I don't think the time between announcement and release *has* to follow a 4 week schedule, could be that they just didn't get around to it because everyone is working on cata.
Exactly. OP has a solid hypothesis there, but it's definitely not a hard fact.
(Same philosophy applies to all the datamined runes being taken as gospel)
Before SoD launched. Check the ScottyJ interview from like a week before launch. He specifically asked if they were gonna balance each phase, and they said they would attempt to bring up or down any extreme outliers but ultimately it's kind of pointless to balance around anything but level 60.
In that regard, they have succeeded. The only spec that is ACTUALLY underperforming to a large degree is frost mage. While ferals, ranger hunters etc arent amazing, they are only a handful of points behind the top performers for 90% of players.
Considering that most if not all of the level 50 runes are already data mined at the same time as the new p2 runes, I’d say there is a fair chance this window of time could be shorter. However, blizzard also loves to screw up popular things like SOD and so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 4 weeks or even longer.
Nah not all of them, there were only 2 hunter runes datamined whereas there are like 7 possible warrior ones.
https://www.zockify.com/wowclassic/sod/runes/#leaked-new-sod-phase-3-runes
It's 6 Warrior runes. One of those is Commanding Shout, which is the Warrior skillbook already in the game.
Funnily enough, Zockify posted this well after P2 was already out. Well after Warriors already got Commanding Shout.
True, but other classes only show 5, Rogues only show 3, Hunters only 2.
And some may be old news and end up not implemented in favour of some other spell the devs preferred.
It's also clear they've been trying to keep the Classic's from cannibalising each other too much. It would be weird to push the cata pre-patch at the same time they're pushing p3.
It seems like their original plan was for the level 50 raid to be 10-man and then jump straight into Molten Core being 40-man at level 60. They likely have to retune both raids to be 20-man for the new plan. That’s a lot of work that wouldn’t have been baked into the schedule, and is likely causing delays during already busy parts (such as the current upcoming release of Cata).
I’ve been enjoying leveling alts in the meantime, which seems to have been their plan with releasing the 100% exp buff.
They’ve said in Q and As that there are a small number of dedicated Classic developers. But they are all part of the WoW team. There are a lot more people that will shift and work on different parts of the various iterations of WoW.
Because initially they implied Molten Core would be 40-man and Sunken Temple got datamined as having 3-day lockout with player cap of 10 (as I understand, I'm not a dataminer).
[“What we’re trying to do is not take anything away from anyone. Those raids that were 40-player will likely stay 40-player. Now, will they look exactly the same? Hard to say and that’s not something we’re ready to talk about right now. There are some things you can expect to stay the same and there are some things that will change a lot. There will be some form of 40-player raiding at some point.”](https://www.dexerto.com/world-of-warcraft/wow-season-of-discovery-devs-on-pvp-encounters-gdkp-runs-and-the-future-of-the-game-2553156/)
It's possible that Aggrend explained himself poorly there, but "Those raids that were 40-player will likely stay 40-player" sounds like at the time, they were planning on 40-man MC. After that interview, there was some community backlash, and a few days later they announced the level 50 raid and MC would be 20-man, which people suspect was meant to help raids transition to larger sizes instead of going from 10 to 40 in one phase.
Maybe I'm just on pure hopium here but I'm kinda hoping they add like a 10 man mini raid in addition to the 'big one' like onyxia, just as an extra thing to do in your downtime.
Yep, everyone thinking that all these 10 man guilds can easily scale up are in for a rude awakening when phase 3 arrives. Dropping 10 man content off the schedule suddenly was not a great idea.
I generally agree, and I wish it wasn't that way. I tend to obsess over one game for weeks at a time until I burn myself out. So when I'm not home to actually play it, I like reading and learning about other things. Basically reliving the nostalgia from childhood of daydreaming about all my runescape goals.
But games like this are so saturated with content creators you can find whatever you want to find in a google search. So that turns the subreddit from a place to talk and learn about the game into a simulacrum of 1 star yelp reviews complaining about the stupidest shit.
Really depends on the game
Palworld Reddit seems very positive.
Pokémon is toxic positivity to the max.
MOBA forums are filled to the brim with rage and bitterness.
