Normal/Savage Alexander complaint

[Ducky]

Garrison, Shipyard, Ashran, Mythic dungeon, Timewalker dungeon, Tanaan Jungle Apexis. Weren't all those features of Warlords of Draenor? Some people will have to one day accept the fact that faceroll content really isn't that fun.

The garrison isn't playable content, it's a place, in effect WoW's bastardised version of instanced player housing with all customisation and personalisation stripped out, and humanoid vending machines added to dispense each profession's single universal crafting material. The follower missions located there are a timer-based mobile-app minigame and operate like retainers without any of the depth, customisation or rewards. The shipyard is a reskin of the exact same thing, and was introduced to artificially reset player progress while simultaneously contradicting the lore of the expansion.

Mythic dungeons and timewalker dungeons are the exact same dungeons that have always been in the game, with no notable changes other than having mob damage and health numbers scaled slightly (unlike FFXIV's hard modes, which are usually almost completely different dungeons to the originals). By the time they were introduced, they were rewarding gear worse than the majority of players already had or could collect out in the world. Unlike FFXIV's permanent dungeon scaling, in WoW the timewalker dungeons are also only available for a few days once every seven weeks.

Blizzard actually had to go back and add further incentives to get people to run these dungeons at all, because they simply weren't fun, they weren't challenging, they weren't rewarding, and "timewalking" wasn't even faithful to the original experience (TW is about as faithful and challenging as running FFXIV's low-level dungeons unsynced as a decked-out level 60).

The PVP zone Ashran has been so broken and imbalanced since the very launch of the expansion that Blizzard has spent every month since it arrived repeatedly changing the rules of the place completely in order keep players in, keep players out, reward them, not reward them, encourage one side to join, encourage the other side to join, get players to participate in the main fight, and then get them to focus on the side events instead. Recently they ultimately just washed their hands of the whole affair, said, "Eh, good enough", upped the rewards again so that at least some players would go there once a week, and have otherwise left it to rot.

Tanaan Jungle was initially supposed to be added at launch, but was pushed back when Blizzard decided to change the story of the expansion halfway through development. When it finally turned up, it added grinds. That's all, simple repetitive storyless grinds and a handful of rare mobs and treasures that were cleaned out in the space of an afternoon or two, except for the mandatorily gated daily quests. Players wanting to earn their flying back (which still isn't back in the game yet, mind you) were required to kill hundreds of completely irrelevant and arbitrary mobs in a small area to build up reputation with a shoehorned and entirely unexplained faction, as well as spend a few weeks running the same shallow daily quests over and over.

The very limited selection of Apexis daily quests involve players going to a specific area in the zone, then simply grinding mobs and clicking widgets until a bar reaches 100%; all of these dailies operate the exact same way. They also solely reward an alternate currency which has been appropriately criticised as being useless for the majority of the playerbase, given that the one thing of note the currency can buy is a mount, which itself is just a simple recolour of the mount that came with the CE, and even that was only introduced alongside Tanaan.

On the subject of rep factions, Blizzard admitted they originally weren't even going to add any to WoD, which is why the factions that were added at the last minute are all quite literally grinds worse than anything that exists in the current version of FFXIV. To reach exalted with the Sha'tari Defense or Laughing Skull, players were required to gain approximately 45k worth of reputation from a pool of mobs that gave just 5 rep per kill. It wasn't challenging or clever content, it was just tedious and lazy, and even Blizzard finally gave in and admitted they were embarrassed about it and should have tried harder.

So no, a couple of mindless menu-based minigames, the ability to be scaled down (but still keep all your max-level skills) to run easy old dungeons once every two months, the option to run a handful of identical daily quests for a nigh-worthless currency, and the choice to grind literally 9,000 mobs to unlock faction rewards do not constitute "notable content". Adding insult to injury, the entirety of Warlords of Draenor has less main story narrative or character development in total than FFXIV's chain of Hildibrand sidequests, and most of it makes considerably less sense.

WoW didn't lose half its playerbase within six months for no reason.

[Itachi]

...

While I generally agree with what you said, FFXIV is sadly not free of mindless grind content on its own.

The relic weapon chain past zenit is full of mind-numbing grind coupled with rng.
Desynthesizing is a senseless filler grind, instead of being intelligently integrated into existing systems.
Eso grind with 2 dungeons which I was already burned out with farming law gear.
The endgame crafting system.


