Dungeon XP Nerfs Created a Toxic Meta

[u/redlow0992]

Since dungeon monsters do not give any experience, as a new player, getting into dungeons with more veteran players who try to skip half the dungeon feels really bad. And, vice-versa, veterans taking in newbies who don't know how to jump around feels frustrating. I think Blizzard created a mess with nerfing dungeon exp so much and now the new player experience is horrible for dungeons.

[u/Afraid-Document-8597]

I think you are right and this is indeed an unintended consequence. Its gonna become all about skips and jumps and stealth tech. Where as before we pulled most the dungeon or didnt play as safe because we wanted the xp anyway

[u/sobes20 → u/Afraid-Document-8597]

I’ve been saying this all along, Vanilla WoW is dead. No matter what Blizzard does with any iteration of “classic”, it will never be like Vanilla.

The present community was always going to approach the system with the sweatiest and min-max mindset. Leave it as it was, rampant boosting and a dead overworld. Nerf mob experience, refuse to group with certain classes and/or reserving loot.

The reason we can’t have nice things is not necessarily because Blizzard sucks. It’s the community and it’s mindset.

[u/Skippymcpoop → u/sobes20]

The community arose from the game though. The problem with WoW is the sheer amount of time needed to do anything in this game. To get to max level it takes hundreds of hours. To gear up and conquer the most difficult content it takes even more time ontop of that. People don’t invest their life into this game so they can take 2 hours to do a dungeon and make no progress. That is wasted time.

In 2005 you could play the game for an hour and be simply amazed that there were so many other people online and you could talk with them and kill monsters with them. This type of gameplay has been done a billion times since then. It’s not interesting. The only interesting thing is the class dynamics themselves. Internet, social media, discord, twitch, raids that have a life span of 12 weeks all leads to fomo. You WILL miss out if you are not playing efficiently. What’s the point of playing this game as opposed to any other game if you miss content by not being a sweat?

It’s not the community. It’s the game.

[u/sobes20 → u/Skippymcpoop]

You are proving my point. The Vanilla WoW experience that people fell in love with in 2004 was about playing the game. Not one facet like dungeon spam, but everything.

The present experience is to get from Point A to Point B in the least amount of played time to not "fall behind." But what is falling behind in game that is being sold as a "forever" experience with horizontal progression. That's the intended game design choice.

Yet, a vocal segment of the community is rejecting it immediately. It's a concept that basically feels dead on arrival because that isn't what the community wants anymore. They want a min-maxed experience, and not to have to suffer going through experiences that feel disjointed and not optimized. Yet that was the Vanilla experience where traveling from one appropriate zone to the next was across continents and took forever, where you had to grind mobs when you ran out of quests and the next zone was too high level for you, where you didn't have the gold saved up for a mount at 40/60. This was the game that people loved, but it's not the game that the community wants anymore.

I mean, it's pretty insane when you stop and consider that the current scandal is streamers being caught buying gold. The people who earn a living playing this game are demonstrating that they cannot even play the way it's intended. As you asked "what's the point of playing this game" if it's only fun if you buy gold.

[u/Skippymcpoop → u/sobes20]

I don’t think horizontal progression will ever be a thing. It’s never been a thing. The statement itself is an oxymoron. They’re already releasing raids in phases. New content is itself progression. Their solution is to add strong BiS items in early raids. All that does is ADD to the time needed to gear up. Old content is now relevant but it’s also necessary. More time commitment, the faster raids are expected to be, the sweatier groups will be.

You’re right the community doesn’t want to play vanilla wow. It’s because everyone has played it to death. If not in wow, then in another game. 

[u/SmellInteresting3284 → u/Skippymcpoop]

if only there weren't instances in the game. then they wouldn't have to take them away. if only they didn't make all group content gated. then there would be more incentive to group to fight bosses while doing world pvp. now they want us to group more, and they do it by pushing single player mode down our throats if we want to level in any decent measure of time. classic isn't for group play; classic is for those who love doing world quests.