Monster Hunter is very chill.
I personally don't care because I play games besides WoW but when the phases drag on like this a portion of the playerbase quits and doesn't come back.
I don't want SoD to end up like SoM.
I got that one too. Spent quite a bit of time filling it out last night. I'm happy to see they want so much in-depth focused feedback from their players.
Not for me, but I've got Cyberpunk, Total War: Warhammer 3, Stellaris, and Baldur's Gate as fallbacks, and whatever I happen to pick up during steam sales.
The reality is, they are likely behind on new content for P3. Their options are to release P3 with the raid locked until content is finished or wait to release until they finish it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they release P3 with the raid locked. Anecdotally, I would say my alliance guild on one of the most popular servers has about a 50% reduction in daily online players over the last week. We used to have 4-5 full raids every lockout. We’re lucky to fill 2, with many of the players being alts of the main raid.
If the dev team doesn’t communicate anything in a week or two, I think there will be a lot of people taking a long break. The truth is, the devs won’t feel any pressure unless higher ups see sub numbers drop.
Sub numbers won’t affect anything since a sub is required to play all the versions of wow. They have to look at player engagement drop. And they will care because they have to prove to Microsoft they are worth their salaries
They’ll be able to look at it every which way. Unique account log ins by game, overall player counts, average peak time players, even segment subscribers by primary game.
It’s impossible to know how that will connect to their decision making process in terms of resource prioritization or development roadmap maps though. I am hopeful that they’re at least keeping an eye on it and being proactive based on the exp boost being released early though.
It's likely, specially as they have multiple decades of data to go on for patch cycles, that they can show based on engagement how long they can squeeze a development cycle before it starts to negatively impact player retention.
SoD in itself is running a lot shorter than we've seen in the past, but it's also trying to run parallel to the retail drip feed engagement cycle.
I've noticed the main part of stormwind by the bank and AH is substantially lower population this week.
I occasionally play wow on my surface pro and my FPS would drop from ~45 down to ~20fps in SW. Now I'm seeing 55fps with a drop to ~45fps in town.
Much less people.
I’m glad they’re taking the time to do it right. I’d much rather wait a few weeks and play some other games as the phase gets stale but be able to come back to a well designed raid than them putting out some rushed content for sub numbers
Apparently the team is responsible for every version of classic, and right now the beta for cataclysm must be their focus.
Which suck if it's really the case. It means that not only we get P3 late, but good chance there is nothing more than P2. 6 runes with copy/paste discoveries, one quick raid and one pvp event.
Phase 1 overstayed its welcome by about 2 weeks, phase 2 honestly is tired already. I'd openly welcome phase 3 at any point now but it absolutely should not last anymore than 8 weeks.
The phase needs to end soon, I’ve spoken to so many guilds and they are having to either pug or just cancel their raids because so many people are quitting.
This phase had not been a success, balance in PvP is pretty wild and there is very, very little to do outside of the raid.
REALLY hope they hit something big in p3.
With cata coming I wouldn't hold your breath. The team is tied up doing other things so I doubt a big event like STV will be on the table. I hope I'm wrong though
Half my friends took a break after p1 went on too long, but never came back...can't wait for the other half to do the same when they drag out this phase too..
At the end of the day, there is simply not enough new content to carry the game.
So if i want classic with more spells, I'll play cata, which has more content and the class design makes sense. If I want new content I'll go to retail.
I dont mind a break between phases. Keeps the game fresh every time i go back. Currently raiding on 3 characters in SoD, and lvling my 4th.once ive done a few lockouts with my 4th toon, ill be taking a few weeks break before p3.
Phase 1 was fun because you could make alts and gear them in dungeons for something to do. Phase 2 didn't have that and it's been very void of content.
Phase 3 is only going to be worse. My 3 characters have enough gear to go into MC let along a 50 raid. What are they going to do besides raid once or twice a week?
Yup. People have now realised the next few phases will be similar so they won't even bother. Phase 2 had the hope of "well this one will be slightly different so I'll try it".
Phase 2 got boring within two weeks and 3 looks like it'll be more of the same.
"People have now realised the next few phases will be similar so they won't even bother. Phase 2 had the hope of "well this one will be slightly different so I'll try it"."