Many new systems that FFXIV introduces (like desynthesizing or retainer quests) require you to jump through senseless hoops first or have stupid limitations (like retainers being unable to equip GC gear) before you can actually really play with them.
Or being unable to join a DF or effectively group with a chocobo out or unable to summon pets or whisper in dungeons, i mean seriously...

I am already not capping eso and I won't endure heavensward relics if the quest chain is a repeat of 2.x.

[Reinha]

I guess you're suggesting placing an ilvl sync on Alexander Savage? I think that would be the only way to get Alexander Normal gear to sync down in Savage. I can already see the complains if that were to happen though.

Not a complete item level sync. A sync for individual gear pieces (normal Alex gear), that takes place in a specific instance (savage). If WoW can pull it off, I'm sure SE has equally good codewriters to make it work. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that it would have no effect at all on players who don't do savage whilst savage players get the gear progression model they are asking for.

WoW didn't lose half its playerbase within six months for no reason.

Woah you really hit the nail on the head. Never seen such an accurate description of what went wrong with Warlords of Draenor. It needs a reboot and a new staff to go with it just like FFXIV did.

[KaijinRhada]

Adding insult to injury, the entirety of Warlords of Draenor has less main story narrative or character development in total than FFXIV's chain of Hildibrand sidequests, and most of it makes considerably less sense.

WoW didn't lose half its playerbase within six months for no reason.

You know what's worse? Legion isn't planned to include alt-Draenor in any way shape or form, NPCs included (Yrel, you god damned liar), except for Gul'dan. Way to go Blizzard for inclusive storytelling (extreme sarcasm). So disappointed they created an alternate timeline and decided to not utilize it.

All in all, I think you really summed up all of my complaints for WoD.

Not a complete item level sync. A sync for individual gear pieces (normal Alex gear), that takes place in a specific instance (savage). If WoW can pull it off, I'm sure SE has equally good codewriters to make it work. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that it would have no effect at all on players who don't do savage whilst savage players get the gear progression model they are asking for.

I like this idea.



On a slightly separate note, maybe another raid or two would help alleviate some problems, add some variety in it. Depending on how they design it, it could be nice, as one raid at a time gets boring really quickly. *cough*Highmaul*cough* The only danger that could bring is just spreading the problem.

[Fendred]

So, having come back to see what kind of stuff I write when I've suffered insomnia for several days, I think I'll pretend I didn't post that stuff and just look the other way.

They were trying to implement multiple raid difficulties as directed by player feedback over a year ago. The primary example given was World of Warcraft's "Wrath of the Lich King" expansion raid setup, where several different difficulties for current raids were introduced. What they seem to have missed was that these raids had loot independent of one another and required the same level of gear for entry. The idea wasn't to create a situation where players would have to mindlessly grind the lower difficulty tiers for drops in order to do the higher difficulty levels of the same raid. If Alexander were set up like a proper WotLK raid, players could totally ignore the normal mode and only do savage. Additionally, they didn't do loot the same way, but that's been talked about to death.

Another point of view would be they are responding to players who feel they don't like the lockouts, but failed to realize the reason people want the lockouts gone is so they can progress faster. All they did here was allow players to run the instance more, but make no discernible difference in progression from the raid and raid loot system that came before it.

[Nadirah]

Snip.

If they were going with the Wrath of the Lich King model, there's be a 10 and 25 man version of each instance, and a heroic version of each raid size, so if you wanted to max your tokens each week you needed to raid all farking four of them.

And people think they're sick of seeing a raid boss *now*? If i see Anub'Arak again at any time it'll still be too soon.

[dejavutwo]

If they were going with the Wrath of the Lich King model, there's be a 10 and 25 man version of each instance, and a heroic version of each raid size, so if you wanted to max your tokens each week you needed to raid all farking four of them.

And people think they're sick of seeing a raid boss *now*? If i see Anub'Arak again at any time it'll still be too soon.

I never felt I had to run the 10-man version for gear since the fights there felt like they were almost entirely execution based as to weather you would pass or not. Here, a piece of gear or two can make a night and day difference on difficulty.

[Akiza]

The reasin why players had to farm Alexander Normal Mode before Alexander Hard Mode is becasue there was no 3.0 B.I.S coming into Heavensward since we just hit 60 so Alexander Normal became the base level gear. Now when 3.2 releases Alexander Savage will be B.I.S will be required to enter the next turns of Alexander Savage and Tomes and Alexander Normal will create a middle step for casual to enter challenge Alexander Savage.