Hey it's Soul, and this is the Word of Warcraft.
Back in October, about a month into Legion, I gave a list of five things about the expansion
that I found to be an inexcusable disappointment for the majority of players.
We're going to take a quick look at where we're at now with those, and I'll give
another five disappointments to freshen things up.
The first point was that Xavius was undertuned, and this caused a ripple of disappointment
among the raiding community that Blizzard is off the mark when it came to tuning.
This was for various reasons, among them the tuning of the encounter itself, artifact ranks
and legendary armor and so on.
Since then Blizzard swung the pendulum straight to the other side and brought players an overtuned
raid with the Trial of Valor, and Helya, who was menacing to underprepared raid teams.
This was then followed up with the Nighthold and Gul'dan, which overall was accepted
as a strong but reasonably entertaining raid to cap the tier.
So technically the easy mythic Xavius kill is a stain on Blizzard's record, but time
marches on with more wins and disappointments to look forward to.
Nomi still sucks.
Nomi's been updated a bit with the chance of learning upgraded recipes having gone up.
There's the new food that gives an additional, higher chance of also learning a recipe upgrade.
In the 7.2.5 PTR, there's a sort of rush order, similar to the Warlods of Draenor garrision
rush order, that speeds up work orders assigned to Nomi, to destroy your materials even faster.
Nomi still sucks.
I get it, Blizzard, you've got to stay the course with design paradigms but for all that
is good, don't do cooking like this ever again.
In the face of all these game systems like artifact power that're meant to give players
the sense that their time is always a positive investment, Nomi is not.
I said bacon sucked because it didn't provide a useful benefit at the start of Legion.
Cut to now, bacon does not suck anymore, now that Lavish Suramar Feasts give 500 to our
main stat, unlike the 200 from before.
Bacon has always been cool, but WoW bacon took some time to get its act together.
And Nomi sucks.
Reputations didn't mean anything after exalted in Legion 7.0 up till Legion 7.2.
Today players who earn enough extra rep with exalted factions receive a goodie bag of false
hope that's worth slightly more than nothing.
Even better, after a recent Q&A, the bag might have even better goodies in the near future.
So technically, reputations past exalted don't have a value of zero any longer.
There's a possible mount in one of those many bags and players can complain about RNG
all day, no problem with that.
But as for reputations past exalted, they at least have some value, and to be frank,
I'm glad this was salvaged with even this obvious design band-aid.
On a side note, my favorite reps are still the Mists of Pandaria reputations that offered
a neat questline as a capstone to the daily grind.
My hopes are that future expansions will adopt a system beyond exalted that will reward players
with both a conclusion questline and a long tail system that adds a bit more value to
completing world quests.
Finally, secondary stats are still a powerful thing to consider, especially when looking
at rings and trinkets.
But the comical difference secondary stats made is no longer there.
Aside from a few outliers, I find myself a bit more satisfied with the revisit to secondary
stats.
Sims and addons still help with the fine tuning of player optimization but for most players,
item level is king.
So let's get on with the good stuff.
Here's my new list of five Legion disappointments that you probably can't deny.
The 7.2 edition.
Social tools Artifact power
Flight implementation 7.2 expectations
Broken shore?
Social tools.
We're currently on patch 7.2 and with 7.2.5 around the corner, I think it's safe to
see that the delivery of WoW's improved "social toolkit" has been delivered, and
color me disappointed.
The social tools mentioned in Legion's announcement had me a bit excited.
A some of you may know, I'm a big fan of guilds and developing lasting relationships
as opposed to the dependence of queues and pugs that seem to permeate today's WoW culture.
Toasts are those notifications telling you your existing friends are doing something
and would rather not do with you, otherwise they'd say something first.
It's my opinion but while this feature adds a bit of convenience when you already have
a big battle.net friend list, it can be kind of annoying.
In fact one of the first big threads I noticed on this topic was to ask how to turn it off,
followed by a link to an addon that could disable the notification.
I get that our attention spans are short these days, but if we really wanted to play with
our friends, we'd reach out.
At least, I think.
The other feature comes straight out of Twitter and Selfie camera hell, a Facebook integration
with the formerly Battle.net client turned Blizzard Application.
Now you can opt in and have your Blizzard App notify you of all the FB friends you're
already stalking that hey, they've been playing Blizzard games without you, too.
I don't mean to insult Blizzard's efforts to reinforce relationships, but this is entirely
not what I expected by improved social tools.
Here I am pushing my agenda again but I expected something more robust but practical, a much
more powerful guild finder/player finder tool that helps facilitate the building of long
term groups for PvP or PvE or RP or whatever activity.
WoW needs more in game help for those who don't meander into external communities
like the Reddits or the Discords.
Artifact Power.
Actually in a lot of ways, the premise of AP isn't bad.
I think it's an unobtainable Unicorn of game design, but the idea of an endless system
that rewards the behaviors of both hardcore and casual players with reasonable parity
sounds pretty darn cool.
Blizzard has done a good job of pushing the system, learning from mistakes, and reiterating
on its design to adapt to the players' habits.
However, this cycle of learning and reiterating has been really, really jarring for these
players.
Before 7.2, players were starting to effectively finish powering up their weapon and were miles
ahead of their counterparts who were catching up.