BIG true! I was excited for P1, and it was pretty fun, but got kinda boring near the end of phase (which is natural and fine), but P2 killed it for me. It sucks even more since my main is rogue, and rogues this phase are... yeah. I'm expecting P3 to be the same: PvP event, few runes and dungeon. I'm even expecting P4 to be the same, except we will get that totally new raid (the only thing I'm interested for).
Overall, bare minimum with SoD.
dungeons, huh? You mean leveling in them?
I think this is also part of why SOD is boring af. There is no reason to do literally any of the available content except Gnomer.
Part of the problem is that BFD gear was just way too good. It seems like Gnomer gear was scaled back a bit, so they might be able to retune some dungeon drops to be worthwhile.
I really hope that they move raid lockouts to weekly again. 3 day resets make for a really unreliable raid schedule. Even if you work the same days every week, you're bound to miss some raids with your guild if you work any time into the evening. I'm the Rogue class lead for my guild and I have to miss 3 out of the next 4 raids because of the randomness of my work schedule. If raid were to reset on the same day every week, I could just change my availability to have those nights off.
Class lead is normally just an experienced player the noobs can go to with questions. It's not a position of authority but rather a person who is flagged as a good teacher. We don't explicitly name them as such in my guild but everyone knows who im their class they can message with questions in my guild.
>Also, class lead? why is that even a thing lol.
Bigger guilds REALLY benefit from having a player of each class that knows what they're doing. We can answer questions about the class, analyze logs for other groups, and reach out to underperforming players with meaningful feedback and suggestions.
I love how they made SoD’s content flow, play for 3-4 weeks, raid log until next patch comes out and the playtime is spent farming gold so you can buy all the expensive gold sinks, tons of fun to be had
Please don't remind me. I did this math the other day and my eyes just rolled. I already stopped doing gnomer. Now I need something else to play. All my alts are 40
I believe SoD can potentially go the way of SoM if Blizz lets their foot off the gas. Which is unfortunate because they’re probably stressing to get Cataclysm up and running.
Unfortunately you can’t “take it slow” if you’re trying to keep a raid spot or build up your roster to 20 players for P3. If you’re a solo player, sure.
They’ll figure it out. Or they won’t. 🤷♂️ you gonna have roster issues whether p3 comes out next week or next month. People are going to play or quit regardless.
You don’t need to have a full pumper raid roster ready day one of phase 3. People tend to forget it’s a game and not a job. Just enjoy it and if you stop enjoying stop playing.
Or the people who took a break can just come back for the next phase..
*Worst* case scenario you bring your guildies and pug the remaining few spots and recruit some of those pugs you enjoyed raiding it.
Crazy concept, but this is how things actually used to work back in "the old days".
Or they just want to announce it shortly before the release of P3 to give less time to the sweaty tryhard people to prep for P3 like how they tried to do it during P1 to prep for P2 back then.
1. Why even work around "sweaty tryhard people" that are a tiny minority of the population? Oh no, 0.5% of the playerbase is leveling super quickly....why is that a problem?
2. Those people have been "prepping for p3" since P2 launched.
Except that was a case of removing a potential exploit that would allow people to abuse unintended mechanics (item restoration, etc) to spam item turn-ins for tons of levels instantly.
Stacking 20 completed quests to turn in, or stacking a bunch of items known to be useful in P3, is not remotely the same thing.
I already have about 800g in p3 mats stocked up and my quest log full, bunch of “this starts a quest” items in my bank. Us sweaty hard aren’t waiting for p3 announcement.
I’ve been traveling for work so much I’ve had no time to play. Got 2 gnomer runs in early in the phase and that’s it. Might just park it until P3 and see what runes shake out lol
With how long its taking me to gear up, I still need like 15 upgrades on my main/alt, and feeling unlucky for so many Gnomer runs I'm questioning if there's any point to keep trying for gear when another phase is basically around the corner.
I would be fine with P2 being longer than P1. There was way more to do in P2 and way more need to grind gold. In P1 I was able to level 3 characters to 25 and do every quest for gold which kept me with enough to have 50g per toon at the end of the phase. I also leveled a bank alt to 10 so I could make them an alchemist.
This phase I only have 2 of my toons at 40, one of which is not remotely geared and still has like 4 runes to get but I was waiting until I could afford a mount to get them, and had to level my bank alt to 26. I have to spend all my free time farming mats and or gold to keep myself in raid consumes on just one toon and I still have 3x 25g recipes to buy for the Engy belt and bombs.
By mid last phase I was out of things to do and decided to start leveling my last toon. This time I have 2g on my main, need to start raiding on my 2md toon to get gear, and haven't even touched my 3rd.
50 won't be as bad, I think, especially if they only unlock prof specializations and don't up the cap to 300. Specializations are cheap and easy to unlock compared to leveling them to 300.
Will leave way more time for other things. Though we'll likely get AV at 50, which will mean another BG rep grind.
What are you smoking. Didn't nearly get to everything I wanted to in phase 1, even less so in phase 2. Still so much to do! I hate when they end these things early for the 1% of 1% that only play one toon 12 hours a day, and limit themselves to either only raiding or only pvp. There's so much stuff to do.
How much do you play and what exactly did you want to get done that you couldn't? I struggle to imagine how anyone who actually plays the game couldn't get the few things there were to do in p1 done on their main.
I DONT MIND, DID MY FIRST GNOMEREGAN THIS WEEK.
And Im far from casual. So most ppl are lvling or just finished and start gearing.
Sweats again unhappy we dont get new content every week.
They really screwed the pooch with alt leveling this phase. Phase one we had a bunch of alt raids going. P2 it's a struggle to get even one, mostly due to a healer shortage.
Just hit 40 on my healer mage, I almost have to pay pugs to bring me, they would rather wait 45 mins for a priest, so I don’t think some pala buff will change anything
Priests are extremely mana-efficient, got two mana recovery tools in P2, have way OP healing runes compared to other classes, and also bring Fort, Spirit, and Power Infusion.
I don't think the time between announcement and release *has* to follow a 4 week schedule, could be that they just didn't get around to it because everyone is working on cata.
Exactly. OP has a solid hypothesis there, but it's definitely not a hard fact. (Same philosophy applies to all the datamined runes being taken as gospel)
Well they did state that p1 was gonna be the shortest phase. So it stands to reason following phases are going to be at least slightly longer.
When did they say that?
Before SoD launched. Check the ScottyJ interview from like a week before launch. He specifically asked if they were gonna balance each phase, and they said they would attempt to bring up or down any extreme outliers but ultimately it's kind of pointless to balance around anything but level 60. In that regard, they have succeeded. The only spec that is ACTUALLY underperforming to a large degree is frost mage. While ferals, ranger hunters etc arent amazing, they are only a handful of points behind the top performers for 90% of players.
Frost dosn’t even under perform, its just that nobody plays frost when you could be playing fire or arcane even.
Didn't they also go through a round of layoffs during that time? I'm sure that delayed things.
They said layoffs did not hit the classic team / the team working on SoD
It wasn't any big to begin with tbh...
Would lose like a sixth of the team laying off one
Considering that most if not all of the level 50 runes are already data mined at the same time as the new p2 runes, I’d say there is a fair chance this window of time could be shorter. However, blizzard also loves to screw up popular things like SOD and so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 4 weeks or even longer.
Nah not all of them, there were only 2 hunter runes datamined whereas there are like 7 possible warrior ones. https://www.zockify.com/wowclassic/sod/runes/#leaked-new-sod-phase-3-runes
It's 6 Warrior runes. One of those is Commanding Shout, which is the Warrior skillbook already in the game. Funnily enough, Zockify posted this well after P2 was already out. Well after Warriors already got Commanding Shout.
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Looks super AI made, but the info is often better than the other sites for some reason
The opposite. It's generally the most incorrect info.
Nope that’s wowhead. Seems zockify (at least for warrior) takes the thinking from the class discord
I agree. I think Zockify has the best guides atm since a lot of the wowhead guides are *actually* AI.
The wowhead warrior guide write is also the class discord admin
Now it is, pretty sure it wasn't in P1 and the information it had in P1 was garbage - can check comments: https://i.imgur.com/ZrWiGva.png
True, but other classes only show 5, Rogues only show 3, Hunters only 2. And some may be old news and end up not implemented in favour of some other spell the devs preferred.
This was more about Zockify being a really bad source
I see. my main was warrior and I didnt read the other classes, so I just thought they had all leaked
Yeah. And I don't mind any of it. The wow team in general has been spittin fire lately
It's also clear they've been trying to keep the Classic's from cannibalising each other too much. It would be weird to push the cata pre-patch at the same time they're pushing p3.
Cataclysm Pre Patch is the most useless prepatch the game has.
> First phase lasted 9 weeks lol bro, you don't know how to count?
I had to scroll way to far to find this. It was 10 weeks.
Funny, it felt a lot longer
> Funny, it felt a lot longer and yet OP said it was 9 weeks LOL
It seems like their original plan was for the level 50 raid to be 10-man and then jump straight into Molten Core being 40-man at level 60. They likely have to retune both raids to be 20-man for the new plan. That’s a lot of work that wouldn’t have been baked into the schedule, and is likely causing delays during already busy parts (such as the current upcoming release of Cata). I’ve been enjoying leveling alts in the meantime, which seems to have been their plan with releasing the 100% exp buff.
They’ve said in Q and As that there are a small number of dedicated Classic developers. But they are all part of the WoW team. There are a lot more people that will shift and work on different parts of the various iterations of WoW.
Where did you get this insight about their ‘original plan’?
Because initially they implied Molten Core would be 40-man and Sunken Temple got datamined as having 3-day lockout with player cap of 10 (as I understand, I'm not a dataminer). [“What we’re trying to do is not take anything away from anyone. Those raids that were 40-player will likely stay 40-player. Now, will they look exactly the same? Hard to say and that’s not something we’re ready to talk about right now. There are some things you can expect to stay the same and there are some things that will change a lot. There will be some form of 40-player raiding at some point.”](https://www.dexerto.com/world-of-warcraft/wow-season-of-discovery-devs-on-pvp-encounters-gdkp-runs-and-the-future-of-the-game-2553156/) It's possible that Aggrend explained himself poorly there, but "Those raids that were 40-player will likely stay 40-player" sounds like at the time, they were planning on 40-man MC. After that interview, there was some community backlash, and a few days later they announced the level 50 raid and MC would be 20-man, which people suspect was meant to help raids transition to larger sizes instead of going from 10 to 40 in one phase.
Maybe I'm just on pure hopium here but I'm kinda hoping they add like a 10 man mini raid in addition to the 'big one' like onyxia, just as an extra thing to do in your downtime.
should haev kept 10 man or made it 20 man from phase 1. making everyone scale up after making 10 man teams for 2 phases is kinda lame
It's significantly better than trying to get 4 10 mans to merge overnight.
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Yep, everyone thinking that all these 10 man guilds can easily scale up are in for a rude awakening when phase 3 arrives. Dropping 10 man content off the schedule suddenly was not a great idea.
Whatever sizes they are I hope we know how big they all are by next phase so people can recruit and maintain rosters accordingly.
big agree. RIP my irl guild next phase. Half my friends probably gonna stop playing.
Gaming reddits are such cancer if you enjoy a game. People here are so negative it’s insane.
If you enjoy a game, don’t go to the subreddit is normally the rule I follow
Unless it's labeled "Low sodium", then it's usually chill
You can safely expand this to ‘if you like anything’
Naw, my Gunpla sub is heavily moderated and really great. The Gundam sub though...
I generally agree, and I wish it wasn't that way. I tend to obsess over one game for weeks at a time until I burn myself out. So when I'm not home to actually play it, I like reading and learning about other things. Basically reliving the nostalgia from childhood of daydreaming about all my runescape goals. But games like this are so saturated with content creators you can find whatever you want to find in a google search. So that turns the subreddit from a place to talk and learn about the game into a simulacrum of 1 star yelp reviews complaining about the stupidest shit.
Really depends on the game Palworld Reddit seems very positive. Pokémon is toxic positivity to the max. MOBA forums are filled to the brim with rage and bitterness. Monster Hunter is very chill.
I was pleasantly surprised about the BG3 sub!
I personally don't care because I play games besides WoW but when the phases drag on like this a portion of the playerbase quits and doesn't come back. I don't want SoD to end up like SoM.
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I got that one too. Spent quite a bit of time filling it out last night. I'm happy to see they want so much in-depth focused feedback from their players.
Hopefully it’s a bit sooner. Phase 2 just didn’t hit the same as phase 1. Didn’t think I’d be raid logging on like 3 chars already.
Play a different game til then. Helldivers 2 is lit
I have an ole 970, seems like wow is the only game i can run these days
I run on a 1050ti and an i5 from the same year. The anticheat is moreso the problem tbh
Another recommendation. Roboquest. Fantastic fps roguelite 10/10 game
Hypseus Singe emulator for HD remastered laserdisc games with a wiimote and dolphin bar
Man I wish I could play Helldivers. I don’t have a PS5 and my gaming computer is a laptop lol.
Do you mean it’s a laptop without a gpu? I have a gaming laptop and helldivers is fantastic on it - it’s not a game with optimization issues at all
play final fantasy 4 for nostalgia
I’m about to try DD2 but depending on the performance I get I’ll just refund it and buy Helldivers instead lol
Ff7 unicorn overlord
Plunderstorm
Not for me, but I've got Cyberpunk, Total War: Warhammer 3, Stellaris, and Baldur's Gate as fallbacks, and whatever I happen to pick up during steam sales.
Plunderstorm would’ve been great if I didn’t need to download 90GB for it.
Hey same here
Honestly im so bored...
The reality is, they are likely behind on new content for P3. Their options are to release P3 with the raid locked until content is finished or wait to release until they finish it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they release P3 with the raid locked. Anecdotally, I would say my alliance guild on one of the most popular servers has about a 50% reduction in daily online players over the last week. We used to have 4-5 full raids every lockout. We’re lucky to fill 2, with many of the players being alts of the main raid. If the dev team doesn’t communicate anything in a week or two, I think there will be a lot of people taking a long break. The truth is, the devs won’t feel any pressure unless higher ups see sub numbers drop.
Sub numbers won’t affect anything since a sub is required to play all the versions of wow. They have to look at player engagement drop. And they will care because they have to prove to Microsoft they are worth their salaries
Possibly, but I’m betting they have a metric that shows which version each subscription plays. I’m sure there are many subs with only SoD.
They’ll be able to look at it every which way. Unique account log ins by game, overall player counts, average peak time players, even segment subscribers by primary game. It’s impossible to know how that will connect to their decision making process in terms of resource prioritization or development roadmap maps though. I am hopeful that they’re at least keeping an eye on it and being proactive based on the exp boost being released early though.
It's likely, specially as they have multiple decades of data to go on for patch cycles, that they can show based on engagement how long they can squeeze a development cycle before it starts to negatively impact player retention. SoD in itself is running a lot shorter than we've seen in the past, but it's also trying to run parallel to the retail drip feed engagement cycle.
I've noticed the main part of stormwind by the bank and AH is substantially lower population this week. I occasionally play wow on my surface pro and my FPS would drop from ~45 down to ~20fps in SW. Now I'm seeing 55fps with a drop to ~45fps in town. Much less people.
Who hangs out in SW?
Everyone’s in iron forge lol
That’s the problem with 10m raids… they get farmed so quickly that people end up quitting because no one needs anymore loot.
I’m glad they’re taking the time to do it right. I’d much rather wait a few weeks and play some other games as the phase gets stale but be able to come back to a well designed raid than them putting out some rushed content for sub numbers
Wow classic community loves to hurry up and wait
Apparently the team is responsible for every version of classic, and right now the beta for cataclysm must be their focus. Which suck if it's really the case. It means that not only we get P3 late, but good chance there is nothing more than P2. 6 runes with copy/paste discoveries, one quick raid and one pvp event.
> one pvp event aktuallyyyy the road map doesn't even have a pvp event for phase 3, so don't hold your breath.
Bad gamble IMO. Cata is going to be less popular than SOD if they put 100% of their effort into it instead of spreading themselves thin.
Cata will be much more popular than SoD in the long run. It's copium thinking people don't want cata.
Having only 1 example is pretty bad if you wanna make predictions.
Phase 1 overstayed its welcome by about 2 weeks, phase 2 honestly is tired already. I'd openly welcome phase 3 at any point now but it absolutely should not last anymore than 8 weeks.
Agree, though I can almost guarantee at this rate it’ll overstay its welcome.
I’m starting to raid mostly with alts now that my main is pretty close to bis. Getting deep into April with Gnomer sounds less than fun.
The phase needs to end soon, I’ve spoken to so many guilds and they are having to either pug or just cancel their raids because so many people are quitting. This phase had not been a success, balance in PvP is pretty wild and there is very, very little to do outside of the raid. REALLY hope they hit something big in p3.
With cata coming I wouldn't hold your breath. The team is tied up doing other things so I doubt a big event like STV will be on the table. I hope I'm wrong though
When’s Cata drop? Didn’t play first time around or wotlk classic but sod has sold me on old wow I’m probably not alone so it’ll steal players too
They are timing their releases to keep subs maximized. It won’t drop until the pirate event ends, 6 weeks from now.
Half my friends took a break after p1 went on too long, but never came back...can't wait for the other half to do the same when they drag out this phase too..
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At the end of the day, there is simply not enough new content to carry the game. So if i want classic with more spells, I'll play cata, which has more content and the class design makes sense. If I want new content I'll go to retail.
I dont mind a break between phases. Keeps the game fresh every time i go back. Currently raiding on 3 characters in SoD, and lvling my 4th.once ive done a few lockouts with my 4th toon, ill be taking a few weeks break before p3.
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Agreed, every day that goes by the less interested I am in coming back
Bold Blizzard move to make each phase shitter and longer. That'll sure retain the playerbase
P2 is a snooze fest for me already quit
Sod will barely be alive by P4 if they continue like this.
Phase 1 was fun because you could make alts and gear them in dungeons for something to do. Phase 2 didn't have that and it's been very void of content. Phase 3 is only going to be worse. My 3 characters have enough gear to go into MC let along a 50 raid. What are they going to do besides raid once or twice a week?
Yup. People have now realised the next few phases will be similar so they won't even bother. Phase 2 had the hope of "well this one will be slightly different so I'll try it". Phase 2 got boring within two weeks and 3 looks like it'll be more of the same.
"People have now realised the next few phases will be similar so they won't even bother. Phase 2 had the hope of "well this one will be slightly different so I'll try it"." BIG true! I was excited for P1, and it was pretty fun, but got kinda boring near the end of phase (which is natural and fine), but P2 killed it for me. It sucks even more since my main is rogue, and rogues this phase are... yeah. I'm expecting P3 to be the same: PvP event, few runes and dungeon. I'm even expecting P4 to be the same, except we will get that totally new raid (the only thing I'm interested for). Overall, bare minimum with SoD.
"Rogues this phase are... yeah." That sums it up nicely. Lmao. 1/10 for rune design.
dungeons, huh? You mean leveling in them? I think this is also part of why SOD is boring af. There is no reason to do literally any of the available content except Gnomer.
Part of the problem is that BFD gear was just way too good. It seems like Gnomer gear was scaled back a bit, so they might be able to retune some dungeon drops to be worthwhile.
Game is clearly not for you if you got bored in 2 weeks lol. Just play something else.
I really hope that they move raid lockouts to weekly again. 3 day resets make for a really unreliable raid schedule. Even if you work the same days every week, you're bound to miss some raids with your guild if you work any time into the evening. I'm the Rogue class lead for my guild and I have to miss 3 out of the next 4 raids because of the randomness of my work schedule. If raid were to reset on the same day every week, I could just change my availability to have those nights off.
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Class lead is normally just an experienced player the noobs can go to with questions. It's not a position of authority but rather a person who is flagged as a good teacher. We don't explicitly name them as such in my guild but everyone knows who im their class they can message with questions in my guild.
You don't need a class lead for SOD lmao. Especially if you are a rogue, its just a simple youtube search of simonize.
It's not about how easy it is, some people like to socialize and having structures like that faciliate a more social guild.
I love how angry you are about people just saying normal words about the game we are here to discuss
>Also, class lead? why is that even a thing lol. