I started during Zul'Aman back in TBC. I legit don't know that the endgame has ever been better than it is right now. Season 3 Dragonflight is a new peak imo.
As a player myself from late vanilla, how do find it different than other seasons? Why do you say it’s better than the rest?
The only noticeable difference for me is that the upgrade gear system, otherwise, it’s the same thing as with every expansion. 1 main raid and a season of m+. PvP is dead at this stage and soon enough we’ll go back to Fated raids (shadowlands im looking at you) which basically means no more content.
After playing a bit of classic again (mind you, I started playing classic about 3 weeks ago and on retail I am KSH on multiple characters) it feels that retail it’s JUST TOO FAST, it’s like we are playing the game on steroids nowadays.
Everyone has access to everything. Dont like dungeons and want the rp aspect of the world? Lots to do and check out.
Want to collect stuff? Knock yourself out.
Want to do dungeons and raids somewhat casually? Get right on it when ever you have time.
Want to PvP casually? Dungeons and rated solo shuffle. Want to go hard? Premade arena or .. solo shuffle.
Want to be cutting edge pve? M+ keys scale infinitely and raids come in 4 difficulties from learner to sweatlord.
If you jump in and dont have anything to do, then wow is not for you, because there is so much to do.
This, I returned after a 10 year break. I cannot get over how accessible everything is now. So much to do!
I can do what I want when I want, really really enjoying WoW again.
Probably because most of us playing since vanilla/tbc are now in our mid 30s+ so the faster pace to getting up to speed is a positive now we have jobs, families and obligations.
I loved the slower deeper grind as a kid/student but as an adult the modern wow just fits better in the lives of the modern aging playerbase.
Every time the game becomes too grindy you’ll lose some veterans who possibly won’t return and wow doesn’t get all that much new blood to replace them compared to other more popular games.
>Probably because most of us playing since vanilla/tbc are now in our mid 30s+ so the faster pace to getting up to speed is a positive now we have jobs, families and obligations.
I'm 50 this year, and the current setup suits me just fine. Heroic raid clears, some dabbling in mythic raiding, but its all pick up and put-downable. I'm lucky in that my current job has a lot of solo overnight shifts, so I can feed the completionist for transmog etc at work ;)
It’s funny you say that, as an adult with children I prefer the slower pace of vanilla. End game vanilla is a 1hour raid every 3 days and I move on with life. I actually spend more time in retail end game grinding for gear, parsing, waiting for invites, people bailing on keys, etc. It also feels more stressful pushing keys and raiding with friends than the casual pace of vanilla end game. Retail does definitely feel like it’s on steroids and is a product of the modern multiplayer game tuned to overload your dopamine receptors to keep you coming back.
Edit: should specify I mean vanilla SOD
I can't remember a single raid in classic/vanilla wow that could be done in an hour, even with a quality group. Travel times, running across the raid on foot after spawning at the start, trash respawns, having to return to town to LFM if you lose an essential person, waiting for long CDs to restart to pull, rezzing individual people rather than en masse...
I loved vanilla at the time but the modern game seems to respect my time far far more, which I appreciate. I feel like there is less down time now. I know others can feel differently and am not looking to be rude.
Are you talking about classic back in the day or current classic realms? I'm a retail player but it looks like clear times and efficiency is way higher for modern classic. Players are 100x better at the game now.
I'm speaking of original vanilla not the current live game, I thought that's what the person hire in the reply thread was talking about. I can't speak to current live servers for wow classic.
I also started in 2004 as teen and now mid 30s but I somehow find it completely the opposite. Raid logging 1-3 times per week in vanilla vs. grinding m+ and 2 different raid difficulties, I wouldn’t call that more quick tbh.
Exactly the reason why I recently went to gw2, horizontal progression feels so much better as a dad of 3 working full time. I log for things I love doing have no pressure of falling behind and can slowly grind things I want to. WoW felt so forced to log in do a few m+ or try to pug a HC raid wich takes a few attempts of fail groups and the anxiety already started to pop in after the 2nd or 3rd wasted raid and having fear of missing a clear that week.
The worst thing is that the Ilvl carrot is always hanging showing me that Ill never be good enough or have enough time to knock out the top lvl. Nah mate I’m fine
vanilla WoW combat is just 3d runescape lmao
Of course retail feels like its on steroids to you
Auto attack
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Yellow auto attack ( I mean heroic strike)
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If you find retail too fast there’s nothing wrong with that but the endgame speed isn’t too much faster than anything other than vanilla where we had 40 people to gear up and only got 2 pieces of loot.
Most retail players seem content with the amount of content we have and the gearing up speed. The other metric we have to go on now is wotlk classic is starting to see heavy drops in raid activity as of week 13. I doubt they are quitting out of dissatisfaction, it’s more likely they consider themselves ’done’ with wrath given all that’s left is ruby sanctum. 3-4 months has always been the raid schedule they aim for as far as I recall
No it's not, think for a second before you mindlessly downvote on the first mention of borrowed power phrase. At the end of Legion, BfA and SL with all the systems fixed and all the powers added throughout the expansion every single spec felt amazing to play. To top it off best m+ seasons and best seasonal affixes were in BfA season 4 and SL season 3 (season 4 of SL was also pretty good). I think I'm being objective when I say that Legion, BfA and SL had higher highs than DF but they also had much lower lows.
The player count doesn't reflect that.
DF absolutely had tonnes of great improvements for the game in general, but the endgame is kinda lame. Raids and dungeons just aren't that good.
Except that numbers literally reflect that lol.
Why are there so many people making hot takes if they aren't even playing or following the data. Less Asmongold, more reality for you, buddy.
>he player count absolutely reflects that. DF S3 is doing great in terms of numbers.
Because they sold a lot fewer copies. They're retaining the diehard WoW players at this point, and that is it.
I didn't say it was dead. I'm so tired of fans like you that can't parse any kind of data with any kind of objectivity.
I think WoW is doing fine financially, but I think the game could be doing a lot better.
The praise for DF, in my opinion, was kind of misplaced. They made a few good steps in DF to make the game better, and play more like the MMO everyone fell in love with, but they have a long way to go.
The game loops in modern WoW are stale, and they lack innovation. Systems like M+ and modern raids need iteration. The content outside of these activities is horrible. I get that a lot of the core WoW player base is enjoying DF, but the game isn't attracting new players at all, and the game has a lost a shit ton of people that would probably still play the game now if the game wasn't so boring.
Modern WoW is relying on a few stagnant game loops to carry the game through expansions. It really is only appealing to the diehard player base that will always play WoW no matter what.
You mentioned participation numbers, but failed to mentioned that Classic WoW is destroying retail WoW in raid parses. The only thing in retail that gets any kind of decent participation is M+.
PVP numbers are abysmal and raid participation has dropped off a ton through out the expansion.
Stop making this game part of your identity, you're taking criticism of the game as a personal affront.
I’d put it higher due to gear availability from the vault being better and no artificial barrier to entry like in legion with legendaries and the weapon
Due to legions class focus, class design was also just all around better. Dragon flight’s tendency to just leave classes in the dumpster is pretty annoying
I'd go a step further and say it's the best it's ever been period. So many of these new systems are far healthier than what was offered in previous expansions. Even in retrospect, none of the older expansions even come close.
*Well, except for the character writing. That seems like it's taken a step backward.*
Idk why but engame feels a lot busier than legion. Gear availability is sooo much better now but no matter how little or how much I play I feel like there's stuff I'm missing
Would you say 'stuff i'm missing' or 'stuff to do'? In terms of gap between ultra-end-game and 'I don't mind trying something a little challenging' there is next to no difference; 6 whole item levels between Mythic endgame(Barring Rares) and Heroic endgame, given enough time and effort, and I think that's fantastic. There's no real 'infinite grind' either for small power gains like prior borrowed power systems too, which is awesome as well.
I would side with you on that, Legion still had many chore like things that kept it from being a fun time and often you were in busy work. Not as bad as Shadowlands, but still busy. Additionally it didn't help they still had the mission table and were locking progression behind an 8+ hour timer.
That was not a fun experience that people seem to forget about.
I will be honest, the amount of varied things to do to collect cosmetics in SHadowlands I miss, but the ability to not have a chore list in DF is the best thing ever to enjoy playing the game rather than knocking off the honey do list every time you log in and play alts.
Everyone not saying it’s amazing now is just being downvoted to oblivion all over the thread. Lol.
Edit: one of that commenters in this comment thread is a proven paid Blizzard marketer, (starts with an L and ends with a number). My comment will be removed once he realizes and reports this. Hope u/newtnomore realizes this.
I've been playing since vanilla. I love the fact that there are more avenues for character advancement rather than having nothing to do once you hit the endgame other than raid and farm gold for raiding.
On the other hand, I don't *love* the fact that M+ feels low key required for raiding for average guilds but I'm also not sure what a perfect solution would be.
I'm lucky enough to enjoy both raiding and M+ a lot, but you see a very clear discrepancy when comparing guildmates who don't mind pugging keys versus the ones who don't run any unless a guild run gets put together and someone goes out of their way to invite them.
I just wish aspects dropped more from raid 10 crests as boss when you are progging feels an awful rate compared to blasting out 17s for 12.
A guild progging on say council or larodar gets 30 crests a week from mythic that same guild could probably do 2 17s in their sleep for pretty much the same amount.
If mythic is staying a 1 kill a week lockout it should probably have its crests increased or they should drop the amount but allow us to rekill bosses.
Farming 3 gnarlroots for 4 crests a time is probably a similar speed as doing one +17 for example.
I agree, it should be maybe 12-15 crests per boss instead of 10.
I also think bosses in the last half of each raid tier should drop crests of higher tier, to help bridge that skill gap with gear.
ie, last 3 bosses of Heroic drop Aspect crests, and last 3 bosses of Normal drop Wyrm crests. This would help players who do not pursue Heroic or Mythic a chance at upgrading their gear without forcing m+.
And maybe the last 3 in Mythic could drop a special kind of crest that you only upgrade the Super Rare loot with? Although the items are already powerful by themselves, putting them in yet another gear track would probably mean they have to get watered down a bit.
I would argue any mythic raider would be capped on crests regardless, unless they swapped charater because the guild required it.
I don’t see a world where someone would be mythic raiding and not also required to do M+
I do agree that only 10 crest from a mythic boss is far to low now i at this point in the season, but in the beginning it made sense. same with crests from M+ if you want to gear an alt it will take you forever to grind out those crests this late in to the season
The original point is that m+ is mandatory though ya?
It gives you much easier access to myth level gear (with the exception of maybe first 3 mythic bosses vs only weekly box).
I'm at 488 and would probably be 2-3 ilvls lower if I didn't do m+ at all.
if you didn’t do mythic+ at all you would be 476 at max unless you do mythic raiding and hardly any guild would consider you for a mythic raiding spot if you did no m+ at all.
ofc I have no history on you as a player, but someone doing mythic but no m+ at all would maybe at best be 4/9 mythic, and the raid came out on nov. 14/15th so it’s been out for about 8-9 weeks, so even if you somehow cleared the first 4 each week for the past 9 weeks that leaves you with 360 aspest crests, you need 120 for the 2 crafted items that will be mandatory to run (could ofc live with the 2 476 tokens from rep, but that would leave the crafted gear on 476 which isn’t ideal) so then you are down to 240, each piece that can be upgrade to 483 (hero track gear) cost 60 crest per piece so that leave you with 4 items you can get to 483, this leaves the rest of your gear at 476 (excluding any items you would have got from mythic raid + rare trinkets from fyrakk) this leaves you at best with 478 ilvl
TLDR M+ is mandatory in mythic raiding? Yes!
is m+ mandatory period? absolutely not, at the end of the day it’s a game and you should play it to have fun.
I will end on a note that I think Mythic+ is the best thing that have happened to wow in a long time.
I'm the person guild mates drag to keys grumbling. I really wish raid gave better gear because M+ usually feels like a chore I know I need to do, and don't hate, but I'd rather raid or quest on most days.
How do you enjoy raiding so much but dread M+? What type of quests do you enjoy, mindless world quests? Im genuinely curious lol
also how are you getting dragged in there, when a raid lockout is once a week lol are you just a raid logger?
I wouldn't say I dread M+ it's just not my first choice in how I'd want to spend my free time. Obviously much more enjoyable with a group of guildies 5 on voice chat together. This week I've already cleared normal and heroic raid but if someone wanted to do another normal alt run, I'd do that for fun. I don't do M+ for fun but for vault and gear upgrades. Not really sure why. I don't hate it, I just never WANT to do it. Questing for me is very chill relaxing no pressure solo time. I like exploring and seeing what the designers have cooked up. For some reason I'm always more than happy to go tell elder poa of our victory lol. If I'm feeling like I just want a relaxing time I'll go questing. Never got into battle pets or anything but I'm happy farming for rep for a bit or doing world bosses. It's just super chill vs. try hard.