The social demands for high item level and achievements to sign up for guild runs or
even menial PUGs now included the demand for an unreasonable artifact rank that suited
the group leader's wants.
In response, 7.2 came around and we now have an artifact power requirement that brings
players closer together, but also reads like a promise of mathematical futility.
Blizzard decided that hey, instead of setting a cap that we think is high enough, let's
use astronomical numbers instead.
And in a way, it worked.
With a raid in the horizon the hard expectations of artifact rank have become more like a reasonable
expectation.
But for Blizzard to have to make inelegant changes to artifact weapons with this whole
de-leveling process, it's probably on players' minds that in 7.3, this could happen again.
It makes me wonder that if in the next expansion, will something similar to this progression
system exist?
I'm not sure, but I don't think WoW's developers nor its players should burden itself
with a system like this that's critical to player progression but ends up being very
malleable.
Flight.
I've already talked about this once, so I'll make this one quick.
Flight itself is okay.
Flight as a mechanic is something I don't entirely agree with, but it doesn't necessarily
break the game, thanks to the current Pathfinder achievements that control its release.
My disappointment with flight in 7.2 is that its delivery was lackluster and with no more
fanfare than your standard achievement.
There's no awesome quest that grants me the ability, or the permission to fly.
There's no tongue-in-cheek thing from Khadgar where he's like, "I'm sure you've
been wanting to take to the skies, Champion, let me give you that opportunity," then
pats us on the head and tah dah, we can fly.
There's just the sound and the toast of the achievement, and I guess the relief of
completing it.
But the worst part about flight is that there's nothing fresh or new or exciting to do with
it.
Current world content is easier.
Yay.
The world looks different from the sky.
Cool.
But there's nowhere to go that makes flight mean something.
Flight doesn't unlock anything like I don't know, a timed quest to help deliver supplies
to 3 different areas under attack.
There could be random legion ships in each zone with rare mobs waiting to be killed.
There could be Kirin Tor based world quests based on actual flying and not the gimmicky
floating we've been trying to get around for the past few months.*********************
But there isn't.
There's just doing things faster with our alts, which IS nice.
And we can pause the game, so to speak.
And that's about it.
I'm happy to fly.
But Legion's world design doesn't seem to care one bit whether I can fly or not.
And that feels lazy to me.
7.2 expectations.
Ion Hazzikostas sort of squirreled his way out of this one.
But effective reasoning doesn't mitigate the disappointment of 7.2's delivery.
For the player type who wants to make sure that their favorite character is as in line
with the game's story as possible, 7.2 has been a race from one hard stop to the next,
encountering quests to complete activities that they've already been doing for the
past few weeks.
The claim of 7.2 being the "largest patch ever" turned out to be true from the eyes
of its developers.
Same for players who work multiple toons and specs who could otherwise feel much too overwhelmed.
Bellular hit the mark on this with a recent video.
Thanks to his desire to deliver on class guides he's churning through 7.2 to develop content
and taking every advantage of the numerous systems updates that do make the game more
alt friendly.
But for the individual player who does not have 12 characters and every spec being worked
on, 7.2 feels like only a fraction of the delivery that was promised.
It's not entirely guaranteed yet but 7.3 expects to be a more unified experience for
all players, meaning that development time will go into a delivery that everyone will
be able to play through, and there should be fewer instances of content that are reserved
for a particular spec and class.
But we're nowhere near that yet.
So I'm a little bummed.
PvP gearing.
So I wouldn't consider myself too much of a PvPer at all so let me describe my experience
with it from the outside.
If I, Soul, want some of that cool gear from pvp, here's what I do.
I go around the Broken Isles and complete Warden Towers for honor points and marks of
honor.
Then I wait till the next season, then buy the old set.
Titanforging.
I've also talked about this before.
I'll bring it up again.
Titanforging threatens to compromise the fulfillment of completing content.
Not to say that Titanforged gear totally negates content, but thanks to it existing in every
delivery of Legion's reward systems, it's watered down the older paradigm of working
your way up from easier to harder challenges.
Over the years Blizzard has fought against instances where a boss drops a fancy collection
of gear that absolutely no one needs or can use.
It's not a fun feeling, especially during progression.
Blizzard made changes over the years, including the rebalancing of secondary stats.
Having gear tokens.
Having gear change dynamically to suit a class's spec type.
Personal loot.
Basically, drops should have a high chance of being something players need because it's
an upgrade, again especially when this is progression and this is your first kill.
Titanforging threatens the upgrade aspect of it.
Players don't need to imagine scenarios; but have stories of where loot drops and no
one needs anything because the gear earned from outside the raid or dungeon turned out
to be much better thanks to Titanforging.
It's made gear from higher forms of content feel a bit less special and takes some of
the reward out of a hard earned win.
In fact if we go full hyperbole, so don't take me seriously on this one, the only gear
to look forward to in the Tomb of Sargeras might only be tier and trinkets, since those
are the only ways gear is unique against everything outside of it.
And this is a big might; players are probably saving every nethershard they can get a hold
of in the hopes that when the Tomb comes out, they can try getting Titanforged gear off
relinquished tokens.
I don't know if relinquished tokens can titanforge all the way to Tomb of Sargeras
gear, but someone'll try it.
Share your thoughts, disagreements and disappointments, and Stay Breezy.
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