has a point in a way. The reason my guild doesn't do mythic is we have 20 people for heroic raid but not 20 that want to do mythic. For established mythic raiders it seems bad. Which is fair
Max's point of WoW's story being like a CW show resonated with me big time. I still really enjoy playing the game but I never really thought of it from that perspective and it makes a lot of sense.
I'm not sure if the person who asked the question regarding getting better at mythic raid will read comments but, like Max was saying and Dorki eluded to... Just play the hardest content you can more, and greed damage. Do not care (as much) about mechanics, even if you int the raid, you're top priority to improve should be maximizing damage, and the more you are able to do this, the natural fight cadence and PvE feel will just naturally enable you to do mechanics better. You MUST FAIL in order to know your limits. If you play it safe always, you will never push you're capabilities. I went through the same thing, but happened to get lucky and went straight from a heroic guild to a top 30 US guild, where I prioritized survival in order to prove what I thought was important in doing the mechanics well at first, but then noticed how everyone else was playing, and no one cared if they died because it happened rare enough, and everyone greeded damage. This change in mindset vastly improved my skill at the game almost instantly
Dorki being like "now I have no idea whats going on" but also not knowing that it was Xe'ra (or what Xe'ra is) that Illidan blasted, lol, you didn't know then either sir.
They could work on creating horizontal progression using concepts from old expacs. I hear that is how GW2 works where the expansion and endgame of the base game are not based in verticality (new level cap, higher ilvl) but on expanding your character horizontally (expanded trees or skill customization based on the features of the expansion that carry over in to other). Like I said, I have not experienced GW2 horizontal progression myself but I only hear good things about it from the community because it keeps older content relevant and for new players, it allows them to have so much to do instead of in WoW where the only purpose for doing older content is to farm for mogs and mounts (oddly enough pets are relevant everywhere it seems). One of the worst feelings I have as someone who started this January in DF, is that there is so much cool stuff (looking at Legion) that I missed out on. I can't even get challenge mode appearances and the tone of the game and the characters were so much more interesting than what DF has to offer.
Imagine a new player come in to wow and wants to raid. They go to lfr, fail all mechanics and still beat the boss, while also learn nothing during the encounter. They’re like “oh raiding is easy” then venture into normal and failed miserably. It served no purpose as a raid difficulty. If you want a story mode raid, make it that you queue with 24 npc characters as “story mode”
Never understood the criticism of expansion-specific systems. It's a good thing that WoW changes, that stuff is given and taken away. It's always been a living game, a journey. The piece of the game that's been missing for a long time is challenging single player-oriented open world content. Leveling hasn't been a challenge since Vanilla, and at max there's been no reason to do challenging content in the open world for years (except in the first couple weeks of an expansion). IMO, they should-- - Get rid of shared tags. Competition for tags is a key reason why Classic works. At max, it means you can put good items on open world mobs. - Get rid of level scaling. You should be able to try to kill higher level mobs for the potential benefit of more XP; or farm lower-level mobs for similar reasons. You should feel your power progression. - Add relevant challenging max-level single-player oriented zones. Make it feel good to go to raid, M+, to get better gear, and use that gear to be more successful in open world zones. Not a huge fan of single-player instanced transmog-oriented content. I didn't care for Suramar -- the Withered system was a little time time-gatey, a little too complex. Mage Tower was fine. Visions was good, I enjoyed the challenge. I *do* think that this content needs to give good rewards, but it has to be challenging else people will find it's a grind. By the way, more challenging single player content would be good for training people for raid.
Lore, man. They need to focus on the actual narrative of the world instead of trying to find newer external bad guys to fight. BfA's story was such a banger on that regards. They gave us looks on all those factions we knew from the past, the world actually got bigger for a short bit of time. They need to do the same with the ENTIRETY of Azeroth and make the entire world updated to what it is currently in the story. The story needs to develop like GoT's earlier seasons and keep the focus on the world building.
Shoutout to Warcraft Recorder, absolutely goated for watching replays of pulls. Watching yourself play is an easy way to question wtf you're doing at times. To find mistakes. Find things in your UI that you can update.
They should do the same thing with Story as power, stop doing "borrowed power story". We need way more returning and evergreen characters. The best and coolest new character will never get as much of a reaction as a returning character you already have history with. Imagine next expansion you are doing stuff with Magni again. Ppl hated him or at least made fun of him in BFA, but if he came back he would be recognizable, memeable and familiar. Or imagine somehow Forgelite Mikanikos shows up like "I'm here to help bitches", I'd love that. Just because I know who he is already, and he can have some kind of progression - not just "here's a new character, ok now they're gone again". I love what they are doing with Iridikron, and that he will be around at least into the next expansion, I don't care nearly much about the one-off guys like Fyrakk (at least he had story through the expansion) or Sarkereth (who even is he..).
53:30 bellular mention it somewhere. The problem with timerift is that your inputs dont matter. only that you are there matters and in extension how many friends you bring. but how hard you dps the mobs has basically no effect on your reward,
Final Fantasy XIV has maintained it's story well, but it's story focused. I prefer how WoW plays, but Endwalker brought me to tears multiple times in one expansion.
they should make every dungeon have a Challenge mode, true bronze silver gold timed run scaled down to a challenging ILVL of ALL dungeons in the game. Gain rewards on completing all the CM's for an expansion. incorporate all the ex content and give us a real challenge for all the past dungeons
For the love of god please give us borrowed power, give me something to do outside of raid/m+. I know lots of people don't want chores, but I WANT a reason to log on the game every day. The biggest problem with virtually every version of borrowed power is the acquisition sucks and then the magically fix it a year later and everyone likes it. There is "nothing" to do in DF, and I'm sure some people enjoy the whole "expansion that respects my time" the option to do more should exist.
Give us 10 man raid! Mythic 20man raid is cool and all but, managing 20-25people + having to have every raid buff available + gotta have warlock, aura mastery, grip is just too much. Now we have augmentation to deal with too. Barrier to mythic raid is getting higher higher. I understand that there is concern on mythic raid being less good because variety/quality of raid would go down if number of players required for mythic raid is less than 20, but i believe blizzard can pull it off. Even 5man mythic+ contents are challenging and enjoyable, Im pretty sure they can provide quality 10man mythic. Homogenize raid buff, or make it buffs that you can choose as options for each boss(npc infront of raid boss that gives you buffs you choose for the boss), if your guild is missing a dk, give us option to get an active button to use grip or whatever. I understand that blizzard is forcing mythic raid to get every single class to be in but its just too much. Eg)Your dk is sick, unless you have a dk bench member you cant kill a boss(or it gets extremely harder). Giving unique buff to every class is good but mendatory for certain fight/mythic raid is just not a good design. Each class have different population too. With weakaura tracking every mechanics, mechanics are getting harder and harder in sake of making it complicated rather than mechanics being fun. I would prefer blizzard to make auras not trackable(private aura) so that players dont have to heavily rely on weakaura.
I believe current wow mythic raid is too complicated and almost non-clearable without weakaura, which is very bad design, and the accessibility is really really bad. Its not something you would try after clearing heroic and want more challenging raid. The amount of the effort, time investment, requiring weakauras, dealing with people more than 20 people every week for 6-9+ hours. Accessibility/barrier need to improve.
Firstly, big fan of this podcast and its members. But, that being said, I really wish when you discuss topics such as 10man or the number of difficulties in the game, you'd stop looking at it mainly from a mythic raider's perspective. Mythic raiders are such a minute part of the raiding community as a whole. While that perspective should be included, it cannot be the main driving force, which is what it seems anytime Dratnos or Max talk about these topics in this stream and in general. Love this podcast, but it's kind of hard to swallow some of the takes coming from Max and Dratnos on topics that concern players way out of their circle. 10 man raiding would be universally welcomed back, especially with the playerbase being how it is now, in terms of numbers alone. I have seen over 7 mythic raiding guilds on my realm. that I was in, die due to lack or participation or lack or recruitment in the last year alone, in my own personal experience. That is not normal, it wasn't the case in BFA, for example. There need to be raid sizes for challenging content tha accomodate the new reality of player numbers. Best approach to take in such situations is to say 'I don't know the full extent of how this affects the entire playerbase' and move on, instead of dying on the hill of mythic raiding perspective. Also, I think that graph max drew, and always draws in multiple streams, is pretty inaccurate. DF stayed strong till 10.1, but it started going a bit downhill from there on many perspectives - class balance (Aug Hello, and god comp), A plot/story, queue times due to lower participation overall (headless horseman takes 10mins to pop...that's a red flag), pvp basically dead post 10.1, etc. etc. The DF graph trends downhill post 10.1. You don't want them to begin the next expac at that level. Again, this is why its important to get some opinions from outside your own bubbles.
I mean, both Max and Dratnos said that 10 man would make raiding worse for them but it would be better for the game overall. "There's no fulfillment in Heroic" take is wild tho
How are you supposed to talk about 10 man from any perspective but mythic raiders? You can already raid 10 man (or any raid size for that matter) in heroic or normal. 10 man literally only affects mythic raiders.
They just need to give fully account wide progress. All the problems with past systems wasn't for mains but kicked in when you tried to alt. The only way any system will work is they fully allow alts to play from day 1. Imagine today if crests were account wide, alts would be a whole lot less boring
43:29 Had a thought experiment on a borrowed power Legendary Gear track with a plus three steps over myth that changes each season. All bop drops (minus trinkets) have a chance to be legendary versions with increased stats, third secondary stat, a relative tertiary stat and a class specific bonus. You can continue to get Legendaries but only equip one, you pull out the power of one to keep upgrading through out a season. Uses crests to upgrade at normal gear tracks and requires power of another legendary to bump to next track or push those top three levels. Max cap on drop rate with drop protection added as you play/time passes reset when you get another drop.
10 man raiding would be amazing. With all the games people are playing now a days 20 is just too many people. It's not realistic for semi hardcore people to put 20 good members. I do think 20 is better for hardcore players but for everyone else 10 is just better.
In terms of power creep, I really like the Legion legendary system. Just make all the legendaries throughput legendaries this time, don't try to do Sephuz and double talent dippers and whatever. Make them all good and make them gameplay defining where it actually changes your rotation. The game is always going to look like Path of Exile because Path of Exile does it properly. Think of Legendaries as PoE uniques, they're gameplay changing, they're not just super beefy stat sticks. The true beauty of the Legendaries was you got them from doing anything. The Blingtron robot could give you one for crying out loud. Every aspect of the game felt playable because you could get a relevant legendary. I think Glyphs should also come back or something similar, like a separate interface where we can do flavor and non throughput stuff to our character. I wish they would add a gauntlet to the game. A gauntlet is not a dungeon, you don't need to go anywhere or travel, but instead just send waves and waves of enemies at the group that get progressively harder and your group just has to figure it out, kinda like Mage Tower meets Violet Hold meets Islands meets Challenges. Have some line of sight spots and that's it. Make consumes usable. Make it send bosses at random so you don't know what boss will come. You could even have affixes progressively kick in and have like an NPC that lets you toggle an intermission in case someone has to go to the bathroom or something "half time". I can't believe they haven't done something like this yet.
something of a "casual" thing to bring along would be update garrison, even if fuck mission tables make pandaria farm be in there and farm current cooking mats from there while also having trophys from achievements like aotc on sark would have sark wings and CE him as a corpse hung on a pillar, make it so you can show off your stuff. They spent loads on making a big personal garrison and then ditched it instead of working on it a bit constantly to progress with you.. Would be a sort of a "player housing" as well if more customisations can be allowed there.
I would almost argue they've solved the end of expansion peak with the combination of what we've seen in Dragonflight, S4 of SL, and corruption. If 10.2 is the last "raid" of the expansion, end with 10.3 being the "Season 4" and bring in temporary power increases on par with corruption for that fun/broken victory lap of Dragonflight, just set all the M+ dungeons to the DF dungeons (no legacy) and have the raids rotate. Use affixes that are largely beneficial for M+s through a 4th affix that's onpar with Awakening and Encrypted and have less awkward raid affixes that are largely beneficial.
I thought about this while listening to you guys talking about Torghast. What if you went into Torghast not as a class, and the anima powers grant you random class abilities to use? so you build a new character with some warlock, warrior, mage abilities all on one character?
I think stuff like azerite armor and legion weapons are a good system if you put a cap each week on how much you can upgrade them. The largest complaints about those systems was the fact people felt like they had to grind them so they wouldn't fall behind. If you did even a trvial amount each week that was easily obtainable than i think most people would have been fine with it.
I can tell you the exact moment I quit BfA. The first day the first world boss was up I killed it and got dope new shoulders, way higher ilvl than I had, but I lost my azerite power from the old shoulders and I wasn't even remotely close to unlocking the first tier on the new ones (this was maybe a week or two after launch? Whenever the world bosses went up). I had never felt such emotional whiplash to a gear drop before. Getting a new piece actively felt awful. A cap would not have solved that, Azerite armor was fundamentally broken as a system because it took the awful feeling of losing power at the beginning of every borrowed-power expansion, and put it onto your gear, so you could keep those little hits of sadness rolling through even after you were done leveling. Legion artifacts were much better in this regard because it was power you worked towards, not something that you could unlock and then lose over and over again depending on the specifics of the gear you had.
I think they should definitely bring back 10-man raiding but have the 10-man raid be a separate raid that isn't being scaled for anything outside of 10. The 10-man raid can be a .5 patch raid like content that comes alongside a mega dungeon.
The most powerful we've ever been, compared to content. Was the end of Warlords of Draenor. The legendary Ring allowed us to kill Mythic Bosses in 30 seconds or Less. that was Pre-Borrowed Power. They just need to give us the power creep we want, but less complicated.
One thing I'd have added in the crafting discussion for 2handers is that for the strength specs that will gain access to the new legendary, the long term value of the craft is heavily reduced. This is heavily depending on the acquisition timeline for it though. Overall having to go an extra fortnight banking a spark for the craft and then eventually discarding it means it just might not be worth crafting at all compared to other pieces, and you'd just hope to nab a mythic track one in the vault prior to getting the legendary.
Regarding the Patreon Question: I went in BFA from only Heroic Raiding directly to N'zoth Cutting Edge Progression (World 500) since ppl believed in my player skill from playing with them in M+ - we killed N'zoth the first time after 40 Trys since I joined the Guild and was put in the progression squad. Never thought I could carry my weight, but apparently I was a lot better than I thought of myself. Regarding Improving I would suggest don't worry too much about having not enough practice just try to understand then fights, and you will easily improve fast enough.
The main argument I hear for reducing the number of raid difficulties is ilvl bloat. Like maybe LFR should just be Mythic 0 and Normal only a little above that as the "friends and fam" difficulty. Then focus on Heroic & Mythic being the main raid difficulties. IDK if there's a perfect solution is, but 48 ilvl is a lot per tier. The thought that the game may need borrowed power kinda relates to ilvl bloat as well. The constant need to get more and more and more powerful just feeds into more bloat issues. Would be interesting if gear sets/tier sets were not such throw aways every raid tier.
Player housing - Custamize abilities, sort of like giving retri a divine storm a redish color instaid of yellow. Also Account reputation - cba doing the same farms on 13 characthers, litterly impossible to finish up weekly key's, raids, and also farming / doing all the quests just to unlock one recepie for your alt at renown 20...
In 2023 10-man is definitely too small for todays retail. but a raid size around 14-16, would be probably more perfect. I feel like so many groups field 15 players pretty well, it's getting that last 25% of a raid team that get filled with floorlickers or people who dont have the same desire as the other 70% of the raid team.
Is 10 man Mythic raid really a popular idea? Max said he thinks people would be more excited for that anything else they could announce, but I don't really ever see anyone talk about 10 man raiding at all. Is this just my media bubble? I certainly consume more WoW content than the average WoW fan, so I feel like I would have stumbled upon this conversation if it was actually prevalent.
It's absolutely prevalent. I consume a ton of wow content too and see it everywhere. People complaining that their friends quit so now they can't play because they have too few people. People complaining that they are forced to play with someone they don't like just to fill out the roster when they want to play with friends. People complaining that managing such a big raid team is too much. Etc etc etc
If they made torghast a solo m+ type dungeon that rewards cosmetics like pvp gladiator gear. The top floor pushers of each class gets titles and rewards. But they made it relate to progression and forced and u fun being capped floors.
The only meaningful contribution to evergreen systems that they haven't done yet is focusing on world-building instead of world-replacing. The way you get players to buy back into the game and feel nostalgia at the same time as engagement for new content is by creating a dynamic environment. Every expansion introduces some new ridiculous island, and now that we've plumbed the W3 depths for all it's worth, the only way to introduce more is by either making it up (which players WILL hate) or taking what already exists and making it fresh and new. Players loved cataclysm because it took the familiar world and put a new twist on it. Players hated shadowlands because we went to some moronic afterlife world with zones that were only thematically connected to what we've already experienced. Players would've engaged WAY MORE with Slands if it took a Cata-style approach to overlaying the shadowlands on top of Azeroth and experiencing the familiar places from a new, deathly perspective.
Without the devs spending way too much time implementing broken borrowed power systems then taking 2 years to perfect them. I honestly don’t see a reason why they can’t surprise us all and achieve a 14-16 month release cycle going forward. I like the way renown, world quests and events currently work and it’s mainly all for cosmetics even if I’m logging in at 2am and it’s dead there is something to do. I never just stand in the capital cities like previous xpacs and more importantly i never feel like im falling behind or guilt if I’m busy doing life. They do need to improve raid accessibility outside lfr tho, merge normal and hc and make mythic flex after week 4-5 when its been cleared by the top 100. The dragon flight story has missed the mark but if they can get a great story next xpac and take us back to the old world zones i think it could be a winner imagine doing world quests like pirate assaults in booty bay or dark portal or scourge invasions. And rewarded with cosmetic glyphs. improve the new player experience ready for the Microsoft game pass players to get them hooked. Loving the new podcast
I feel like adding a borrowed power would be fine. 1 thing you acquire that's fun and impactful and thematic to the expansion that develops over the course of the expansion. No grind but something on top of your class and spec trees. World content needs a huge overhaul
start of Legion broke me I got the worst legendaries on my warrior. leveled another warrior toon, got weak ones too. I could not perform, I felt super useless. I had to minmax the hardest in my life to even get green ilvl logs. Quit afterwards, and had been playing since early vanilla until then.
The talent system probably just needs abit more refinement and if people really get bored they could expand the tree so you have more vertical lines even therefore more customisation of your play style.
Tl;dr: I would love it if you guys could dedicate an episode to navigating logs. I hate the user interface for logs and I don’t understand it. I really liked the Patreon question at the end. I think it would be awesome if you guys could do an episode that is purely dedicated to logs. I’m a fairly experienced and skilled player with CE under my belt and a few seasons of 3k+ io. I have been raid leading heroic for my casual ish guild and my biggest pitfall is that I simply do not understand how to dive into logs and navigate through it. It seems like a really poorly designed user interface to me. I understand graphs, I have a scientific education and work in a technical job. It’s really just navigating through logs that gets me. For example on Raz, I was trying to figure out how to see when the boss was casting certain abilities, and when the raid was using their raid dr abilities, and I spend like literally 6 hours trying to figure it out and honestly can’t even remember how I finally ended up finding what I was looking for.
Maybe I’m weird, but I have a lot of fun in LFR lol I love when it gets chaotic and ridiculous and people freak out over the most minuscule shit. It’s hilarious and fun like I said I’m weird.
After seeing how many people play ESO like solely for housing, I think if there was a player housing system in WoW that people cared about, that could be HUGE for the game. So, like Dratnos said, if we don't get anything PvE-related, I hope they do do housing and tie it into the new profession system. They could even pull from New World and have a new profession that's furnishing or something like that, or have a new tree for a few profession that craft housing-specific items, something like that.
I know that people want 10man raiding, but instead of making it raid content there might be a place for it on the dungeon side. With the rotating M+ dungeon pools there might be a chance to do something along the line of a really challenging even bigger mega dungeon each season instead of the basic expansion dungeons we are used to.
Wouldnt it be cool if you get a curve/KSM pleb as a guest every other week or something? I think it would be good to have some comments about some of these topics from someone who doesnt play this as a job.
This is what I want but I very much doubt it will happen. I could see dorki engage with more casual viewers and try to understand their point of view, but as much as I love max he just can't get there. I know that he says he really tries not to advocate for high end players getting changes and recognize the other part of the playerbase and all that. But very often he will give a take and someone will try to give a more casual perspective and he will just say that doesn't exist. And it's like, but that's literally wow for most people
The problem is that those people are usually not invested enough into the game to have nuanced takes and quite often, as derogatory as that may sound, do not actually know what they want. Additionally, it has been proven many times over in different games that a good game for the top end will result in a good game for the mid to low end.
@@ScarletHawkexactly right. And also maybe that the problem with mythic raids isnt necessarily the difficulty itself, but the requirement for exactly 20 players. That may not be a problem in liquid or poptart corndog, where people are standing in que to get in. But it very much is a problem for a top 100 guild
@@tomhoffs8209i do agree somewhat, which is why i specifically mentioned KSM or curve people. These guys are still good enough, invested enough and interested enough. I would be willing to bet that there are more curved people listening to this, than cutting edge.
I'm enjoying the podcast and you guys all have great ideas. My 2 cents on the podcast as a whole is to maybe invite in a casual content player or lower end dungeon/raid player. Most of your thoughts in the middle of this episode was X thing I didn't do cause it wasn't "challenging", but there's a huge chunk of this game that doesn't want the game to be overly challenging. As far as what I'd like to see for future expansion: I think continuing to add/modify the talent trees so what you gain for power stays with you is great and borrowed powers just feel bad whenever they go away, I think player housing would be really hard to pull off with this game engine and would rather see class halls return and a well thought out guild hall instead, and maybe allow players to go back and play visions, torghast, island expeditions, etc. to allow you to earn X amount of non power related currency (like some extra traders tenders).
hard pass on a difficulty between heroic and mythic. theres a decent gap but thats because mythic is made for world first raiders. just make heroic a little harder if you do anything.
I'd rather them just keep doing what they did with Dragonflight as opposed to what they did with BFA/Legion systems. The quality of the game just keeps going up with this method instead of constantly getting reset and eventually you will end up with a base game that is as good or better than the previous highest highs. Side content like Darkmoon fair needs to be vastly improved, Golden saucer from FF puts it to shame.
One of the main reasons bosses have repeating lines is they actually say something specific depending on mechanic, so if you just learn what lines to listen to it's exactly the same as making a WA beep at you. I don't know if they do it for literally every single mechanic, but as a very audio-based player I tend to be able to tell what's about to happen in a fight based on the boss lines more than DBM timers. I'd say it's pretty normal for players who don't outright mute the game, even if they don't actively notice they're doing it.
Id love for them to take a Diablo 3 approach to abilities. Keep the Talent Tree style as they are where you go down the tree and get buffs and select which abilities you want. Then a seperate system where you can modify what certain abilities can do. Pick Moonfire, do you want a hard hitting moonfire with longer CD and no DoT or do you want a Weaker DoT but it hits 2 or 3 targets per cast. Or normal Moonfire but it does Frost damage. Stuff like that would be way more fun for each class. Then you can add more abilities without it feeling like bloat because you can only select a certain number of abilities to hotbar at once.
1:01:30 Couldn't disagree more. Writers and viewers/players alike always fall into this weird logical trap where they think high stakes = better story. It's ridiculous. Ask a hundred players what their favourite moments were in a story and basically never will you hear "oh when they defeated the big baddie and saved the world". Literally nobody cares, the evil is always an excuse for the story. It allows for situations to happen that force character growth and drama. That's where the real value is at. The Thrall vs Garrosh cinematic in WoD is one of the most beloved cinematics ever. It has nothing to do with defeating a big baddie and everything to do with the tragedy of their history and the interpersonal drama between these two characters. It's reminiscing on how and where it all went so wrong and the guilt (or lack of) that Thrall feels towards that situation. It's emotional, it's impactful, it's fantastic. A different example: Denathrius. Widely beloved villain and most importantly NOT some old character. Denathrius has shown that Blizzard can literally invent a new villain out of the blue and have the audience love them. It had everything to do with the stellar writing, animating, and voice acting of him. If Denathrius was the main villain instead of Zovaal, who lacks any emotion, any clear motivation, any personality, Shadowlands would not have been received so badly. Zovaal as a villain is empty and hollow. So I strongly disagree that Blizzard couldn't make a banger expansion story. It's just that either they won't because they're too afraid to make any interesting narrative because it's not politically correct enough, or they simply don't have the talent in-house anymore to create a story worthwhile. Wow's characters are just disney-fied karikatures instead of deep, interesting characters. They take 0 risk and thus get 0 result.
Lool everyone cares about the big baddie if he’s bad ass . Whether it’s arthas or when illidan literally grabbed guldan by his throat and incinerated him then crushed his skull . But now all u get is sarkareth crying
With dragonflight the problem for me was that there wasnt enough progression. You get your tier and after that youre just looking for a little but of ilvl here and there.
I want them to open up 10 man mythic later in the tier Like halfway through they open up 10 man Maybe it has a different achievement with it, but overall leave 20 man but most guilds are done progging after 8-10 weeks and now they are farming
@@daralion2 Will never happen. The whole point of a set size is to make it easier to balance at the hardest difficulty. No shot mythic ever becomes a flex raid.
X% damage aura to the entire raid/group per unique class (or even per spec) and remove the raid buffs! Encourages bringing as many specs/classes as possible without having some class buffs feeling worse.
I feel the same way about not being able to do mythic for practice. I like M+ because it’s repeatable. If I run a key and it sucks, I can do it again and again and improve. I’ve actually done less repeat heroic recently because since it’s not personal loot, my lockout impacts other people’s chances to get things. I don’t like that.
I think all of you are not getting the LFR thing right. LFR existing kills any possible curiosity towards the raid itself. Those that are on the edge wether to raid or not will be satisfied with LFR but have to be contempt with the less than ideal social experience. And they will never have the spark to proceed with finding a guild, going through normal and hc and possibly even mythic with a set group of people and growing as a player in between.
surprised that there wasnt a legendary or questline each tier that gives you another talent point or two. it takes no effort on blizzards side and makes everyone happy with an almost decked out tree. when they revealed the tree rework the first thing that came to mind its gonna expand throughout the expansion like with the dragonflying skillpoints.
The whole problem with "we can't enough people for mythic" isn't that the number of people is 20, it's the mythic lockout system. It needs to be removed when HOF is filled at the very latest.
Tbh I think it would be better if the lockout stuff was removed once the first 10 people clear it or something.
it is also 20 people thing + you basically need 14specific classes for mythic raid.
@@Kyzarusty What ppl forget you only bring 14 specific classes on high tier mythic guilds, after i lets say top 300 it legit doesnt really matter what you bring, ofcourse there are some bosses who need a certain class but thats 80% of the time warlock cuz of gate and lets be real, you have atleast 3 ppl in the guild who would play warlock.
@@MrSnowgamer meh, i think its more than that though. Imagine your dk player is sick or w/e and dont have bench member who plays dk. And you need to prog a boss where dk grip is mandatory(maybe not mandatory but make it extremely more difficult), you just cant raid that night without a dk. Same thing can be applied to other situation that having specific class just make the fight so much easier.
Its good thing that certain classes bring advantage to certain encounters but being mandatory to have those classes make it so much harder.
Like last expansion we did mythic anduin without dks on one night, the fight is completely different and so much harder.
Now we have augmentation to deal with which completely changed everything in raid/m+.
Its already hard to have 20 people to participate 6-9+ hours everyweek and if you include benchs its more than 25+. Accessibility and barrier to the contents is higher than you think.
Also more requirements/raid buffs/mustbringclass getting added to raid is just bringing the barrier higher and higher.
@@Kyzarusty Also, having to coordinate 20 people to be there consistently throughout the tier is rough. And then hoping you have a solid few for bench just in case something happens. Life happens, and 10 man raiding would be amazing and would have a TON more mythic clears and make the best gear available to more players. Just my personal opinion.
I think a major "Thing they need to fix" isn't classes/professions/raids/dungeons. This stuff is all in an ok place to me. It's actually new player experience. It feels like WoW in its current state, is just slowly losing current players over time for a variety of reasons, but not bringing in many new players. I think doing something to make the game actually bring in new players would be great for the long term experience.
No irony. Have Dorki intro/outro each episode. Those dulcet tones deserve to be the first and last sound waves to enter our ears. (He's also just going to get better at it over time.).
Great job, great selection of complimentary personalities and game knowledge. Any coincidence these 3 main tanks? I think not.
deep voice dorki intro, it's very calming
Something I would love to see is cosmetics for spell effects, like what PoE does. This is nearly endless potential on Blizzards end that would be AMAZING.
So glad max made a podcast. Listening to him talk is the best while playing games
Outro so good. Made me laugh. Dorki 100 percent my favorite personality on the podcast. Great job guys
Yeah they need to let him speak more
Wow, Dorki's take on "you don't get any fulfillment out of LFR, Normal or Heroic raid" is so jacked
nah just out of touch tbh i have some casual friends who like doing that stuff for fun
When we got AOTC G'huun the screams on discord were as loud as anything you've heard from RWF. I know my place, I am not mythic quality or skill. Heroic IS an actual challenge and accomplishment for me, and many other players.
I had many aotc so it doesn't give me that dopamine hit, mythic raid can do it but I can't commit myself to it.
Very much in living a bubble, forgetting there are people with normal lives also playing the game.
There is absolutely fulfilment in heroic if your skill level as a guild is at that level. It took us ages to kill jailer for example and when we did we felt good
I think LFR has its place as a stepping stone for getting /something/ at least. I came back to Dragonflight like 2-3 weeks ago (taking another short break before the patch). I think if you're popping into the expansion really late, it does help with getting some things and getting the foot in the door. Key scaling is a lot different from when I last played in Shadowlands Season 1, but I do think LFR helped a little as a stepping stone to make starting M+ a little easier. 2 weeks later we got Keystone Hero, did Dawn of the Infinite and sitting on a nice ilvl of 443 to go into 10.2 to start things off.
Speaking as someone who uses lfr raiding. I started in SL. So me being able to lfr a raid helps me be confident enough with the raid content to do normal and heroic. For people at dorkis level and high end players don't need it. But it helps the lower end guys
As a person that only does LFR, removing it would eliminate me from doing raids. I don't see any reasoning that would be for taking content from players.
@@jasonbrown1201 There is nothing preventing them from doing a story difficulty where casual players get to "experience" the raid zone and story. IDC what anyone says but LFR is not raiding. There is little to no communication, griefers, people who afk or die on purpose to get free loot. For people who only do LFR this should not be an issue, they still get to see the raid, maybe get some reward, and Blizzard gets to save the work and diminish the total ilvl increase.
@@connor654 Actually I agree with what you are saying. I believe if they removed the story context from raid and removed LFR, that would be the best result.
I find it weird how the raid is filled with story conclusions that most of the raid community doesn't even care about: that was obvious with Dorki and Max's comment in the video, and yet the lore (story) players don't care about doing raids.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have story content outside raids and raid not have any story content? Then LFR wouldn't be needed and raid dev's would have more freedom.
BTW, I am not really just a casual player in the conventional sense. I do only LFR, and very low level Mythic+ (under 7- don't get into affixes), but I do watch RWF, MDI and AWC every season.
I have cleared the raid on mythic and I still see LFR as an essential difficulty . It got me into raiding back in cata . And I still do LFR . It’s has its own fun !
I would even say they should tune down LFR a bit as we’ve always wiped on last boss in both raz and sark. And it just ends up with people fighting , people kicking . And people leaving . And I don’t think that form of toxicity should exist in LFR
"Theres some pretty baddragons comming out of this vault" -DRATTY
@ 22:26
Here's the thing with removing LFR argument. As mythic raiders, you are not seeing the problem LFR creates because you're not facing the same struggles that Normal and HC guilds are facing. LFR creates the problem that you do not need a guild to experience the end game, which has always been a pivotal part of WoW and will continue to be. There are lots of Normal/Casual guilds and HC guilds struggling to recruit players because there is not a need to be in a guild to experience end content. Casual guilds essentially started dying after LFR was introduced. This is why there has been a fight to remove LFR and bring back guilds (I'm sure you've heard this argument discussed before). If you want guild numbers to go back up and bring back the sense of community, you have to remove the accessibility to do every piece of content without a team.
It's the same problem with Mythic Plus (pugging). Everyone complains about pugging in Mythic Plus is an absolute dogshit experience. M+ is meant to be done with friends and guild members, not through pugging. As a player who has done it both ways, I can attest that playing with guildies is a 200% better experience. I absolutely refuse to pug into M+ now. The grass is way greener and healthier on the other side.
Imo borrowed power is fine as long as it’s not the constant grind and fomo when you are busy for a week. When missing a week feels like you are just behind from that point on is bad
As far as Dorki wanting something related to the old characters. The issue is they basically went down a checklist of all the villains and didn't build up anything new along the way, which was a huge mistake. There isn't really a great way to fix that without building up new villains and not completely throwing everything away this time around. I thought Arthas was going to be their "get out of jail free" card in Shadowlands but they completely fucked up that whole thing.
Dorki has a point in a way. The reason my guild doesn't do mythic is we have 20 people for heroic raid but not 20 that want to do mythic. For established mythic raiders it seems bad. Which is fair
Max's point of WoW's story being like a CW show resonated with me big time. I still really enjoy playing the game but I never really thought of it from that perspective and it makes a lot of sense.
Very good podcast. Can't wait for dorki's bed time story.
Really great to hear a thoughtful answer to the "how to get better" question! Thanks lads, this pod is off to a killer start :)
I'm not sure if the person who asked the question regarding getting better at mythic raid will read comments but, like Max was saying and Dorki eluded to... Just play the hardest content you can more, and greed damage. Do not care (as much) about mechanics, even if you int the raid, you're top priority to improve should be maximizing damage, and the more you are able to do this, the natural fight cadence and PvE feel will just naturally enable you to do mechanics better. You MUST FAIL in order to know your limits. If you play it safe always, you will never push you're capabilities. I went through the same thing, but happened to get lucky and went straight from a heroic guild to a top 30 US guild, where I prioritized survival in order to prove what I thought was important in doing the mechanics well at first, but then noticed how everyone else was playing, and no one cared if they died because it happened rare enough, and everyone greeded damage. This change in mindset vastly improved my skill at the game almost instantly
Dorki being like "now I have no idea whats going on" but also not knowing that it was Xe'ra (or what Xe'ra is) that Illidan blasted, lol, you didn't know then either sir.
They could work on creating horizontal progression using concepts from old expacs. I hear that is how GW2 works where the expansion and endgame of the base game are not based in verticality (new level cap, higher ilvl) but on expanding your character horizontally (expanded trees or skill customization based on the features of the expansion that carry over in to other). Like I said, I have not experienced GW2 horizontal progression myself but I only hear good things about it from the community because it keeps older content relevant and for new players, it allows them to have so much to do instead of in WoW where the only purpose for doing older content is to farm for mogs and mounts (oddly enough pets are relevant everywhere it seems). One of the worst feelings I have as someone who started this January in DF, is that there is so much cool stuff (looking at Legion) that I missed out on. I can't even get challenge mode appearances and the tone of the game and the characters were so much more interesting than what DF has to offer.
Imagine a new player come in to wow and wants to raid. They go to lfr, fail all mechanics and still beat the boss, while also learn nothing during the encounter. They’re like “oh raiding is easy” then venture into normal and failed miserably. It served no purpose as a raid difficulty. If you want a story mode raid, make it that you queue with 24 npc characters as “story mode”
Never understood the criticism of expansion-specific systems. It's a good thing that WoW changes, that stuff is given and taken away. It's always been a living game, a journey.
The piece of the game that's been missing for a long time is challenging single player-oriented open world content. Leveling hasn't been a challenge since Vanilla, and at max there's been no reason to do challenging content in the open world for years (except in the first couple weeks of an expansion). IMO, they should--
- Get rid of shared tags. Competition for tags is a key reason why Classic works. At max, it means you can put good items on open world mobs.
- Get rid of level scaling. You should be able to try to kill higher level mobs for the potential benefit of more XP; or farm lower-level mobs for similar reasons. You should feel your power progression.
- Add relevant challenging max-level single-player oriented zones. Make it feel good to go to raid, M+, to get better gear, and use that gear to be more successful in open world zones.
Not a huge fan of single-player instanced transmog-oriented content. I didn't care for Suramar -- the Withered system was a little time time-gatey, a little too complex. Mage Tower was fine. Visions was good, I enjoyed the challenge. I *do* think that this content needs to give good rewards, but it has to be challenging else people will find it's a grind.
By the way, more challenging single player content would be good for training people for raid.
Torghast and mage tower with scaling difficulty would be kinda cool
Lore, man.
They need to focus on the actual narrative of the world instead of trying to find newer external bad guys to fight.
BfA's story was such a banger on that regards. They gave us looks on all those factions we knew from the past, the world actually got bigger for a short bit of time.
They need to do the same with the ENTIRETY of Azeroth and make the entire world updated to what it is currently in the story.
The story needs to develop like GoT's earlier seasons and keep the focus on the world building.
Shoutout to Warcraft Recorder, absolutely goated for watching replays of pulls.
Watching yourself play is an easy way to question wtf you're doing at times. To find mistakes. Find things in your UI that you can update.
Poor Fronk getting smashed by the casters. You're doing great bud! Shout to Fronk!
Suggestion - Stop previews, it's like a spoiler that I have to hear again in the same content. Just let it rock.
I think this helps to get ppl hooked in for a longer vid
Off topic, but Dr. Atnos' beard is so sick. Looks really good on him 100%
They should do the same thing with Story as power, stop doing "borrowed power story". We need way more returning and evergreen characters. The best and coolest new character will never get as much of a reaction as a returning character you already have history with.
Imagine next expansion you are doing stuff with Magni again. Ppl hated him or at least made fun of him in BFA, but if he came back he would be recognizable, memeable and familiar. Or imagine somehow Forgelite Mikanikos shows up like "I'm here to help bitches", I'd love that. Just because I know who he is already, and he can have some kind of progression - not just "here's a new character, ok now they're gone again".
I love what they are doing with Iridikron, and that he will be around at least into the next expansion, I don't care nearly much about the one-off guys like Fyrakk (at least he had story through the expansion) or Sarkereth (who even is he..).
53:30 bellular mention it somewhere. The problem with timerift is that your inputs dont matter. only that you are there matters and in extension how many friends you bring. but how hard you dps the mobs has basically no effect on your reward,
It’s kind of warfronts, but with more variety.
Final Fantasy XIV has maintained it's story well, but it's story focused. I prefer how WoW plays, but Endwalker brought me to tears multiple times in one expansion.
Opinion question for next podcast: Return of Hybrid Tax? In favor or no? If so, old implementation or different way?
Me before Dratnos said player housing: 🤔
Me when Dratnos said player housing: 🤗
they should make every dungeon have a Challenge mode, true bronze silver gold timed run scaled down to a challenging ILVL of ALL dungeons in the game. Gain rewards on completing all the CM's for an expansion. incorporate all the ex content and give us a real challenge for all the past dungeons
For the love of god please give us borrowed power, give me something to do outside of raid/m+. I know lots of people don't want chores, but I WANT a reason to log on the game every day. The biggest problem with virtually every version of borrowed power is the acquisition sucks and then the magically fix it a year later and everyone likes it.
There is "nothing" to do in DF, and I'm sure some people enjoy the whole "expansion that respects my time" the option to do more should exist.
Not sure if you're aware but it released last night on Spotify already - not sure if intended
Yeah aware! let the audio listeners feast first as it requires very little work to release them =)
Give us 10 man raid!
Mythic 20man raid is cool and all but, managing 20-25people + having to have every raid buff available + gotta have warlock, aura mastery, grip is just too much. Now we have augmentation to deal with too. Barrier to mythic raid is getting higher higher.
I understand that there is concern on mythic raid being less good because variety/quality of raid would go down if number of players required for mythic raid is less than 20, but i believe blizzard can pull it off. Even 5man mythic+ contents are challenging and enjoyable, Im pretty sure they can provide quality 10man mythic.
Homogenize raid buff, or make it buffs that you can choose as options for each boss(npc infront of raid boss that gives you buffs you choose for the boss), if your guild is missing a dk, give us option to get an active button to use grip or whatever.
I understand that blizzard is forcing mythic raid to get every single class to be in but its just too much. Eg)Your dk is sick, unless you have a dk bench member you cant kill a boss(or it gets extremely harder). Giving unique buff to every class is good but mendatory for certain fight/mythic raid is just not a good design. Each class have different population too.
With weakaura tracking every mechanics, mechanics are getting harder and harder in sake of making it complicated rather than mechanics being fun. I would prefer blizzard to make auras not trackable(private aura) so that players dont have to heavily rely on weakaura.
I believe current wow mythic raid is too complicated and almost non-clearable without weakaura, which is very bad design, and the accessibility is really really bad.
Its not something you would try after clearing heroic and want more challenging raid.
The amount of the effort, time investment, requiring weakauras, dealing with people more than 20 people every week for 6-9+ hours.
Accessibility/barrier need to improve.
Firstly, big fan of this podcast and its members. But, that being said, I really wish when you discuss topics such as 10man or the number of difficulties in the game, you'd stop looking at it mainly from a mythic raider's perspective. Mythic raiders are such a minute part of the raiding community as a whole. While that perspective should be included, it cannot be the main driving force, which is what it seems anytime Dratnos or Max talk about these topics in this stream and in general. Love this podcast, but it's kind of hard to swallow some of the takes coming from Max and Dratnos on topics that concern players way out of their circle.
10 man raiding would be universally welcomed back, especially with the playerbase being how it is now, in terms of numbers alone. I have seen over 7 mythic raiding guilds on my realm. that I was in, die due to lack or participation or lack or recruitment in the last year alone, in my own personal experience. That is not normal, it wasn't the case in BFA, for example. There need to be raid sizes for challenging content tha accomodate the new reality of player numbers.
Best approach to take in such situations is to say 'I don't know the full extent of how this affects the entire playerbase' and move on, instead of dying on the hill of mythic raiding perspective.
Also, I think that graph max drew, and always draws in multiple streams, is pretty inaccurate. DF stayed strong till 10.1, but it started going a bit downhill from there on many perspectives - class balance (Aug Hello, and god comp), A plot/story, queue times due to lower participation overall (headless horseman takes 10mins to pop...that's a red flag), pvp basically dead post 10.1, etc. etc. The DF graph trends downhill post 10.1. You don't want them to begin the next expac at that level. Again, this is why its important to get some opinions from outside your own bubbles.
I mean, both Max and Dratnos said that 10 man would make raiding worse for them but it would be better for the game overall. "There's no fulfillment in Heroic" take is wild tho
How are you supposed to talk about 10 man from any perspective but mythic raiders? You can already raid 10 man (or any raid size for that matter) in heroic or normal. 10 man literally only affects mythic raiders.
They just need to give fully account wide progress. All the problems with past systems wasn't for mains but kicked in when you tried to alt. The only way any system will work is they fully allow alts to play from day 1. Imagine today if crests were account wide, alts would be a whole lot less boring
Yes Max "for you" it would be hard, but for the majority it would be a lot better.
43:29 Had a thought experiment on a borrowed power Legendary Gear track with a plus three steps over myth that changes each season. All bop drops (minus trinkets) have a chance to be legendary versions with increased stats, third secondary stat, a relative tertiary stat and a class specific bonus. You can continue to get Legendaries but only equip one, you pull out the power of one to keep upgrading through out a season. Uses crests to upgrade at normal gear tracks and requires power of another legendary to bump to next track or push those top three levels. Max cap on drop rate with drop protection added as you play/time passes reset when you get another drop.
10 man raiding would be amazing. With all the games people are playing now a days 20 is just too many people. It's not realistic for semi hardcore people to put 20 good members. I do think 20 is better for hardcore players but for everyone else 10 is just better.
In terms of power creep, I really like the Legion legendary system. Just make all the legendaries throughput legendaries this time, don't try to do Sephuz and double talent dippers and whatever. Make them all good and make them gameplay defining where it actually changes your rotation. The game is always going to look like Path of Exile because Path of Exile does it properly. Think of Legendaries as PoE uniques, they're gameplay changing, they're not just super beefy stat sticks.
The true beauty of the Legendaries was you got them from doing anything. The Blingtron robot could give you one for crying out loud. Every aspect of the game felt playable because you could get a relevant legendary.
I think Glyphs should also come back or something similar, like a separate interface where we can do flavor and non throughput stuff to our character.
I wish they would add a gauntlet to the game. A gauntlet is not a dungeon, you don't need to go anywhere or travel, but instead just send waves and waves of enemies at the group that get progressively harder and your group just has to figure it out, kinda like Mage Tower meets Violet Hold meets Islands meets Challenges. Have some line of sight spots and that's it. Make consumes usable. Make it send bosses at random so you don't know what boss will come. You could even have affixes progressively kick in and have like an NPC that lets you toggle an intermission in case someone has to go to the bathroom or something "half time". I can't believe they haven't done something like this yet.
something of a "casual" thing to bring along would be update garrison, even if fuck mission tables make pandaria farm be in there and farm current cooking mats from there while also having trophys from achievements like aotc on sark would have sark wings and CE him as a corpse hung on a pillar, make it so you can show off your stuff. They spent loads on making a big personal garrison and then ditched it instead of working on it a bit constantly to progress with you.. Would be a sort of a "player housing" as well if more customisations can be allowed there.
The Professions are a good place to add kind of borrowed powers into the game.
I would almost argue they've solved the end of expansion peak with the combination of what we've seen in Dragonflight, S4 of SL, and corruption.
If 10.2 is the last "raid" of the expansion, end with 10.3 being the "Season 4" and bring in temporary power increases on par with corruption for that fun/broken victory lap of Dragonflight, just set all the M+ dungeons to the DF dungeons (no legacy) and have the raids rotate. Use affixes that are largely beneficial for M+s through a 4th affix that's onpar with Awakening and Encrypted and have less awkward raid affixes that are largely beneficial.
I thought about this while listening to you guys talking about Torghast. What if you went into Torghast not as a class, and the anima powers grant you random class abilities to use? so you build a new character with some warlock, warrior, mage abilities all on one character?
I think stuff like azerite armor and legion weapons are a good system if you put a cap each week on how much you can upgrade them. The largest complaints about those systems was the fact people felt like they had to grind them so they wouldn't fall behind. If you did even a trvial amount each week that was easily obtainable than i think most people would have been fine with it.
I can tell you the exact moment I quit BfA. The first day the first world boss was up I killed it and got dope new shoulders, way higher ilvl than I had, but I lost my azerite power from the old shoulders and I wasn't even remotely close to unlocking the first tier on the new ones (this was maybe a week or two after launch? Whenever the world bosses went up). I had never felt such emotional whiplash to a gear drop before. Getting a new piece actively felt awful. A cap would not have solved that, Azerite armor was fundamentally broken as a system because it took the awful feeling of losing power at the beginning of every borrowed-power expansion, and put it onto your gear, so you could keep those little hits of sadness rolling through even after you were done leveling. Legion artifacts were much better in this regard because it was power you worked towards, not something that you could unlock and then lose over and over again depending on the specifics of the gear you had.
I think they should definitely bring back 10-man raiding but have the 10-man raid be a separate raid that isn't being scaled for anything outside of 10. The 10-man raid can be a .5 patch raid like content that comes alongside a mega dungeon.
The most powerful we've ever been, compared to content. Was the end of Warlords of Draenor. The legendary Ring allowed us to kill Mythic Bosses in 30 seconds or Less. that was Pre-Borrowed Power. They just need to give us the power creep we want, but less complicated.
Player housing in the form of ships where we can sail and do missions controlling our customizable ship, which we also put our trophies in?
One thing I'd have added in the crafting discussion for 2handers is that for the strength specs that will gain access to the new legendary, the long term value of the craft is heavily reduced. This is heavily depending on the acquisition timeline for it though.
Overall having to go an extra fortnight banking a spark for the craft and then eventually discarding it means it just might not be worth crafting at all compared to other pieces, and you'd just hope to nab a mythic track one in the vault prior to getting the legendary.
Regarding the Patreon Question: I went in BFA from only Heroic Raiding directly to N'zoth Cutting Edge Progression (World 500) since ppl believed in my player skill from playing with them in M+ - we killed N'zoth the first time after 40 Trys since I joined the Guild and was put in the progression squad. Never thought I could carry my weight, but apparently I was a lot better than I thought of myself. Regarding Improving I would suggest don't worry too much about having not enough practice just try to understand then fights, and you will easily improve fast enough.
The main argument I hear for reducing the number of raid difficulties is ilvl bloat. Like maybe LFR should just be Mythic 0 and Normal only a little above that as the "friends and fam" difficulty. Then focus on Heroic & Mythic being the main raid difficulties. IDK if there's a perfect solution is, but 48 ilvl is a lot per tier.
The thought that the game may need borrowed power kinda relates to ilvl bloat as well. The constant need to get more and more and more powerful just feeds into more bloat issues. Would be interesting if gear sets/tier sets were not such throw aways every raid tier.
Player housing - Custamize abilities, sort of like giving retri a divine storm a redish color instaid of yellow.
Also Account reputation - cba doing the same farms on 13 characthers, litterly impossible to finish up weekly key's, raids, and also farming / doing all the quests just to unlock one recepie for your alt at renown 20...
Didn't really know this was a thing, glad to have found it.
Always enjoy watching some Max and Daddy Dratty takes
In 2023 10-man is definitely too small for todays retail. but a raid size around 14-16, would be probably more perfect. I feel like so many groups field 15 players pretty well, it's getting that last 25% of a raid team that get filled with floorlickers or people who dont have the same desire as the other 70% of the raid team.
There is a new borrowed power called “getting a rework”. You get to be op for a couple months during which you get 18 consecutive nerfs
This sparks joy
Is 10 man Mythic raid really a popular idea? Max said he thinks people would be more excited for that anything else they could announce, but I don't really ever see anyone talk about 10 man raiding at all. Is this just my media bubble? I certainly consume more WoW content than the average WoW fan, so I feel like I would have stumbled upon this conversation if it was actually prevalent.
It's absolutely prevalent. I consume a ton of wow content too and see it everywhere. People complaining that their friends quit so now they can't play because they have too few people. People complaining that they are forced to play with someone they don't like just to fill out the roster when they want to play with friends. People complaining that managing such a big raid team is too much. Etc etc etc
If they made torghast a solo m+ type dungeon that rewards cosmetics like pvp gladiator gear. The top floor pushers of each class gets titles and rewards. But they made it relate to progression and forced and u fun being capped floors.
The only meaningful contribution to evergreen systems that they haven't done yet is focusing on world-building instead of world-replacing. The way you get players to buy back into the game and feel nostalgia at the same time as engagement for new content is by creating a dynamic environment. Every expansion introduces some new ridiculous island, and now that we've plumbed the W3 depths for all it's worth, the only way to introduce more is by either making it up (which players WILL hate) or taking what already exists and making it fresh and new. Players loved cataclysm because it took the familiar world and put a new twist on it. Players hated shadowlands because we went to some moronic afterlife world with zones that were only thematically connected to what we've already experienced. Players would've engaged WAY MORE with Slands if it took a Cata-style approach to overlaying the shadowlands on top of Azeroth and experiencing the familiar places from a new, deathly perspective.
Bruh the timestamp guy doin OT give my man a raise
Without the devs spending way too much time implementing broken borrowed power systems then taking 2 years to perfect them. I honestly don’t see a reason why they can’t surprise us all and achieve a 14-16 month release cycle going forward.
I like the way renown, world quests and events currently work and it’s mainly all for cosmetics even if I’m logging in at 2am and it’s dead there is something to do. I never just stand in the capital cities like previous xpacs and more importantly i never feel like im falling behind or guilt if I’m busy doing life. They do need to improve raid accessibility outside lfr tho, merge normal and hc and make mythic flex after week 4-5 when its been cleared by the top 100. The dragon flight story has missed the mark but if they can get a great story next xpac and take us back to the old world zones i think it could be a winner imagine doing world quests like pirate assaults in booty bay or dark portal or scourge invasions. And rewarded with cosmetic glyphs.
improve the new player experience ready for the Microsoft game pass players to get them hooked.
Loving the new podcast
I feel like adding a borrowed power would be fine. 1 thing you acquire that's fun and impactful and thematic to the expansion that develops over the course of the expansion. No grind but something on top of your class and spec trees. World content needs a huge overhaul
start of Legion broke me
I got the worst legendaries on my warrior.
leveled another warrior toon, got weak ones too.
I could not perform, I felt super useless. I had to minmax the hardest in my life to even get green ilvl logs.
Quit afterwards, and had been playing since early vanilla until then.
The talent system probably just needs abit more refinement and if people really get bored they could expand the tree so you have more vertical lines even therefore more customisation of your play style.
Tl;dr: I would love it if you guys could dedicate an episode to navigating logs. I hate the user interface for logs and I don’t understand it.
I really liked the Patreon question at the end. I think it would be awesome if you guys could do an episode that is purely dedicated to logs. I’m a fairly experienced and skilled player with CE under my belt and a few seasons of 3k+ io. I have been raid leading heroic for my casual ish guild and my biggest pitfall is that I simply do not understand how to dive into logs and navigate through it. It seems like a really poorly designed user interface to me. I understand graphs, I have a scientific education and work in a technical job. It’s really just navigating through logs that gets me. For example on Raz, I was trying to figure out how to see when the boss was casting certain abilities, and when the raid was using their raid dr abilities, and I spend like literally 6 hours trying to figure it out and honestly can’t even remember how I finally ended up finding what I was looking for.
as a casual/aotc raider and not much of a m+ enjoyer in SL I LOVED thorgast.
Maybe I’m weird, but I have a lot of fun in LFR lol I love when it gets chaotic and ridiculous and people freak out over the most minuscule shit. It’s hilarious and fun like I said I’m weird.
After seeing how many people play ESO like solely for housing, I think if there was a player housing system in WoW that people cared about, that could be HUGE for the game. So, like Dratnos said, if we don't get anything PvE-related, I hope they do do housing and tie it into the new profession system. They could even pull from New World and have a new profession that's furnishing or something like that, or have a new tree for a few profession that craft housing-specific items, something like that.
I know that people want 10man raiding, but instead of making it raid content there might be a place for it on the dungeon side.
With the rotating M+ dungeon pools there might be a chance to do something along the line of a really challenging even bigger mega dungeon each season instead of the basic expansion dungeons we are used to.
Wouldnt it be cool if you get a curve/KSM pleb as a guest every other week or something? I think it would be good to have some comments about some of these topics from someone who doesnt play this as a job.
This is what I want but I very much doubt it will happen. I could see dorki engage with more casual viewers and try to understand their point of view, but as much as I love max he just can't get there.
I know that he says he really tries not to advocate for high end players getting changes and recognize the other part of the playerbase and all that. But very often he will give a take and someone will try to give a more casual perspective and he will just say that doesn't exist. And it's like, but that's literally wow for most people
The problem is that those people are usually not invested enough into the game to have nuanced takes and quite often, as derogatory as that may sound, do not actually know what they want. Additionally, it has been proven many times over in different games that a good game for the top end will result in a good game for the mid to low end.
I just want someone to call them on some of their takes that show they live in a bubble (Dorki's "Heroic provides no fulfilment" take).
@@ScarletHawkexactly right. And also maybe that the problem with mythic raids isnt necessarily the difficulty itself, but the requirement for exactly 20 players. That may not be a problem in liquid or poptart corndog, where people are standing in que to get in. But it very much is a problem for a top 100 guild
@@tomhoffs8209i do agree somewhat, which is why i specifically mentioned KSM or curve people. These guys are still good enough, invested enough and interested enough. I would be willing to bet that there are more curved people listening to this, than cutting edge.
I'm enjoying the podcast and you guys all have great ideas. My 2 cents on the podcast as a whole is to maybe invite in a casual content player or lower end dungeon/raid player. Most of your thoughts in the middle of this episode was X thing I didn't do cause it wasn't "challenging", but there's a huge chunk of this game that doesn't want the game to be overly challenging.
As far as what I'd like to see for future expansion: I think continuing to add/modify the talent trees so what you gain for power stays with you is great and borrowed powers just feel bad whenever they go away, I think player housing would be really hard to pull off with this game engine and would rather see class halls return and a well thought out guild hall instead, and maybe allow players to go back and play visions, torghast, island expeditions, etc. to allow you to earn X amount of non power related currency (like some extra traders tenders).
hard pass on a difficulty between heroic and mythic. theres a decent gap but thats because mythic is made for world first raiders. just make heroic a little harder if you do anything.
I'd rather them just keep doing what they did with Dragonflight as opposed to what they did with BFA/Legion systems. The quality of the game just keeps going up with this method instead of constantly getting reset and eventually you will end up with a base game that is as good or better than the previous highest highs. Side content like Darkmoon fair needs to be vastly improved, Golden saucer from FF puts it to shame.
so i use the boss voice lines as my timer sounds idk if thats normal but its prity nice on some bosses
One of the main reasons bosses have repeating lines is they actually say something specific depending on mechanic, so if you just learn what lines to listen to it's exactly the same as making a WA beep at you. I don't know if they do it for literally every single mechanic, but as a very audio-based player I tend to be able to tell what's about to happen in a fight based on the boss lines more than DBM timers. I'd say it's pretty normal for players who don't outright mute the game, even if they don't actively notice they're doing it.
Id love for them to take a Diablo 3 approach to abilities.
Keep the Talent Tree style as they are where you go down the tree and get buffs and select which abilities you want. Then a seperate system where you can modify what certain abilities can do.
Pick Moonfire, do you want a hard hitting moonfire with longer CD and no DoT or do you want a Weaker DoT but it hits 2 or 3 targets per cast. Or normal Moonfire but it does Frost damage.
Stuff like that would be way more fun for each class. Then you can add more abilities without it feeling like bloat because you can only select a certain number of abilities to hotbar at once.
Torghast was so fun once nothing significant was riding on the result.
Visions were dope honestly better than torghast or warfronts, if they iterated and built on them imo it'd be pretty sick
I think they should aim to release AT LEAST a new Dungeon with every major patch/season.
Repetition is the father of learning
-Weezy
my new favorite podcast!
1:01:30 Couldn't disagree more. Writers and viewers/players alike always fall into this weird logical trap where they think high stakes = better story. It's ridiculous. Ask a hundred players what their favourite moments were in a story and basically never will you hear "oh when they defeated the big baddie and saved the world". Literally nobody cares, the evil is always an excuse for the story. It allows for situations to happen that force character growth and drama. That's where the real value is at. The Thrall vs Garrosh cinematic in WoD is one of the most beloved cinematics ever. It has nothing to do with defeating a big baddie and everything to do with the tragedy of their history and the interpersonal drama between these two characters. It's reminiscing on how and where it all went so wrong and the guilt (or lack of) that Thrall feels towards that situation. It's emotional, it's impactful, it's fantastic. A different example: Denathrius. Widely beloved villain and most importantly NOT some old character. Denathrius has shown that Blizzard can literally invent a new villain out of the blue and have the audience love them. It had everything to do with the stellar writing, animating, and voice acting of him. If Denathrius was the main villain instead of Zovaal, who lacks any emotion, any clear motivation, any personality, Shadowlands would not have been received so badly. Zovaal as a villain is empty and hollow. So I strongly disagree that Blizzard couldn't make a banger expansion story. It's just that either they won't because they're too afraid to make any interesting narrative because it's not politically correct enough, or they simply don't have the talent in-house anymore to create a story worthwhile.
Wow's characters are just disney-fied karikatures instead of deep, interesting characters. They take 0 risk and thus get 0 result.
Lool everyone cares about the big baddie if he’s bad ass . Whether it’s arthas or when illidan literally grabbed guldan by his throat and incinerated him then crushed his skull . But now all u get is sarkareth crying
I love this podcast so much. More plz.
Merge heroic and normal. Introduce 10 man specific content like they did with m+. R+ but 10 man only.
With dragonflight the problem for me was that there wasnt enough progression. You get your tier and after that youre just looking for a little but of ilvl here and there.
Illidan walking in but it is not illidan, it is John Stormrage.
I want them to open up 10 man mythic later in the tier
Like halfway through they open up 10 man
Maybe it has a different achievement with it, but overall leave 20 man but most guilds are done progging after 8-10 weeks and now they are farming
doesnt even have to be 10 man, like a variable raid size mythic with the .5 patch drops would be so cool
@@daralion2 Will never happen. The whole point of a set size is to make it easier to balance at the hardest difficulty. No shot mythic ever becomes a flex raid.
I like your guy's talk here. I'm really enjoying this.
Make consecration be able to turn in to divine hammers like ret for prot too
X% damage aura to the entire raid/group per unique class (or even per spec) and remove the raid buffs! Encourages bringing as many specs/classes as possible without having some class buffs feeling worse.
Speaking of lord of the rings, I think Sarg tied himself to the sword like Sauron did the ring and they’re gonna bring him back, calling it
I feel the same way about not being able to do mythic for practice. I like M+ because it’s repeatable. If I run a key and it sucks, I can do it again and again and improve. I’ve actually done less repeat heroic recently because since it’s not personal loot, my lockout impacts other people’s chances to get things. I don’t like that.
I've been waiting for years for them to bring back the Brawler's Guild
Souls podcast next
I think all of you are not getting the LFR thing right.
LFR existing kills any possible curiosity towards the raid itself. Those that are on the edge wether to raid or not will be satisfied with LFR but have to be contempt with the less than ideal social experience.
And they will never have the spark to proceed with finding a guild, going through normal and hc and possibly even mythic with a set group of people and growing as a player in between.
YOURE WELCOME FOR GETTING TO MEET ME
surprised that there wasnt a legendary or questline each tier that gives you another talent point or two. it takes no effort on blizzards side and makes everyone happy with an almost decked out tree. when they revealed the tree rework the first thing that came to mind its gonna expand throughout the expansion like with the dragonflying skillpoints.
They could do an evergreen system and then additions in the .5 and .7 patches like the onyx annulet. Maybe like a class/spec weapon or some thing.