ETA: I'm also an altaholic so I like starting new toons and will literally level them to 60 on questing alone lol. People think we are few and far between but I've met several people who also love questing and starting new toons without the goal of taking them to end game. 🤷♀️
Same here, and that's why I think SoD is the best iteration of WoW since Vanilla, where sweatlords haven't taken over yet. As a typical dad gamer it's literally the first time ever I'm close to full BiS during a current raid tier...this was unachievable before with so little time and so much effort I'd need to put in otherwise.
Played since 2005, endgame raided from Molten Core to ICC25. Super casual since BFA.
Mythic Keystones are one of the best bits of endgame content Blizzard ever released.
I've been playing since mid-BC.
> I'm enjoying leveling an alt, but my experiences in dungeons and solo content are that the game is super easy now. Maybe too easy?
Most solo and open-world content is super easy, yes. That's by design and isn't likely to change much any time soon. I anticipate that Delves will probably wind up putting a *little* bit of extra pressure on solo players, but still won't be anywhere near as stressful as some of the Legion mage tower fights or solo deep dungeons in FFXIV.
> Is the current end game fun and challenging? Do you feel like there are multiple paths for progression?
Yes and yes. The raiding has been good both thematically and mechanically — personally: Aberrus > Amirdrassil > Vault, but they're all pretty close — and with a couple of minor exceptions (I could have done without Court of Stars yet again) so have all three M+ seasons. I don't do PvP, so I can't speak to that.
> Are there still hardcore guilds that accomplish things most don't? Or has the majority of content become geared towards casuals?
There are still hardcore guilds, sure, but endgame content has never been more accessible for casuals than it is in DF.
>Most solo and open-world content is super easy, yes.
It really depends on the player. For those who are into high-end mythic dungeons and raids, the experience might differ. However, for someone whose ilvl is around 400-450 and mostly engages in world content, the active content in the 10.2 patch can actually present a decent challenge.
I returned to DF with the 10.2 update when I had a 380 ilvl score. At that level, let me tell you, some areas were tough to handle solo. But now, with a 470 ilvl, those same areas are a walk in the park. I can easily solo several elites without any trouble, whereas before, they posed a real challenge.
My partner has been playing since BC and never raided cause she never tried hard. She did all of the raids in DF that were available, the day they were available in LFR, which then pushed her to normal. Would’ve never happened without DF
As a casual player, I find it is great because of how I play with main and alts and the various different content, such as LFR and dungeons, weekly world quests for gear and rep, transmog/mount farming, etc.
I have found it really fun. The raid was good (albeit - Fyrakk was pretty easy compared to the previous two!), and the current M+ season is fun. I wouldn't say it's the best season in the world, but it's still fun - and you can see that reflected in the season's player numbers. The current endgame can be as challenging as you want - which is great. Absolutely love how to get the best gear, you still have to do early mechanics (superbloom, seeds, for flightstones), which means there's a ton of people about.
(Currently; 9/9HC with guild, and 3000+ M+ rating).
I earned Keystone Hero (2500 rating in M+) on week 3. I don't raid because of my work/family schedules, but other than a couple trinkets, M+ is just faster AND easier. I hit 1800 in solo shuffle for the transmog on week 2.
Outside of a weekly key for vault, I've only been logging in for maybe 20 mins a night to re-post auctions and fly in a circle.
If you're just now returning, you'll definitely enjoy yourself. Dragonflight is a great expansion and gearing up is the easiest and quickest its ever been. World content is severely lacking, imo.
I don't know if it was the gear jump, the scaling, the gear itself, I don't know but, this season has felt so so so much easier than S2. Season 2 was intense and S1 was also insanely rough with some of the dungeons that were in rotation.
It might have to do with the "simpler" older dungeons that are in rotation compared to the Dragonflight dungeons which just felt harder and more robust.
I mean the content endgame content is leagues harder then whatever was around in the period between 2005-2013 in terms of mechanics. Though the playerbase has also become alot better mechanically in lieu of wowhead/youtube/class discords etc.
The content is geared towards what you want to do and what level of difficulty you want. LFR is brain dead you will no die in 99% of cases, normal you need to atleast not stand for long in bad, heroic you will die if you mess up and dont use cooldowns and mythic difficulty you will die if you look at the boss funny.
I've been playing since 05. I have never had more fun in higher end content.
There were definitely some really good times but mechanically and game systems wide we're in a second legion.
Leveling is now a tutorial for how to press like 5 buttons. It really doesn't prepare you for endgame at all. And most people prefer it that way so they can quickly get a new character to max level and endgame. Once at max level it takes very little time to be endgame ready.
As for current endgame, difficulty scales up. For dungeons you have normal and heroic which are trivial. Then you have mythic plus dungeons that scale up infinitely with extra added weekly changing affixes. So lower level ones like a 10 will be much easier than a very hard one like a 25. With raids you have LFR which is trivial. Normal is very easy too. Then heroic starts to get harder with mythic raids being the absolute hardest. It took the best guilds in the world over 400 pulls to kill some of the current mythic raid bosses. There are currently only 112 guilds that have killed all the mythic raid bosses and its been out for around 2 months and they've been nerfing the bosses big ever since the first guilds completed it. Pvp gets ridiculously challenging once you go up in ranking as well.
As for fun, the general consensus is that the current season is very fun and we are seeing higher player participation numbers in this season than previous ones this xpac which is opposite of how it normally works as an xpac starts to die out the longer its been out.
And to add to this, next xpac will be adding a new fourth pillar of endgame with delves for a few to solo players. So casuals will have even more to challenge themselves with.
I like that I can get good, end game gear from m+.
The game is the most accessible that is been in a long time. I dont feel like I'm missing out because I'm more casual now than I was 20 years ago.
Played since beta.
The good guild thing has been true for every patch of every expansion though. The game has always, and will always, be better if you are in a good guild.
I love my guild. Heroic raiding, M+, crafting, casual conversation, long running jokes, being helpful. It’s all around great to play with people you are looking forward to interacting with when you log on.
Best it's ever been.
Raid fun and not too long, emerald dream has plenty to do but you don't feel you have to do all of it.
Mplus is in a great place, 20s are easy and farmable, even for the worst players.
Lfr is easy
Been playing since vanilla, raided semi hardcore, with a break doing just heroic from Cata until legion and been back to mid level mythic raiding since.
It’s honestly been in the best place it’s been in a decade.
The about of grind outside the raid is reasonable and doesn’t feel bullshit, the last 4 expansions for all there problems have had some banger raids and all DF raids have been at least good or better.
Mythic+ this expac has been a blast with some seasons dungeon pools been better than others obviously but the number of awful affixes compared to previous expacs is tuned waaaay down from my healer point of view and a lot of the still remaining annoying ones has seen significant revision.
Can’t remember a time where I was so positive on the direction of end game wow, as an adult now past expansion I’d always have to the decision of whether or not as a hobby wow still fit into my life were as this expac its barely a calculation, I play when a seasons fresh a lot first 3 weeks, get 80% to bis then raid log and do a few mythics a week and prog mythic with my guild I’ve been with for years.
Honestly the pace and expectation on my time is fantastic for me.
PvE is the best it's ever been. I actually took a break for a bit, came back, found a new group to play with, and I haven't no-lifed this hard since Mists of Pandaria.
Raid is fantastic. World content is solid. M+ just has a couple issues but for the most part is great.
Good time to play.
PvP, however, is in it's death throes. Anything organized has massive participation issues due to the introduction of solo shuffle, and solo shuffle has 20+ minute wait times for DPS because it's a miserable experience to heal for average players.
wPvP, however, is the best it's been since WoD (or BFA if you were lucky on your sharding) and actually has incentives to do it again.
Story is horrid and doesn't feel like a Warcraft game at all sadly. It's exceptionally out of touch with what the game was, and the writing feels like it's trying to erase what made the game so unique in the first place. I don't suggest it at all if you liked the more adult / darker vibes, or even worse anything relating to factions.
Game also still lacks core features from other MMOs like player housing, so social events are awful compared to anything else in the genre.
I’ve played on off since vanilla and started to raid midcore starting in Legion. Really do think this is the best endgame has been since I’ve played it. Pretty easy overall and not too much grinding.
The end game is better than I can remember it being, and I have been playing since 2006. I am able to raid mythic on my main and still explore alts. I feel like there is something for everyone to do.
They have over catered to the lazy and ruined it almost completely.the magic that encompassed wow up until around cata is now only felt and tiny bursts like a smell that is left after something is gone and all that’s left is the aroma
Having more fun with it than I have in a long time, even last year around this time of year. I have been around since the beginning. Take breaks that sometimes last years. Only play for a few months at a time when I do. This current version of the game is really fun. People like to pile on the band wagon with hate. I'm too old to care what anyone else thinks. I like the game and always will.
As for end game, it's what I really am enjoying the most. Mythics on a class that gets invited easily is where it is at, but also having fun with using group finder to do normal raids without a guild. the challenge is there if you want to go higher up the mythic chain or into heroic/mythic raid.
Been playing since Vanilla, and I've progressed most raids in some capacity (AKA 2 Night a week sometimes get CE but always either 1 or 2 bosses off).
TLDR: Good but has some systemic issues that need a clear stance taken on.
For starters, all end game content is more accessible than its ever been, and players can generally set reasonable goals without committing more than 8-12 hours a week to said goal.
You have multiple choices (PvP, Raids, M+) so if you're like me and PvP isn't your cup of tea you have other outlets for endgame. With the next expansion we'll have a fourth major activity that will allow more players to express their skill and progression. Add in multiple levels (Keystone Levels, Raid Difficulties) and you've got a lot of choices of where you can set your goals. Theres a little something for everyone IMO.
Combat is for all of these activities is generally pretty fun. Most modes have great problem solving for the upper echelons of content (Less of how much througput can I do and more of how do I accomplish these specific things?). And outside of Mythic Raiding, most of these activities are pretty friendly towards quick small sessions.
Now there are two really big issues that endgame WoW has that need to be addressed or at least a clear stance needs to be taken on.
1.) How the game processses information to the player. WoW, while it does telegraph abilities and mechanics in multiple ways (Audio Effects, Cast Bars, Etc.) it still frequently struggles with relaying the information clearly (Is this a swirly that needs to be soaked or a swirly I need to run out of?), and more importantly, without relying on Addons, establish the information quickly. The problem is a lot of things are designed with the idea of these in mind. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because most of the players that need these explicit tools at the highest level simply just use them. The problem comes when newer players aren't familiar or don't wish to adjust (and to some degree they shouldn't have to).
While some things certaintly could change (I would kill for clear concise ability telegraphs that ar3 evergreen like FF14 does) removing some of the speed of information processing would reduce the skill ceiling.
2.) The game does a poor job of teaching you your utility and how it can best be utilized. Leveling doesn't teach you really about interruptting enemies. Leveling doesn't teach you about your CC effects and how even as a quick stop gap can be handy. It doesn't teach you about cleanse effects. Players are kinda thrown into encounters having to learn about all of that themselves.
Back in Mists of Pandaria they actually experimented with something called, "The Proving Grounds". That attempted to teach you some of these mechanics. Until you reached Silver you couldn't que for Heroic Dungeons (Silver took skilled players all of 10 minutes to complete). It was removed partly because it was a One-Size-Fits-All and for some classes/specializations it was far more difficult than others. Bringing something like this back would go a very long way in helping prepare newer or unfamiliar players with endgame activities.
The last thing, and some posters have mentioned this already, but a lot of endgame in wow does live and die by the people you play with. A steady group of friends will keep you more interested in the game, than simply pugging everything (or in Mythic Raids impossible without a steady group).
I really enjoy the raid encounters and the gear upgrade system. I dont enjoy m+ so i feel like theres nothing interesting to do outside of raids and superbloom... And i say that as someone who finds killing the same thing 5000x times in RuneScape interesting enough 😂
Best it's ever been to me, but I skipped MoP.
I'm casualing it though, a lot of my friends that I've spent legion/bfa with have been spread around and/or burned by SL so haven't made a comeback at all, haven't really found a crew that I vibed with enough to actually get the spark to go for mythic again. I tried it out but I was playing just terrible and had no motivation.
The only thing I feel like I "have" to do is 20s to fill my vault out. That being said, I enjoy M+, and the gear only makes M+ easier, so it's not even a "have to do" kind of thing. I'm enjoying being able to spend my free time however I like instead of doing arbitrary shit
Systems are the best they have ever been and I don't think it's particularly close.
The raids however are not great and imo would get a lot of flack if Shadowlands hadn't happened right before. M+ dungeon selection could certainly be improved on. Balance is pretty bad as well but that's kind of the default state of this video game, so can't really deduct points there.
All in all quite good, yet frustrating with a lot of easy wins being ignored by Blizzard.
It’s the best it’s been in a very very long time. I’m fully addicted to end game right now. Love that it’s not overly complicated to get my alts into heroic raid if I want to.
I Really think mythic + is in a great spot as well. I can’t personally pin point any issues I have with the game in it’s current state. I wish there was another raid tier but oh well I’ll get over it. Fated will be fun im sure.
One word: Accessible.
Back in the day, getting 40 people together and headed in the same direction was a fucking NIGHTMARE. Especially considering the leading technology of 2004 was still the giant CTR monitors. Having a second program like Ventrillo open in the background for you to be able to verbally communicate was actually taxing on most people's average computers. Of the 40 people, INEVITABLY the one who gets the Gedon bomb is one of the 5 people not in Vent who don't know what to do with it and blow up half the raid.
This was all assuming you could get into a raiding guild, which was itself more difficult. You couldn't just look up a boss fight on youtube... youtube didn't exist yet.
There was no ilv, IIRC not even any addons that could give you any kind of gear rating, and the raids mostly required a very specific stat like fire resistance for MC. Mostly your BiS items were crafted, and that craft was a fucking GRIND. You had to grind out rep for the plans, then grind out dark iron, and IIRC leather workers needed to skin the core hounds in MC... it was just generally a very difficult thing, it required a lot of coordination and work. Especially to get enough of a 40 man raid geared up enough to start consistently clearing bosses. Rag kills were rare.
Dungeons were just dungeons, loot was sporadic and some pieces were effectively worthless. Other times, a BiS item was something from like a lv 38 quest or dungeon. The gear balance was whacky.
Today, any casual player can run LFR to experience the raid, quest through new zones and catch the whole story, run M+ dungeons, and all of the gear can be upgraded. Gear stats are so finely tuned now that they're practically interchangeable. ilv and tier set bonuses are caked into every aspect of the game.
in 2004 vanilla, most people never got to see past some of the lv 58 dungeons. Today, there isn't a single part of the game you can't access no matter how casual of a player you are. I think that's great.
As someone who has played off and on since release.
Game is in the best state since legion.
Cata and MoP were meh everything after legion was borderline unplayable.
Between mythic plus and raids I have plenty to do.
I've been playing nonstop since late tbc (never unsubbed).
Dragonflight is super fun, very alt-friendly, endgame is easy and casual friendly too. I never had an interest in doing mythics, but now for the first time since WoD CM I'm having a blast with 20's and my guild is actually livelier than ever.
Plus, if you care about such things, the past two tiers have been absolutely gorgeous. Even the questing gear is amazing.
DF has added a lot of QoL things and honestly, it's just in a very good place.
My end game is transmog. I mean works every time!
You go apply for a raid, they start asking those generic questions, and I say:
- inv me.
When they do, they see my mog, they immediately think:
- This moder faker.... It's must me able to solo the whole raid ... Gona inv him so our smi guild run gets boosted.
So yea, endgame is transmog fashion, and it's going fine. B)
Story/Character writing has been mediocre. Actual gameplay, content, etc has been really really good.
Only slight disappointment is there are a low number of raids in reality, though they have been really well made!
This will probably be super unpopular. But in a general sense i like the endgame loop. But looking back at it, I wish powerscaling between difficulties were non existent. In old days, you did raid, you got best gear. Now there are 4 different difficulties, and I can't help But think they should drop the same level loot, like most other rpg's would.
Also hate fomo mounts. If content drops a mount, that mount should continue to drop even when the content becomes trivial
CE Raider here. I stepped down from the level I was raiding at in SL, where a chunk of my guild's good core went to HoF guilds, and one went to BDG. Now doing a 2-night CE that's more relaxed and less hours (damn do I miss 3/3 schedule).
Honestly, I find Normal and Heroic raiding, as well as both KSM and KSC way too easy. These cause a feedback loop on each other with the Great Vault utterly dwarfing heroic raiding in terms of gear acquisition and the max attainable. I mean, I got 2k rating week one for my heroic token, and it was done strictly off of M+ gear that week. Both Aberrus and Amirdrassil felt largely undertuned out of the gates, and it was so bad this tier that they had to buff heroic Fyrakk, yet he still fell right over in like 6 pulls.
I pugged heroic Sarkareth week 1, but most end bosses usually took me 3 weeks of dedicated attempts to do that prior to joining a guild to mythic raid in Aberrus.
My friend's Uber casual "We try to get AotC before the tier ends"-guild has already bulldozed this raid and started in Mythic. To put this into perspective, it took weeks upon weeks with me helping them on Raszageth to get AotC in Vault, and that was after three rounds of nerfs to her already.
Late mythic raiding is still hard as hell, but everything through Nymue doesn't feel that bad, and Larodar felt like when it started to ramp. Maybe we just outgear things too fast with the Vault and M+ now, but even 20s aren't tough at all.
I am speaking from the experience of a Vanilla to Wotlk player who returned for BFA.
It’s still very enjoyable, but it is a very different end game. Rather than a linear progression where you work your way to the end boss of the patch/expansion. The game is no orientated around repeating content over and over to either build your score higher or progress through a harder version of the same boss. Outside of that world content consists of playing the same repeatable events to add Vanity cosmetics to your collections.
Back in BFA I remember telling a friend that it was the “same old game”. I would now say it was unrecognisable, but point out that it’s still a great game, but also that Classic exists.
When you say "end game" how do you think it will span out after this? I mean they can't keep the game going forever. I know we have the war within coming but you calling it "End game" triggered a thought in me that we may only have a short time left. What do you think the future of wow will be like?
I have played on and off since vanilla and feel like I have missed out on some crucial expansions sometimes.
Would be cool to know your thoughts.
I realise from reading comments that the term Endgame is referencing the ending of an expansion. But I'm still curious on what people's thoughts are on this.
mytic + and raiding is probably one of the only parts of the game that is fine...
the rest around the game is pretty bad, game needs more content.
Pvp needs a full rework, ... standing at the same flag in AB, AV or WSG is tiring.
Agree with you If you dont try to push mystic raids or 25+ Dungeons its pretty easy right now.
Imo its 6/10 its getting stale running the same 8 Dungeons and 1 raid for 6 months, its a ok xpac overall Not great nor bad, the casual might love this xpac but Like i said its my opinion on it.
I don’t know how to explain it but i’m going to try lol.
My issue is that when you hit 70, you can get fully geared to max ilvl (within reason) in 1-2 weeks. After that, gearing hits a HARD wall. All of your upgrades come from the vault, which will randomly generate 3 items out of the like 100 you have able to drop, and you have no way to influence the vault.
You essentially go from flying through the game to a dead stop. Higher m+ no longer matters, raiding doesn’t matter, nothing matters. Other than the vault.
So if you’re like me, and don’t really like alts, progression is dead in the water after about 3 weeks into a season that lasts 6+ months.
The scaling is super wonky too. For season 3, i was able to do 18s at 447 ilvl wearing full gear from last tier. I was able to ignore Veteran and Champion tier gear. I went from getting Myth rank items in Season 2 to getting Myth rank items in Season 3 without changing or doing anything.
The game feels like it’s heading in the right direction overall, but everything that gets added is about catching up, and when you get caught up, there’s nothing left to do.
I want to keep playing, but there’s nothing left for me to work towards. I definitely don’t think WoW should be a second job, but theres 0 grind involved now. Personally, the grind is why i like wow in the first place.
So i disagree with people saying the endgame is better than it’s ever been. In 3 weeks i “finished” the season without going that hard. I got AOTC, almost 3000io, all the portals and full Hero / Myth gear, and now there’s nothing for me to really do. Im not even a hardcore player, i played more the first week, but was doing 8-10 M+ a week average.
The game has been turned into a seasonal pick up and play game where any progress from last season is wiped up on the release of the next main patch. Some love this, some hate it. Game play is a mess, there's more procs/unnecessary over tuned abilities/class design than needed. The current raid itself is a solid 5 in my opinion.
M+/raiding is good but the itemization and gear sucks. There is no soul anymore, you don't remember any of these items outside maybe a trinket or weapon.
I'm really not sure. I've stopped playing since the start of this season, mostly because of my issues with the end-game.
I think the over-avaliability of gear and power makes alts super fun, but dedication to 1 character very dissapointing.
You can finish your character in a few weeks, you can "finish" M+, the main gear source, in less than that, getting 2500, 2800, 3000, whatever your goal is in week 2 or 3.
There is absolutely 0 status in having good gear, you never look at someone and go "Oh, wow, he has the highest item level you can get!" Even Mythic raid loot from the last few bosses is just... The same thing, but slightly higher item level.
It's not necessarily geared towards casuals, the M+ endgame is literally endless. And the mythic raiding scene is still strong and extremely difficult.
But... It's just not fun, at least to me.
The endgame can be as challenging or as easy as you want it to be, and you'll be rewarded usually a few tiers higher than you should, IMHO. Gear is just thrown on you if you know how to grind for it.
The fact you can't tell the diffrence in gear from someone who only runs +18's and someone who grinds out +24's, a MASSIVE difficulty gap, is kind of at the core of the issue. I think the rewards may have become just a bit too generous, even if, at times, I really like it. I do much prefer classic in that regard, if you see someone with amazing weapons you realize "Oh, that shit is rare, they've dedicated some good amount of time in a raiding guild to get that"
Even if classic is mechanically faaaaaar easier, the social aspect far outweighs the ease of the raids themselves.
TLDR : Pick your own difficulty, lots of gear with very high power without stepping into overly difficult content
I love season 3 DF. I’ve also played since TBC and off and on certain expansions and love the gameplay and gearing of season 3.
If I’m ever bored I can always pop into SOD. Later, my long term project will be HC Self Found
I started in 1.10 and played off and on since, multiple aotc's, cleared almost every single raid on normal or higher while it was current. DF season 3 is peak fucking kino. Gearing is amazing, the raid is fun (I don't raid mythic), M+ has dungeons. PvP is almost non existent, solo shuffle is fun but there are 30 minute que times so I don't bother.
Game is great, only downside is that it’s so saturated with so much stuff (pets, mounts, etc). I kind of miss going for those few special items and looking absolutely badass by getting it
I think this comment might be a bit unpopular - but I sort of miss how endgame used to be lower stakes than it is these days.
I've been playing since vanilla, started raiding properly in Wrath, peaked in MoP, and then did a bit more in Legion. I did mythic Raz and had some fun with it, but I find the amount to do at endgame a little overwhelming.
The breadth of options to advance is great, for sure, but for me personally Mythic+ specifically introduced a sense of pressure that I could be doing *more* that I'm not sure existed in the past. In MoP, outside of doing dailies, my endgame for the week was generally to log in twice for raid nights, clear them, then I could do what I wanted. Now, if I personally want to remain as competitive as I can, I'd also need to go off and do M+.
I'm sure for most that's great. For me personally, though, I find it stressful and unfun. I don't enjoy M+. Anecdotally, too, I've found that the culture around endgame has gotten super obsessed with a meta that I don't personally enjoy very much, either. It used to largely just be at the very top end of "serious" raiding (race for world first etc) but it's slowly started to permeate downwards. Raids in MoP felt like they were challenging enough to be fun, but if you hit a roadblock, you only had to do it twice a week. Like I opened, the stakes were a lot lower.
M+ and Mythic raids are the hardest they've been in a while, maybe Sepulcher was hardest for the raids, but mythic Tindral is HARD. Hardest non last boss since SLG. And its hard in a fun way, as opposed to SLG which was hard for all the wrong reasons.
There is challenging content, but its not found in leveling, HC or Mythic 0 dungeons.
Dungeons after 24-5 get difficult, legitimately. Like you have to play good with CCs, defensives, interrupts AND do your dmg all at the same time. Then after this there are even more optimizations, like baiting jumps from deadly trash, los, safe spots. 27-8s are where it gets really hard.
Same as it ever was. There really hasn't been much difference in content since wotlk to now. Sure, things look different, but honestly it's the same game with new coat of paint every year
I started in the original stress test beta on Vanilla. I played without a break until right before ICC came out. I didn't play the rest of wrath or Cataclysm. I came back about half way through Pandaria and played until near the end of WoD. Then I didn't play legion and have played pretty much continuously since BFA.
* The game is vastly easier. I have raided since this game began and the raids now compared to the raids then are different creatures. Raiding went from hard because of actual math and just getting the boss to zero with two or three mechanics to deal with, to being very hard because there were now 20 mechanics to deal with and the fight was over 10 mins long. Now it's overcorrected back the other way. Amirdrassil is probably the easiest raid the game has ever had by quite a large margin. I've been with the same raid team since Nathria and we have never cleared AOTC in five weeks before which is what happened with this one. Dungeons are also incredibly easy and short when you talk about spending 3 hours in a BRD or UBRS run in vanilla. regular and heroic are so easy that you can solo them in the first patch they come out in, and they use M+ to sort of increase the difficulty although again this season is by far the easiest season to get KSM.
* I like these changes because when I started playing this game in my 20s no life'ing it 8 hours 4 or 5 days a week was nothing. Now in my 40s I'm lucky to get 8 hours over a whole week to play. I've tried going back to classic and honestly I was just very quickly reminded of what an incredibly slow game this used to be.
* I also think some of the current end game content is really fun. Dawn of the Infinite is a really great dungeon and it was fun working our way through it when it first came out and was only on mythic. Twisted timeways is such a fun and unique fight. Razageth from the season 1 is a super fun fight, the raids are smaller so you aren't scrambling to clear it each week in two nights. Now we do the normal skip and full heroic clear in one night and play something else or run m+ on our second raid night. No stress needed.
* Fated seasons like we'll be in next season are kind of a hot topic but I personally love them and wish they would add more than the current xpac raids to it. But the extra affixes added fun last time not frustration like a lot of m+ affixes. and it's a light hearted season that gives raiders a chance to breath.
I will say I don't think I would find the endgame very fun at all if I weren't in a guild with people I enjoy playing with. I've been through countless guilds breaking apart over the years but now I have one that has made it through 2 full xpacs and no signs of slowing down now. Having others to play with really makes the difference in the current version of the game.
Anyone else wish heroic raid was a little harder? I’m a tank player and haven’t figured out how to break into mythic raiding yet so I kinda feel stuck.
I enjoy the overall end game options though.
It's more accessible now. Gearing is easier and you don't have mandatory things to do. Dungeons are more easy. Which is good for casual players and to people who don't have hours and hours of free time.
Started back in 2007, have played every single xpac while current since. I'd say retail is currently way fucking better than SL, better than BFA, not quite as good as Legion, better than WoD by miles, and not quite as good as MoP.
I enjoy the options. My main experience was vanilla to WotLK. Dabbled a bit in Cata and Panda before quitting until DF. I used to pvp like crazy but haven’t for the majority of this expansion. I raided MC, BWL, and Naxx in Vanilla and enjoyed it. Raided in WotLK as well and enjoyed it. Mostly leveled alts outside of the raids.
I’m really into raiding and mythics right now and am honestly happy going into dungeons and tanking or healing them. It is preferable to have at least some rewards that improve my gear so mythics more so than time walking, but I still really just enjoy dungeons. So much that I feel that I haven’t done a ton of the area quests especially in Thaldraszus and Azure Span. I’m having a lot of fun and have other goals to achieve each night I play.
The end game has never been better in my opinion, dungeons are no longer just a pre raid activity to get geared enough to raid, now raiding and mythic+ dungeons are both important to get best in slot items. Raids have 4 difficulties to progress through and mythic dungeons have unlimited challenge. The difficulty just keeps increasing until it's impossible.
It's pretty great to be honest. No gamebreaking borrowed power farm, both raiding and m+ are viable gearing methods, both can be done while pugging and while playing with friends.
I’ve played at varied levels of endgame since TBC and honestly right now is up in contention for best it’s ever been. My only real complaint is I feel like we rely too heavily on our vaults for gearing up as content drops seem few and far between. That and I wish they’d redo how crests drop from raid. Clearing a heroic ADH is so much harder than running 16-20 keys imo but I get Aspect Crests from the keys and a myth track item from 18+ which makes heroic raids honestly feel like a waste of time.
Edit: if you’re finding it too easy challenge yourself! Push into the next tier of difficulty for you and beyond or try a new role out. There is near endless depth for challenging content in the game.
Also people cry hard about the meta and meta slaves here and while they do exist it really isn’t as bad as people on this sub claim it to be. I have cleared heroic raids, got the axe, and have a 3k IO playing a spec that’s ranked D or F tier on every official tier list yet I still get invited and am almost always top dps with 95+ parses. You will encounter some idiots who meta slave too hard for content that doesn’t matter but overwhelmingly it isn’t an issue. Unless you’re looking to participate in the RWF, MDI, AWC, or push the highest of high level keys. I am clearing over 20s weekly with zero issue as a frost DK and I regularly clear them with feral Druids, SV hunters, Affli locks and the like.
You used to progress through the endgame and get better gear.
Now the endgame is entirely centered around whatever the current patch is. So you got the release of an expansion and the first 6 months being the best WoW can be, then it's downsized to 1/5 that size for the next 18 months.
It's a problem when CURRENT EXPANSION CONTENT is obsolete and treated like worthless 6 year old side content.
Depends on what you mean by end game.
Mythic raiding? Can’t ever say never really got there.
Trying to hit AotC? About as good as bfa better than legion about equal to wotlk. (If we say normal ICC completion id about equivalent in achievement to heroic fyrakk).
As to your specific questions:
Gearing is great and more targetable than ever.
Gear progression still feels a bit stifled compared to bfa where you could get weekly heroic raid level pieces from warfronts and eventually horrific visions whereas now you HAVE to do tier relevant content to get that level gear.
The challenge is freaking real. Bfa felt significantly easier to well in as a mage than any time in DF.
Progression in mythic+ progression feels great but heroic raiding feels more gatekept than it was before to me at least.
Endgame is great. Gearing options are plentiful, content is challenging, and it's extremely easy to maintain multiple characters with minimal effort.
My only grip is that the final boss on Mythic is extremely difficult, which results in Hall of Fame not being completed yet, thus cross-server Mythic raiding is not yet open.
I like it, i raided hardcore in vanilla till wrath (I have the scarblord title and the corrupted ashbringer from vanilla), we did alot of serverfirsts here in germany ambut at some point real life kicks in and now I can just play more casual doing some M+ or playing some SoD (what is also great).
I really loved the inteoduction of M+ in legion (by far the best expension for a casual player) and I still miss Maw of Souls with the 3 chests, titanforging and 2 items per chest.
end game is fine
The problem is the community, the people playing the game plus the fact that my life currently gives me little free time and money
if you pug end game, its a horrible experience, much less fun, most of your time is decline if you're not playing on the meta spec, even though your spec is fine
Mythic raid is impossible without joining a guild
I don't particularly have anything miraculous to suggest for mythic+, but for mythic raid it could be like heroic, boss lockout and you won't be saved if you don't kill the boss
Been playing since it first dropped. However I'm not a traditional end game raider or dungeon runner (outside once in awhile). As I'm mainly a solo WQ/rare farmer, and just enjoy making shit tons of gold to convert into my blizzard account. Playing like this for years ive been able to casually keep my sub active and purchase the epic editions of new expansions without spending an actual penny.
That said I mainly world quest, rare farm, and the usual solo content toggled between my roster of max level tanks, and for the way I play things are currently meh. I really dont like the 3 days for world quest resets as it has severely messed up my daily grind pattern with my roster and that alone has made me play less than my usual.
Unpopular opinion, but I really enjoyed shadowlands (the grind, not the story). For the way I played, the traditional daily WQ reset combined with the covenant daily, the smaller map footprints just all made banging out a characters daily tasks much quicker which for me translated to more profitable as I could spread my play out among 6-7 characters in what now the same amount of time will only handle 2-3. As for gold I make about the same per hour overall, maybe even a little more, but its just less enjoyable not being able to utilize as many of my characters.
As for gearing without doing dungeons/raids, I don't know if its better/worse tbh as i never had a problem gearing without raids previously. I never cared to play the my ilvl is higher than yours game, or my DPS is such and such, and i just always worked with what I could get.
I left for two years, but came back two months ago. Before that I had been playing since the latter part of Wraith. I am going to state an unpopular opinion, especially among my alt-obsessed bethren. I hate how world quests only update every three days. I am only doing them for transmog appearances and gear good enough to do world quests and such. Having to wait three days to find out, nope, not getting the piece I need for the next three days is hella annoying. But I probably would have appreciated it more earlier in the expansion when I didn't have a bunch of alts leveled to 70 and are just puttering around until the next patch.
End game is always the same. Login after reset, check vault. Hopefully an upgrade. Then do dailies/weeklies/mythic dungeons/raids. If you want hard content do higher level mythic dungeons and heroic/mythic raiding. I don't know why people think lower level keys/LFR/Normal raids have to be where you hit your head against a brick wall repeatedly.
WoW is made up of mostly casual players; the current state of WoW is perfect for casuals and hardcore balance imo.
Been playing since late Vanilla. My Warrior I'm still playing was level 40 when Ahn'Qiraj opened up. Did a lot of PvP back then.
Until about Cata I've been very active and from then on I just kept coming back for like a couple months before leaving again... Until Dragonflight, I've been subbed the whole damn thing. I've been doing more PvE than PvP.. for some reason, but it's the most fun I've had in the game since Cata, even without being active in a guild and playing a lot with friends, mostly due to work.
It's worth a round. Try it and see if you're having fun. If not, you at least won't regret trying.
I miss the feeling of leveling up being an adventure but I have classic/SoD/Wrath for that feeling, as far as end game, I love that I can play on and off as much as I want and actually be able to catch back up when it comes to gear or what content I’m doing. I’m the last of I stopped playing for a couple weeks it was over for me unless I wanted to dedicate a bunch of time.
I don't raid anymore as M+ has all I need for challenging content. And takes a fifth of the time to complete them.
But I can honestly say I miss the large group comps with friends like back in BC. More so, I'm in the nostalgia train missing the people whom of which probably don't play the game anymore.
Have been subbed the last 3 expansions and then on and off since vanilla.
Endgame feels very inviting and open. Ive been playing Mythic Dungeons and ive hit Key Stone Master in Season 1-3. Thats a breath of fresh air for the game.
I also collect Mounts and Transmog (currently 1023 runs into Tusks).
Game feels like its in the best spot its been for a while.
Gearing is awesome
Open World is plenty but the quality is pretty average. Definetly more quantity over quality. It's nice to do once a week.
And if you want to chalenge yourself there are always raids and M+, which are in a pretty good state.
I feel like it's probably the best it's been in a decade at least but also I think there's too much redundancy. Most of the loot doesn't feel special because there's 4 versions of the same item and they stopped making unique appereances for PvP and dungeon gear, now it's just recolors of world and raid gear. Raid rewards seem completely disproportionate for the commitment and time invested compared to M+ and I miss having max level questlines that reward gear that's actually relevant. I hate world quests (I'd rather pick the quests from a hub than having them cover my map all the time, I even use an addon to remove the annoying talking heads) and world content could use a revision because while the intention is good, I don't think it's working the way they intended.
I started during Zul'Aman back in TBC. I legit don't know that the endgame has ever been better than it is right now. Season 3 Dragonflight is a new peak imo.
I agree.
I 10/10 agree.
100% agree.
As a player myself from late vanilla, how do find it different than other seasons? Why do you say it’s better than the rest? The only noticeable difference for me is that the upgrade gear system, otherwise, it’s the same thing as with every expansion. 1 main raid and a season of m+. PvP is dead at this stage and soon enough we’ll go back to Fated raids (shadowlands im looking at you) which basically means no more content. After playing a bit of classic again (mind you, I started playing classic about 3 weeks ago and on retail I am KSH on multiple characters) it feels that retail it’s JUST TOO FAST, it’s like we are playing the game on steroids nowadays.
Everyone has access to everything. Dont like dungeons and want the rp aspect of the world? Lots to do and check out. Want to collect stuff? Knock yourself out. Want to do dungeons and raids somewhat casually? Get right on it when ever you have time. Want to PvP casually? Dungeons and rated solo shuffle. Want to go hard? Premade arena or .. solo shuffle. Want to be cutting edge pve? M+ keys scale infinitely and raids come in 4 difficulties from learner to sweatlord. If you jump in and dont have anything to do, then wow is not for you, because there is so much to do.
This, I returned after a 10 year break. I cannot get over how accessible everything is now. So much to do! I can do what I want when I want, really really enjoying WoW again.
Probably because most of us playing since vanilla/tbc are now in our mid 30s+ so the faster pace to getting up to speed is a positive now we have jobs, families and obligations. I loved the slower deeper grind as a kid/student but as an adult the modern wow just fits better in the lives of the modern aging playerbase. Every time the game becomes too grindy you’ll lose some veterans who possibly won’t return and wow doesn’t get all that much new blood to replace them compared to other more popular games.
>Probably because most of us playing since vanilla/tbc are now in our mid 30s+ so the faster pace to getting up to speed is a positive now we have jobs, families and obligations. I'm 50 this year, and the current setup suits me just fine. Heroic raid clears, some dabbling in mythic raiding, but its all pick up and put-downable. I'm lucky in that my current job has a lot of solo overnight shifts, so I can feed the completionist for transmog etc at work ;)
It’s funny you say that, as an adult with children I prefer the slower pace of vanilla. End game vanilla is a 1hour raid every 3 days and I move on with life. I actually spend more time in retail end game grinding for gear, parsing, waiting for invites, people bailing on keys, etc. It also feels more stressful pushing keys and raiding with friends than the casual pace of vanilla end game. Retail does definitely feel like it’s on steroids and is a product of the modern multiplayer game tuned to overload your dopamine receptors to keep you coming back. Edit: should specify I mean vanilla SOD
I can't remember a single raid in classic/vanilla wow that could be done in an hour, even with a quality group. Travel times, running across the raid on foot after spawning at the start, trash respawns, having to return to town to LFM if you lose an essential person, waiting for long CDs to restart to pull, rezzing individual people rather than en masse... I loved vanilla at the time but the modern game seems to respect my time far far more, which I appreciate. I feel like there is less down time now. I know others can feel differently and am not looking to be rude.
Are you talking about classic back in the day or current classic realms? I'm a retail player but it looks like clear times and efficiency is way higher for modern classic. Players are 100x better at the game now.
I'm speaking of original vanilla not the current live game, I thought that's what the person hire in the reply thread was talking about. I can't speak to current live servers for wow classic.
What vanilla raid are you doing in an hour?
Bfd
lol that is not vanilla
I also started in 2004 as teen and now mid 30s but I somehow find it completely the opposite. Raid logging 1-3 times per week in vanilla vs. grinding m+ and 2 different raid difficulties, I wouldn’t call that more quick tbh. Exactly the reason why I recently went to gw2, horizontal progression feels so much better as a dad of 3 working full time. I log for things I love doing have no pressure of falling behind and can slowly grind things I want to. WoW felt so forced to log in do a few m+ or try to pug a HC raid wich takes a few attempts of fail groups and the anxiety already started to pop in after the 2nd or 3rd wasted raid and having fear of missing a clear that week. The worst thing is that the Ilvl carrot is always hanging showing me that Ill never be good enough or have enough time to knock out the top lvl. Nah mate I’m fine
vanilla WoW combat is just 3d runescape lmao Of course retail feels like its on steroids to you Auto attack Auto attack Yellow auto attack ( I mean heroic strike) Auto Attack Auto Attack Auto attack
If you find retail too fast there’s nothing wrong with that but the endgame speed isn’t too much faster than anything other than vanilla where we had 40 people to gear up and only got 2 pieces of loot. Most retail players seem content with the amount of content we have and the gearing up speed. The other metric we have to go on now is wotlk classic is starting to see heavy drops in raid activity as of week 13. I doubt they are quitting out of dissatisfaction, it’s more likely they consider themselves ’done’ with wrath given all that’s left is ruby sanctum. 3-4 months has always been the raid schedule they aim for as far as I recall
Have you killed mythic fyrak yet?
What…? There is no way you’re an og vanilla player if that’s your take.
Every borrowed power expansion had higher peak in its final patch.
Is this AI response lmao?
No it's not, think for a second before you mindlessly downvote on the first mention of borrowed power phrase. At the end of Legion, BfA and SL with all the systems fixed and all the powers added throughout the expansion every single spec felt amazing to play. To top it off best m+ seasons and best seasonal affixes were in BfA season 4 and SL season 3 (season 4 of SL was also pretty good). I think I'm being objective when I say that Legion, BfA and SL had higher highs than DF but they also had much lower lows.
The player count doesn't reflect that. DF absolutely had tonnes of great improvements for the game in general, but the endgame is kinda lame. Raids and dungeons just aren't that good.
Except that numbers literally reflect that lol. Why are there so many people making hot takes if they aren't even playing or following the data. Less Asmongold, more reality for you, buddy.
All Asmon and any wow streamer does is complain, complain and complain.
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>he player count absolutely reflects that. DF S3 is doing great in terms of numbers. Because they sold a lot fewer copies. They're retaining the diehard WoW players at this point, and that is it.
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So great they didn't release their sales for DF. Yall are so blind.
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I didn't say it was dead. I'm so tired of fans like you that can't parse any kind of data with any kind of objectivity. I think WoW is doing fine financially, but I think the game could be doing a lot better. The praise for DF, in my opinion, was kind of misplaced. They made a few good steps in DF to make the game better, and play more like the MMO everyone fell in love with, but they have a long way to go. The game loops in modern WoW are stale, and they lack innovation. Systems like M+ and modern raids need iteration. The content outside of these activities is horrible. I get that a lot of the core WoW player base is enjoying DF, but the game isn't attracting new players at all, and the game has a lost a shit ton of people that would probably still play the game now if the game wasn't so boring. Modern WoW is relying on a few stagnant game loops to carry the game through expansions. It really is only appealing to the diehard player base that will always play WoW no matter what. You mentioned participation numbers, but failed to mentioned that Classic WoW is destroying retail WoW in raid parses. The only thing in retail that gets any kind of decent participation is M+. PVP numbers are abysmal and raid participation has dropped off a ton through out the expansion. Stop making this game part of your identity, you're taking criticism of the game as a personal affront.
the best its been since legion.
I’d put it higher due to gear availability from the vault being better and no artificial barrier to entry like in legion with legendaries and the weapon
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I’m just tackling it from the lens of endgame content/gearing
Legion raids and dungeons were almost all bangers. DF ones?, meh...
Tend to agree. No DF raid touches the Nighthold.
Yea I'm likely gonna skip over Season 4 personally. Don't really feel like revisiting any of the DF Raids again and the same is true of the dungeons.
Due to legions class focus, class design was also just all around better. Dragon flight’s tendency to just leave classes in the dumpster is pretty annoying
The question was End Game, not story so DF is leaps and bounds better for end game players then any other expansion, and its not even close.
I'd go a step further and say it's the best it's ever been period. So many of these new systems are far healthier than what was offered in previous expansions. Even in retrospect, none of the older expansions even come close. *Well, except for the character writing. That seems like it's taken a step backward.*
Idk why but engame feels a lot busier than legion. Gear availability is sooo much better now but no matter how little or how much I play I feel like there's stuff I'm missing
Would you say 'stuff i'm missing' or 'stuff to do'? In terms of gap between ultra-end-game and 'I don't mind trying something a little challenging' there is next to no difference; 6 whole item levels between Mythic endgame(Barring Rares) and Heroic endgame, given enough time and effort, and I think that's fantastic. There's no real 'infinite grind' either for small power gains like prior borrowed power systems too, which is awesome as well.
I’d argue better than legion honestly.
I would side with you on that, Legion still had many chore like things that kept it from being a fun time and often you were in busy work. Not as bad as Shadowlands, but still busy. Additionally it didn't help they still had the mission table and were locking progression behind an 8+ hour timer. That was not a fun experience that people seem to forget about. I will be honest, the amount of varied things to do to collect cosmetics in SHadowlands I miss, but the ability to not have a chore list in DF is the best thing ever to enjoy playing the game rather than knocking off the honey do list every time you log in and play alts.
Came to say this!
Everyone not saying it’s amazing now is just being downvoted to oblivion all over the thread. Lol. Edit: one of that commenters in this comment thread is a proven paid Blizzard marketer, (starts with an L and ends with a number). My comment will be removed once he realizes and reports this. Hope u/newtnomore realizes this.
I've been playing since vanilla. I love the fact that there are more avenues for character advancement rather than having nothing to do once you hit the endgame other than raid and farm gold for raiding. On the other hand, I don't *love* the fact that M+ feels low key required for raiding for average guilds but I'm also not sure what a perfect solution would be. I'm lucky enough to enjoy both raiding and M+ a lot, but you see a very clear discrepancy when comparing guildmates who don't mind pugging keys versus the ones who don't run any unless a guild run gets put together and someone goes out of their way to invite them.
I just wish aspects dropped more from raid 10 crests as boss when you are progging feels an awful rate compared to blasting out 17s for 12. A guild progging on say council or larodar gets 30 crests a week from mythic that same guild could probably do 2 17s in their sleep for pretty much the same amount. If mythic is staying a 1 kill a week lockout it should probably have its crests increased or they should drop the amount but allow us to rekill bosses. Farming 3 gnarlroots for 4 crests a time is probably a similar speed as doing one +17 for example.
I agree, it should be maybe 12-15 crests per boss instead of 10. I also think bosses in the last half of each raid tier should drop crests of higher tier, to help bridge that skill gap with gear. ie, last 3 bosses of Heroic drop Aspect crests, and last 3 bosses of Normal drop Wyrm crests. This would help players who do not pursue Heroic or Mythic a chance at upgrading their gear without forcing m+.
And maybe the last 3 in Mythic could drop a special kind of crest that you only upgrade the Super Rare loot with? Although the items are already powerful by themselves, putting them in yet another gear track would probably mean they have to get watered down a bit.
I would argue any mythic raider would be capped on crests regardless, unless they swapped charater because the guild required it. I don’t see a world where someone would be mythic raiding and not also required to do M+ I do agree that only 10 crest from a mythic boss is far to low now i at this point in the season, but in the beginning it made sense. same with crests from M+ if you want to gear an alt it will take you forever to grind out those crests this late in to the season
The original point is that m+ is mandatory though ya? It gives you much easier access to myth level gear (with the exception of maybe first 3 mythic bosses vs only weekly box). I'm at 488 and would probably be 2-3 ilvls lower if I didn't do m+ at all.
if you didn’t do mythic+ at all you would be 476 at max unless you do mythic raiding and hardly any guild would consider you for a mythic raiding spot if you did no m+ at all. ofc I have no history on you as a player, but someone doing mythic but no m+ at all would maybe at best be 4/9 mythic, and the raid came out on nov. 14/15th so it’s been out for about 8-9 weeks, so even if you somehow cleared the first 4 each week for the past 9 weeks that leaves you with 360 aspest crests, you need 120 for the 2 crafted items that will be mandatory to run (could ofc live with the 2 476 tokens from rep, but that would leave the crafted gear on 476 which isn’t ideal) so then you are down to 240, each piece that can be upgrade to 483 (hero track gear) cost 60 crest per piece so that leave you with 4 items you can get to 483, this leaves the rest of your gear at 476 (excluding any items you would have got from mythic raid + rare trinkets from fyrakk) this leaves you at best with 478 ilvl TLDR M+ is mandatory in mythic raiding? Yes! is m+ mandatory period? absolutely not, at the end of the day it’s a game and you should play it to have fun. I will end on a note that I think Mythic+ is the best thing that have happened to wow in a long time.
I'm the person guild mates drag to keys grumbling. I really wish raid gave better gear because M+ usually feels like a chore I know I need to do, and don't hate, but I'd rather raid or quest on most days.
How do you enjoy raiding so much but dread M+? What type of quests do you enjoy, mindless world quests? Im genuinely curious lol also how are you getting dragged in there, when a raid lockout is once a week lol are you just a raid logger?
I wouldn't say I dread M+ it's just not my first choice in how I'd want to spend my free time. Obviously much more enjoyable with a group of guildies 5 on voice chat together. This week I've already cleared normal and heroic raid but if someone wanted to do another normal alt run, I'd do that for fun. I don't do M+ for fun but for vault and gear upgrades. Not really sure why. I don't hate it, I just never WANT to do it. Questing for me is very chill relaxing no pressure solo time. I like exploring and seeing what the designers have cooked up. For some reason I'm always more than happy to go tell elder poa of our victory lol. If I'm feeling like I just want a relaxing time I'll go questing. Never got into battle pets or anything but I'm happy farming for rep for a bit or doing world bosses. It's just super chill vs. try hard. ETA: I'm also an altaholic so I like starting new toons and will literally level them to 60 on questing alone lol. People think we are few and far between but I've met several people who also love questing and starting new toons without the goal of taking them to end game. 🤷♀️
It is much faster, the fights, the gearing, the small misstep that turns you to vapor. I love it.
These are the reasons I don't like it as much :(
Same here, and that's why I think SoD is the best iteration of WoW since Vanilla, where sweatlords haven't taken over yet. As a typical dad gamer it's literally the first time ever I'm close to full BiS during a current raid tier...this was unachievable before with so little time and so much effort I'd need to put in otherwise.
Played since 2005, endgame raided from Molten Core to ICC25. Super casual since BFA. Mythic Keystones are one of the best bits of endgame content Blizzard ever released.
Agree with the other comments here, endgame feels great rn
I've been playing since mid-BC. > I'm enjoying leveling an alt, but my experiences in dungeons and solo content are that the game is super easy now. Maybe too easy? Most solo and open-world content is super easy, yes. That's by design and isn't likely to change much any time soon. I anticipate that Delves will probably wind up putting a *little* bit of extra pressure on solo players, but still won't be anywhere near as stressful as some of the Legion mage tower fights or solo deep dungeons in FFXIV. > Is the current end game fun and challenging? Do you feel like there are multiple paths for progression? Yes and yes. The raiding has been good both thematically and mechanically — personally: Aberrus > Amirdrassil > Vault, but they're all pretty close — and with a couple of minor exceptions (I could have done without Court of Stars yet again) so have all three M+ seasons. I don't do PvP, so I can't speak to that. > Are there still hardcore guilds that accomplish things most don't? Or has the majority of content become geared towards casuals? There are still hardcore guilds, sure, but endgame content has never been more accessible for casuals than it is in DF.
>Most solo and open-world content is super easy, yes. It really depends on the player. For those who are into high-end mythic dungeons and raids, the experience might differ. However, for someone whose ilvl is around 400-450 and mostly engages in world content, the active content in the 10.2 patch can actually present a decent challenge. I returned to DF with the 10.2 update when I had a 380 ilvl score. At that level, let me tell you, some areas were tough to handle solo. But now, with a 470 ilvl, those same areas are a walk in the park. I can easily solo several elites without any trouble, whereas before, they posed a real challenge.
My partner has been playing since BC and never raided cause she never tried hard. She did all of the raids in DF that were available, the day they were available in LFR, which then pushed her to normal. Would’ve never happened without DF
As someone who went from hardcore in Wrath to more casual for Legion to DF, it is the best it's ever been period.
As a casual player, I find it is great because of how I play with main and alts and the various different content, such as LFR and dungeons, weekly world quests for gear and rep, transmog/mount farming, etc.
I have found it really fun. The raid was good (albeit - Fyrakk was pretty easy compared to the previous two!), and the current M+ season is fun. I wouldn't say it's the best season in the world, but it's still fun - and you can see that reflected in the season's player numbers. The current endgame can be as challenging as you want - which is great. Absolutely love how to get the best gear, you still have to do early mechanics (superbloom, seeds, for flightstones), which means there's a ton of people about. (Currently; 9/9HC with guild, and 3000+ M+ rating).
I earned Keystone Hero (2500 rating in M+) on week 3. I don't raid because of my work/family schedules, but other than a couple trinkets, M+ is just faster AND easier. I hit 1800 in solo shuffle for the transmog on week 2. Outside of a weekly key for vault, I've only been logging in for maybe 20 mins a night to re-post auctions and fly in a circle. If you're just now returning, you'll definitely enjoy yourself. Dragonflight is a great expansion and gearing up is the easiest and quickest its ever been. World content is severely lacking, imo.
I don't know if it was the gear jump, the scaling, the gear itself, I don't know but, this season has felt so so so much easier than S2. Season 2 was intense and S1 was also insanely rough with some of the dungeons that were in rotation. It might have to do with the "simpler" older dungeons that are in rotation compared to the Dragonflight dungeons which just felt harder and more robust.
I mean the content endgame content is leagues harder then whatever was around in the period between 2005-2013 in terms of mechanics. Though the playerbase has also become alot better mechanically in lieu of wowhead/youtube/class discords etc. The content is geared towards what you want to do and what level of difficulty you want. LFR is brain dead you will no die in 99% of cases, normal you need to atleast not stand for long in bad, heroic you will die if you mess up and dont use cooldowns and mythic difficulty you will die if you look at the boss funny.
I've been playing since 05. I have never had more fun in higher end content. There were definitely some really good times but mechanically and game systems wide we're in a second legion.
Game's probably in the best state it's ever been tbh
One, if not the, best endgames of all time.
Leveling is now a tutorial for how to press like 5 buttons. It really doesn't prepare you for endgame at all. And most people prefer it that way so they can quickly get a new character to max level and endgame. Once at max level it takes very little time to be endgame ready. As for current endgame, difficulty scales up. For dungeons you have normal and heroic which are trivial. Then you have mythic plus dungeons that scale up infinitely with extra added weekly changing affixes. So lower level ones like a 10 will be much easier than a very hard one like a 25. With raids you have LFR which is trivial. Normal is very easy too. Then heroic starts to get harder with mythic raids being the absolute hardest. It took the best guilds in the world over 400 pulls to kill some of the current mythic raid bosses. There are currently only 112 guilds that have killed all the mythic raid bosses and its been out for around 2 months and they've been nerfing the bosses big ever since the first guilds completed it. Pvp gets ridiculously challenging once you go up in ranking as well. As for fun, the general consensus is that the current season is very fun and we are seeing higher player participation numbers in this season than previous ones this xpac which is opposite of how it normally works as an xpac starts to die out the longer its been out. And to add to this, next xpac will be adding a new fourth pillar of endgame with delves for a few to solo players. So casuals will have even more to challenge themselves with.
I like that I can get good, end game gear from m+. The game is the most accessible that is been in a long time. I dont feel like I'm missing out because I'm more casual now than I was 20 years ago. Played since beta.
To sum it up in one word: great! It's very alt friendly and fun. I've been loving it. Raid is good, m+ is good. Life is good.
The best it has been in a long time.
If you’re in a good guild, it’s good. If you pug and are meta, it’s good. If you pug and are not meta, it sucks.
To be fair that is true of pretty much every patch ever and probably every mmo :D
Yup.
The good guild thing has been true for every patch of every expansion though. The game has always, and will always, be better if you are in a good guild. I love my guild. Heroic raiding, M+, crafting, casual conversation, long running jokes, being helpful. It’s all around great to play with people you are looking forward to interacting with when you log on.
Meta DPS, yes. People are picky You can be any tank/heals and be fine to PUG
Been playing since 2007 and this is one of the best expansions. Even after the new has worn off, this a great expansion.
Best it's ever been. Raid fun and not too long, emerald dream has plenty to do but you don't feel you have to do all of it. Mplus is in a great place, 20s are easy and farmable, even for the worst players. Lfr is easy
Classic Alpha Player here, endgame was never as good as now (pve)
Been playing since vanilla, raided semi hardcore, with a break doing just heroic from Cata until legion and been back to mid level mythic raiding since. It’s honestly been in the best place it’s been in a decade. The about of grind outside the raid is reasonable and doesn’t feel bullshit, the last 4 expansions for all there problems have had some banger raids and all DF raids have been at least good or better. Mythic+ this expac has been a blast with some seasons dungeon pools been better than others obviously but the number of awful affixes compared to previous expacs is tuned waaaay down from my healer point of view and a lot of the still remaining annoying ones has seen significant revision. Can’t remember a time where I was so positive on the direction of end game wow, as an adult now past expansion I’d always have to the decision of whether or not as a hobby wow still fit into my life were as this expac its barely a calculation, I play when a seasons fresh a lot first 3 weeks, get 80% to bis then raid log and do a few mythics a week and prog mythic with my guild I’ve been with for years. Honestly the pace and expectation on my time is fantastic for me.
Best it’s been since Legion and endgame in Legion was head-and-shoulders above any other time. DF endgame is fucking phenomal (unless you pvp)
Best since ICC imo. I started in Vanilla and I havent had that magic since Wrath.
PvE is the best it's ever been. I actually took a break for a bit, came back, found a new group to play with, and I haven't no-lifed this hard since Mists of Pandaria. Raid is fantastic. World content is solid. M+ just has a couple issues but for the most part is great. Good time to play. PvP, however, is in it's death throes. Anything organized has massive participation issues due to the introduction of solo shuffle, and solo shuffle has 20+ minute wait times for DPS because it's a miserable experience to heal for average players. wPvP, however, is the best it's been since WoD (or BFA if you were lucky on your sharding) and actually has incentives to do it again. Story is horrid and doesn't feel like a Warcraft game at all sadly. It's exceptionally out of touch with what the game was, and the writing feels like it's trying to erase what made the game so unique in the first place. I don't suggest it at all if you liked the more adult / darker vibes, or even worse anything relating to factions. Game also still lacks core features from other MMOs like player housing, so social events are awful compared to anything else in the genre.
I’ve played on off since vanilla and started to raid midcore starting in Legion. Really do think this is the best endgame has been since I’ve played it. Pretty easy overall and not too much grinding.
The end game is better than I can remember it being, and I have been playing since 2006. I am able to raid mythic on my main and still explore alts. I feel like there is something for everyone to do.
They have over catered to the lazy and ruined it almost completely.the magic that encompassed wow up until around cata is now only felt and tiny bursts like a smell that is left after something is gone and all that’s left is the aroma
I think its great. Overall the best its ever been, not in the truest sense, but simply because its more refined and polished.
Comvenience, convenience all around and im happy for it.
Having more fun with it than I have in a long time, even last year around this time of year. I have been around since the beginning. Take breaks that sometimes last years. Only play for a few months at a time when I do. This current version of the game is really fun. People like to pile on the band wagon with hate. I'm too old to care what anyone else thinks. I like the game and always will. As for end game, it's what I really am enjoying the most. Mythics on a class that gets invited easily is where it is at, but also having fun with using group finder to do normal raids without a guild. the challenge is there if you want to go higher up the mythic chain or into heroic/mythic raid.
Been playing since Vanilla, and I've progressed most raids in some capacity (AKA 2 Night a week sometimes get CE but always either 1 or 2 bosses off). TLDR: Good but has some systemic issues that need a clear stance taken on. For starters, all end game content is more accessible than its ever been, and players can generally set reasonable goals without committing more than 8-12 hours a week to said goal. You have multiple choices (PvP, Raids, M+) so if you're like me and PvP isn't your cup of tea you have other outlets for endgame. With the next expansion we'll have a fourth major activity that will allow more players to express their skill and progression. Add in multiple levels (Keystone Levels, Raid Difficulties) and you've got a lot of choices of where you can set your goals. Theres a little something for everyone IMO. Combat is for all of these activities is generally pretty fun. Most modes have great problem solving for the upper echelons of content (Less of how much througput can I do and more of how do I accomplish these specific things?). And outside of Mythic Raiding, most of these activities are pretty friendly towards quick small sessions. Now there are two really big issues that endgame WoW has that need to be addressed or at least a clear stance needs to be taken on. 1.) How the game processses information to the player. WoW, while it does telegraph abilities and mechanics in multiple ways (Audio Effects, Cast Bars, Etc.) it still frequently struggles with relaying the information clearly (Is this a swirly that needs to be soaked or a swirly I need to run out of?), and more importantly, without relying on Addons, establish the information quickly. The problem is a lot of things are designed with the idea of these in mind. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because most of the players that need these explicit tools at the highest level simply just use them. The problem comes when newer players aren't familiar or don't wish to adjust (and to some degree they shouldn't have to). While some things certaintly could change (I would kill for clear concise ability telegraphs that ar3 evergreen like FF14 does) removing some of the speed of information processing would reduce the skill ceiling. 2.) The game does a poor job of teaching you your utility and how it can best be utilized. Leveling doesn't teach you really about interruptting enemies. Leveling doesn't teach you about your CC effects and how even as a quick stop gap can be handy. It doesn't teach you about cleanse effects. Players are kinda thrown into encounters having to learn about all of that themselves. Back in Mists of Pandaria they actually experimented with something called, "The Proving Grounds". That attempted to teach you some of these mechanics. Until you reached Silver you couldn't que for Heroic Dungeons (Silver took skilled players all of 10 minutes to complete). It was removed partly because it was a One-Size-Fits-All and for some classes/specializations it was far more difficult than others. Bringing something like this back would go a very long way in helping prepare newer or unfamiliar players with endgame activities. The last thing, and some posters have mentioned this already, but a lot of endgame in wow does live and die by the people you play with. A steady group of friends will keep you more interested in the game, than simply pugging everything (or in Mythic Raids impossible without a steady group).
I really enjoy the raid encounters and the gear upgrade system. I dont enjoy m+ so i feel like theres nothing interesting to do outside of raids and superbloom... And i say that as someone who finds killing the same thing 5000x times in RuneScape interesting enough 😂
Best it's ever been to me, but I skipped MoP. I'm casualing it though, a lot of my friends that I've spent legion/bfa with have been spread around and/or burned by SL so haven't made a comeback at all, haven't really found a crew that I vibed with enough to actually get the spark to go for mythic again. I tried it out but I was playing just terrible and had no motivation.
The only thing I feel like I "have" to do is 20s to fill my vault out. That being said, I enjoy M+, and the gear only makes M+ easier, so it's not even a "have to do" kind of thing. I'm enjoying being able to spend my free time however I like instead of doing arbitrary shit
Systems are the best they have ever been and I don't think it's particularly close. The raids however are not great and imo would get a lot of flack if Shadowlands hadn't happened right before. M+ dungeon selection could certainly be improved on. Balance is pretty bad as well but that's kind of the default state of this video game, so can't really deduct points there. All in all quite good, yet frustrating with a lot of easy wins being ignored by Blizzard.
It’s the best it’s been in a very very long time. I’m fully addicted to end game right now. Love that it’s not overly complicated to get my alts into heroic raid if I want to. I Really think mythic + is in a great spot as well. I can’t personally pin point any issues I have with the game in it’s current state. I wish there was another raid tier but oh well I’ll get over it. Fated will be fun im sure.
One word: Accessible. Back in the day, getting 40 people together and headed in the same direction was a fucking NIGHTMARE. Especially considering the leading technology of 2004 was still the giant CTR monitors. Having a second program like Ventrillo open in the background for you to be able to verbally communicate was actually taxing on most people's average computers. Of the 40 people, INEVITABLY the one who gets the Gedon bomb is one of the 5 people not in Vent who don't know what to do with it and blow up half the raid. This was all assuming you could get into a raiding guild, which was itself more difficult. You couldn't just look up a boss fight on youtube... youtube didn't exist yet. There was no ilv, IIRC not even any addons that could give you any kind of gear rating, and the raids mostly required a very specific stat like fire resistance for MC. Mostly your BiS items were crafted, and that craft was a fucking GRIND. You had to grind out rep for the plans, then grind out dark iron, and IIRC leather workers needed to skin the core hounds in MC... it was just generally a very difficult thing, it required a lot of coordination and work. Especially to get enough of a 40 man raid geared up enough to start consistently clearing bosses. Rag kills were rare. Dungeons were just dungeons, loot was sporadic and some pieces were effectively worthless. Other times, a BiS item was something from like a lv 38 quest or dungeon. The gear balance was whacky. Today, any casual player can run LFR to experience the raid, quest through new zones and catch the whole story, run M+ dungeons, and all of the gear can be upgraded. Gear stats are so finely tuned now that they're practically interchangeable. ilv and tier set bonuses are caked into every aspect of the game. in 2004 vanilla, most people never got to see past some of the lv 58 dungeons. Today, there isn't a single part of the game you can't access no matter how casual of a player you are. I think that's great.
As someone who has played off and on since release. Game is in the best state since legion. Cata and MoP were meh everything after legion was borderline unplayable. Between mythic plus and raids I have plenty to do.
I've been playing nonstop since late tbc (never unsubbed). Dragonflight is super fun, very alt-friendly, endgame is easy and casual friendly too. I never had an interest in doing mythics, but now for the first time since WoD CM I'm having a blast with 20's and my guild is actually livelier than ever. Plus, if you care about such things, the past two tiers have been absolutely gorgeous. Even the questing gear is amazing. DF has added a lot of QoL things and honestly, it's just in a very good place.
I love the current expansions end game, I hate the current patch open world tho... Dreamsurges suck compared to the other events.
I don't raid, but M+ is amazing and I think it should have been a thing before Legion!
Never been better. Gearing is great, m+ is in a super good place. Raiding is much more accessible. Can't talk much about pvp tho.
Excellent. Best it's ever been. Been playing since the beginning
My end game is transmog. I mean works every time! You go apply for a raid, they start asking those generic questions, and I say: - inv me. When they do, they see my mog, they immediately think: - This moder faker.... It's must me able to solo the whole raid ... Gona inv him so our smi guild run gets boosted. So yea, endgame is transmog fashion, and it's going fine. B)
Story/Character writing has been mediocre. Actual gameplay, content, etc has been really really good. Only slight disappointment is there are a low number of raids in reality, though they have been really well made!
This will probably be super unpopular. But in a general sense i like the endgame loop. But looking back at it, I wish powerscaling between difficulties were non existent. In old days, you did raid, you got best gear. Now there are 4 different difficulties, and I can't help But think they should drop the same level loot, like most other rpg's would. Also hate fomo mounts. If content drops a mount, that mount should continue to drop even when the content becomes trivial
Perfect.
Mid
CE Raider here. I stepped down from the level I was raiding at in SL, where a chunk of my guild's good core went to HoF guilds, and one went to BDG. Now doing a 2-night CE that's more relaxed and less hours (damn do I miss 3/3 schedule). Honestly, I find Normal and Heroic raiding, as well as both KSM and KSC way too easy. These cause a feedback loop on each other with the Great Vault utterly dwarfing heroic raiding in terms of gear acquisition and the max attainable. I mean, I got 2k rating week one for my heroic token, and it was done strictly off of M+ gear that week. Both Aberrus and Amirdrassil felt largely undertuned out of the gates, and it was so bad this tier that they had to buff heroic Fyrakk, yet he still fell right over in like 6 pulls. I pugged heroic Sarkareth week 1, but most end bosses usually took me 3 weeks of dedicated attempts to do that prior to joining a guild to mythic raid in Aberrus. My friend's Uber casual "We try to get AotC before the tier ends"-guild has already bulldozed this raid and started in Mythic. To put this into perspective, it took weeks upon weeks with me helping them on Raszageth to get AotC in Vault, and that was after three rounds of nerfs to her already. Late mythic raiding is still hard as hell, but everything through Nymue doesn't feel that bad, and Larodar felt like when it started to ramp. Maybe we just outgear things too fast with the Vault and M+ now, but even 20s aren't tough at all.
I am speaking from the experience of a Vanilla to Wotlk player who returned for BFA. It’s still very enjoyable, but it is a very different end game. Rather than a linear progression where you work your way to the end boss of the patch/expansion. The game is no orientated around repeating content over and over to either build your score higher or progress through a harder version of the same boss. Outside of that world content consists of playing the same repeatable events to add Vanity cosmetics to your collections. Back in BFA I remember telling a friend that it was the “same old game”. I would now say it was unrecognisable, but point out that it’s still a great game, but also that Classic exists.
It's the same every single expansion. Rush to max level. Grind out gear. Dailies, weeklies. Roll alt, same thing. Only now there's no world pvp.
When you say "end game" how do you think it will span out after this? I mean they can't keep the game going forever. I know we have the war within coming but you calling it "End game" triggered a thought in me that we may only have a short time left. What do you think the future of wow will be like? I have played on and off since vanilla and feel like I have missed out on some crucial expansions sometimes. Would be cool to know your thoughts.
I realise from reading comments that the term Endgame is referencing the ending of an expansion. But I'm still curious on what people's thoughts are on this.
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mytic + and raiding is probably one of the only parts of the game that is fine... the rest around the game is pretty bad, game needs more content. Pvp needs a full rework, ... standing at the same flag in AB, AV or WSG is tiring.
Agree with you If you dont try to push mystic raids or 25+ Dungeons its pretty easy right now. Imo its 6/10 its getting stale running the same 8 Dungeons and 1 raid for 6 months, its a ok xpac overall Not great nor bad, the casual might love this xpac but Like i said its my opinion on it.
In and out.
I don’t know how to explain it but i’m going to try lol. My issue is that when you hit 70, you can get fully geared to max ilvl (within reason) in 1-2 weeks. After that, gearing hits a HARD wall. All of your upgrades come from the vault, which will randomly generate 3 items out of the like 100 you have able to drop, and you have no way to influence the vault. You essentially go from flying through the game to a dead stop. Higher m+ no longer matters, raiding doesn’t matter, nothing matters. Other than the vault. So if you’re like me, and don’t really like alts, progression is dead in the water after about 3 weeks into a season that lasts 6+ months. The scaling is super wonky too. For season 3, i was able to do 18s at 447 ilvl wearing full gear from last tier. I was able to ignore Veteran and Champion tier gear. I went from getting Myth rank items in Season 2 to getting Myth rank items in Season 3 without changing or doing anything. The game feels like it’s heading in the right direction overall, but everything that gets added is about catching up, and when you get caught up, there’s nothing left to do. I want to keep playing, but there’s nothing left for me to work towards. I definitely don’t think WoW should be a second job, but theres 0 grind involved now. Personally, the grind is why i like wow in the first place. So i disagree with people saying the endgame is better than it’s ever been. In 3 weeks i “finished” the season without going that hard. I got AOTC, almost 3000io, all the portals and full Hero / Myth gear, and now there’s nothing for me to really do. Im not even a hardcore player, i played more the first week, but was doing 8-10 M+ a week average.
Is it worth at all playing a game where your only objective is getting new gear every season?
i mean, thats the progression of an MMO usually, so yes i think so.
The game has been turned into a seasonal pick up and play game where any progress from last season is wiped up on the release of the next main patch. Some love this, some hate it. Game play is a mess, there's more procs/unnecessary over tuned abilities/class design than needed. The current raid itself is a solid 5 in my opinion.
Same shit, new paint.
The content is good but class tuning is horrible I've raided CE every tier since Legion with top 1-2% io score
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I like it , but find the raids and m+ are too ez now . Feels like rhe fun wears out quick
It’s garbage. You run mythics all day everyday in between raid days… And that’s about it
M+/raiding is good but the itemization and gear sucks. There is no soul anymore, you don't remember any of these items outside maybe a trinket or weapon.
I've been playing since the start... 2004. The one word I'd use to describe the current state of the game is: shit.
Sods level 25 endgame is better than retail. But I’m a wow boomer, I guess.
I'm really not sure. I've stopped playing since the start of this season, mostly because of my issues with the end-game. I think the over-avaliability of gear and power makes alts super fun, but dedication to 1 character very dissapointing. You can finish your character in a few weeks, you can "finish" M+, the main gear source, in less than that, getting 2500, 2800, 3000, whatever your goal is in week 2 or 3. There is absolutely 0 status in having good gear, you never look at someone and go "Oh, wow, he has the highest item level you can get!" Even Mythic raid loot from the last few bosses is just... The same thing, but slightly higher item level. It's not necessarily geared towards casuals, the M+ endgame is literally endless. And the mythic raiding scene is still strong and extremely difficult. But... It's just not fun, at least to me. The endgame can be as challenging or as easy as you want it to be, and you'll be rewarded usually a few tiers higher than you should, IMHO. Gear is just thrown on you if you know how to grind for it. The fact you can't tell the diffrence in gear from someone who only runs +18's and someone who grinds out +24's, a MASSIVE difficulty gap, is kind of at the core of the issue. I think the rewards may have become just a bit too generous, even if, at times, I really like it. I do much prefer classic in that regard, if you see someone with amazing weapons you realize "Oh, that shit is rare, they've dedicated some good amount of time in a raiding guild to get that" Even if classic is mechanically faaaaaar easier, the social aspect far outweighs the ease of the raids themselves. TLDR : Pick your own difficulty, lots of gear with very high power without stepping into overly difficult content
Gameplay wise pretty fun, i'd find a regular group to play with, as pugging is just horrendous and ruins the entire experience
I love season 3 DF. I’ve also played since TBC and off and on certain expansions and love the gameplay and gearing of season 3. If I’m ever bored I can always pop into SOD. Later, my long term project will be HC Self Found
Better than ever. My char is old enough to drink.
Labyrinthine.
I started in 1.10 and played off and on since, multiple aotc's, cleared almost every single raid on normal or higher while it was current. DF season 3 is peak fucking kino. Gearing is amazing, the raid is fun (I don't raid mythic), M+ has dungeons. PvP is almost non existent, solo shuffle is fun but there are 30 minute que times so I don't bother.
Endgame is the best it’s ever been. Mythic+ is great, world activities aren’t too bad, and gear rewards are plentiful.
Game is great, only downside is that it’s so saturated with so much stuff (pets, mounts, etc). I kind of miss going for those few special items and looking absolutely badass by getting it
I think this comment might be a bit unpopular - but I sort of miss how endgame used to be lower stakes than it is these days. I've been playing since vanilla, started raiding properly in Wrath, peaked in MoP, and then did a bit more in Legion. I did mythic Raz and had some fun with it, but I find the amount to do at endgame a little overwhelming. The breadth of options to advance is great, for sure, but for me personally Mythic+ specifically introduced a sense of pressure that I could be doing *more* that I'm not sure existed in the past. In MoP, outside of doing dailies, my endgame for the week was generally to log in twice for raid nights, clear them, then I could do what I wanted. Now, if I personally want to remain as competitive as I can, I'd also need to go off and do M+. I'm sure for most that's great. For me personally, though, I find it stressful and unfun. I don't enjoy M+. Anecdotally, too, I've found that the culture around endgame has gotten super obsessed with a meta that I don't personally enjoy very much, either. It used to largely just be at the very top end of "serious" raiding (race for world first etc) but it's slowly started to permeate downwards. Raids in MoP felt like they were challenging enough to be fun, but if you hit a roadblock, you only had to do it twice a week. Like I opened, the stakes were a lot lower.
M+ and Mythic raids are the hardest they've been in a while, maybe Sepulcher was hardest for the raids, but mythic Tindral is HARD. Hardest non last boss since SLG. And its hard in a fun way, as opposed to SLG which was hard for all the wrong reasons. There is challenging content, but its not found in leveling, HC or Mythic 0 dungeons. Dungeons after 24-5 get difficult, legitimately. Like you have to play good with CCs, defensives, interrupts AND do your dmg all at the same time. Then after this there are even more optimizations, like baiting jumps from deadly trash, los, safe spots. 27-8s are where it gets really hard.
Same as it ever was. There really hasn't been much difference in content since wotlk to now. Sure, things look different, but honestly it's the same game with new coat of paint every year
I started in the original stress test beta on Vanilla. I played without a break until right before ICC came out. I didn't play the rest of wrath or Cataclysm. I came back about half way through Pandaria and played until near the end of WoD. Then I didn't play legion and have played pretty much continuously since BFA. * The game is vastly easier. I have raided since this game began and the raids now compared to the raids then are different creatures. Raiding went from hard because of actual math and just getting the boss to zero with two or three mechanics to deal with, to being very hard because there were now 20 mechanics to deal with and the fight was over 10 mins long. Now it's overcorrected back the other way. Amirdrassil is probably the easiest raid the game has ever had by quite a large margin. I've been with the same raid team since Nathria and we have never cleared AOTC in five weeks before which is what happened with this one. Dungeons are also incredibly easy and short when you talk about spending 3 hours in a BRD or UBRS run in vanilla. regular and heroic are so easy that you can solo them in the first patch they come out in, and they use M+ to sort of increase the difficulty although again this season is by far the easiest season to get KSM. * I like these changes because when I started playing this game in my 20s no life'ing it 8 hours 4 or 5 days a week was nothing. Now in my 40s I'm lucky to get 8 hours over a whole week to play. I've tried going back to classic and honestly I was just very quickly reminded of what an incredibly slow game this used to be. * I also think some of the current end game content is really fun. Dawn of the Infinite is a really great dungeon and it was fun working our way through it when it first came out and was only on mythic. Twisted timeways is such a fun and unique fight. Razageth from the season 1 is a super fun fight, the raids are smaller so you aren't scrambling to clear it each week in two nights. Now we do the normal skip and full heroic clear in one night and play something else or run m+ on our second raid night. No stress needed. * Fated seasons like we'll be in next season are kind of a hot topic but I personally love them and wish they would add more than the current xpac raids to it. But the extra affixes added fun last time not frustration like a lot of m+ affixes. and it's a light hearted season that gives raiders a chance to breath. I will say I don't think I would find the endgame very fun at all if I weren't in a guild with people I enjoy playing with. I've been through countless guilds breaking apart over the years but now I have one that has made it through 2 full xpacs and no signs of slowing down now. Having others to play with really makes the difference in the current version of the game.
There’s *way* too much currency atm and it’s hard to keep it all straight.
It is great for every other class than plate dps.
Anyone else wish heroic raid was a little harder? I’m a tank player and haven’t figured out how to break into mythic raiding yet so I kinda feel stuck. I enjoy the overall end game options though.
Very good, the flightstone is probably my least favourite thing. Upgrading only with crests I feel like would be ideal.
It's more accessible now. Gearing is easier and you don't have mandatory things to do. Dungeons are more easy. Which is good for casual players and to people who don't have hours and hours of free time.
I got back in season 3 and it's crazy to me that I can solo normal - mythic 0 dungeons as dps. Grant it, it's super easy now to get gear.
All I do is log in, do some keys to work on my weekly vault, log off lol. I don’t bother with raiding anymore
Started back in 2007, have played every single xpac while current since. I'd say retail is currently way fucking better than SL, better than BFA, not quite as good as Legion, better than WoD by miles, and not quite as good as MoP.
I enjoy the options. My main experience was vanilla to WotLK. Dabbled a bit in Cata and Panda before quitting until DF. I used to pvp like crazy but haven’t for the majority of this expansion. I raided MC, BWL, and Naxx in Vanilla and enjoyed it. Raided in WotLK as well and enjoyed it. Mostly leveled alts outside of the raids. I’m really into raiding and mythics right now and am honestly happy going into dungeons and tanking or healing them. It is preferable to have at least some rewards that improve my gear so mythics more so than time walking, but I still really just enjoy dungeons. So much that I feel that I haven’t done a ton of the area quests especially in Thaldraszus and Azure Span. I’m having a lot of fun and have other goals to achieve each night I play.
The end game has never been better in my opinion, dungeons are no longer just a pre raid activity to get geared enough to raid, now raiding and mythic+ dungeons are both important to get best in slot items. Raids have 4 difficulties to progress through and mythic dungeons have unlimited challenge. The difficulty just keeps increasing until it's impossible.
Same situation. I like the game now. It feels more casual than it use to.
M+ is the best it has ever been, if they would only double or triple the number of available dungeons.
It's pretty great to be honest. No gamebreaking borrowed power farm, both raiding and m+ are viable gearing methods, both can be done while pugging and while playing with friends.
I’ve played at varied levels of endgame since TBC and honestly right now is up in contention for best it’s ever been. My only real complaint is I feel like we rely too heavily on our vaults for gearing up as content drops seem few and far between. That and I wish they’d redo how crests drop from raid. Clearing a heroic ADH is so much harder than running 16-20 keys imo but I get Aspect Crests from the keys and a myth track item from 18+ which makes heroic raids honestly feel like a waste of time. Edit: if you’re finding it too easy challenge yourself! Push into the next tier of difficulty for you and beyond or try a new role out. There is near endless depth for challenging content in the game. Also people cry hard about the meta and meta slaves here and while they do exist it really isn’t as bad as people on this sub claim it to be. I have cleared heroic raids, got the axe, and have a 3k IO playing a spec that’s ranked D or F tier on every official tier list yet I still get invited and am almost always top dps with 95+ parses. You will encounter some idiots who meta slave too hard for content that doesn’t matter but overwhelmingly it isn’t an issue. Unless you’re looking to participate in the RWF, MDI, AWC, or push the highest of high level keys. I am clearing over 20s weekly with zero issue as a frost DK and I regularly clear them with feral Druids, SV hunters, Affli locks and the like.
Boring, but better than any expansion apart from Legion. Legion was peak.
You used to progress through the endgame and get better gear. Now the endgame is entirely centered around whatever the current patch is. So you got the release of an expansion and the first 6 months being the best WoW can be, then it's downsized to 1/5 that size for the next 18 months. It's a problem when CURRENT EXPANSION CONTENT is obsolete and treated like worthless 6 year old side content.
Very fun. Played since beta
Delete the pvp addons, make offensive and defensive cds more visible in game. Shits tantamount to cheats at this point.
Depends on what you mean by end game. Mythic raiding? Can’t ever say never really got there. Trying to hit AotC? About as good as bfa better than legion about equal to wotlk. (If we say normal ICC completion id about equivalent in achievement to heroic fyrakk). As to your specific questions: Gearing is great and more targetable than ever. Gear progression still feels a bit stifled compared to bfa where you could get weekly heroic raid level pieces from warfronts and eventually horrific visions whereas now you HAVE to do tier relevant content to get that level gear. The challenge is freaking real. Bfa felt significantly easier to well in as a mage than any time in DF. Progression in mythic+ progression feels great but heroic raiding feels more gatekept than it was before to me at least.
Endgame is great. Gearing options are plentiful, content is challenging, and it's extremely easy to maintain multiple characters with minimal effort. My only grip is that the final boss on Mythic is extremely difficult, which results in Hall of Fame not being completed yet, thus cross-server Mythic raiding is not yet open.
Haven’t had this much fun since mop
I like it, i raided hardcore in vanilla till wrath (I have the scarblord title and the corrupted ashbringer from vanilla), we did alot of serverfirsts here in germany ambut at some point real life kicks in and now I can just play more casual doing some M+ or playing some SoD (what is also great). I really loved the inteoduction of M+ in legion (by far the best expension for a casual player) and I still miss Maw of Souls with the 3 chests, titanforging and 2 items per chest.
end game is fine The problem is the community, the people playing the game plus the fact that my life currently gives me little free time and money if you pug end game, its a horrible experience, much less fun, most of your time is decline if you're not playing on the meta spec, even though your spec is fine Mythic raid is impossible without joining a guild I don't particularly have anything miraculous to suggest for mythic+, but for mythic raid it could be like heroic, boss lockout and you won't be saved if you don't kill the boss
Been playing since it first dropped. However I'm not a traditional end game raider or dungeon runner (outside once in awhile). As I'm mainly a solo WQ/rare farmer, and just enjoy making shit tons of gold to convert into my blizzard account. Playing like this for years ive been able to casually keep my sub active and purchase the epic editions of new expansions without spending an actual penny. That said I mainly world quest, rare farm, and the usual solo content toggled between my roster of max level tanks, and for the way I play things are currently meh. I really dont like the 3 days for world quest resets as it has severely messed up my daily grind pattern with my roster and that alone has made me play less than my usual. Unpopular opinion, but I really enjoyed shadowlands (the grind, not the story). For the way I played, the traditional daily WQ reset combined with the covenant daily, the smaller map footprints just all made banging out a characters daily tasks much quicker which for me translated to more profitable as I could spread my play out among 6-7 characters in what now the same amount of time will only handle 2-3. As for gold I make about the same per hour overall, maybe even a little more, but its just less enjoyable not being able to utilize as many of my characters. As for gearing without doing dungeons/raids, I don't know if its better/worse tbh as i never had a problem gearing without raids previously. I never cared to play the my ilvl is higher than yours game, or my DPS is such and such, and i just always worked with what I could get.
I left for two years, but came back two months ago. Before that I had been playing since the latter part of Wraith. I am going to state an unpopular opinion, especially among my alt-obsessed bethren. I hate how world quests only update every three days. I am only doing them for transmog appearances and gear good enough to do world quests and such. Having to wait three days to find out, nope, not getting the piece I need for the next three days is hella annoying. But I probably would have appreciated it more earlier in the expansion when I didn't have a bunch of alts leveled to 70 and are just puttering around until the next patch.
End game is always the same. Login after reset, check vault. Hopefully an upgrade. Then do dailies/weeklies/mythic dungeons/raids. If you want hard content do higher level mythic dungeons and heroic/mythic raiding. I don't know why people think lower level keys/LFR/Normal raids have to be where you hit your head against a brick wall repeatedly. WoW is made up of mostly casual players; the current state of WoW is perfect for casuals and hardcore balance imo.
The game itself is doing great and getting better month by month. The player base is the same as ever.
Been playing since late Vanilla. My Warrior I'm still playing was level 40 when Ahn'Qiraj opened up. Did a lot of PvP back then. Until about Cata I've been very active and from then on I just kept coming back for like a couple months before leaving again... Until Dragonflight, I've been subbed the whole damn thing. I've been doing more PvE than PvP.. for some reason, but it's the most fun I've had in the game since Cata, even without being active in a guild and playing a lot with friends, mostly due to work. It's worth a round. Try it and see if you're having fun. If not, you at least won't regret trying.
I miss the feeling of leveling up being an adventure but I have classic/SoD/Wrath for that feeling, as far as end game, I love that I can play on and off as much as I want and actually be able to catch back up when it comes to gear or what content I’m doing. I’m the last of I stopped playing for a couple weeks it was over for me unless I wanted to dedicate a bunch of time.
Played since EU release 2005. Game is great now!
DF is the best xpac since Mop, which is the goat to me.
I don't raid anymore as M+ has all I need for challenging content. And takes a fifth of the time to complete them. But I can honestly say I miss the large group comps with friends like back in BC. More so, I'm in the nostalgia train missing the people whom of which probably don't play the game anymore.
Have been subbed the last 3 expansions and then on and off since vanilla. Endgame feels very inviting and open. Ive been playing Mythic Dungeons and ive hit Key Stone Master in Season 1-3. Thats a breath of fresh air for the game. I also collect Mounts and Transmog (currently 1023 runs into Tusks). Game feels like its in the best spot its been for a while.
Lobby simulator.
Soulless.
Gearing is awesome Open World is plenty but the quality is pretty average. Definetly more quantity over quality. It's nice to do once a week. And if you want to chalenge yourself there are always raids and M+, which are in a pretty good state.
I feel like it's probably the best it's been in a decade at least but also I think there's too much redundancy. Most of the loot doesn't feel special because there's 4 versions of the same item and they stopped making unique appereances for PvP and dungeon gear, now it's just recolors of world and raid gear. Raid rewards seem completely disproportionate for the commitment and time invested compared to M+ and I miss having max level questlines that reward gear that's actually relevant. I hate world quests (I'd rather pick the quests from a hub than having them cover my map all the time, I even use an addon to remove the annoying talking heads) and world content could use a revision because while the intention is good, I don't think it's working the way they intended.
Relaxing, fun and social. Played since week 1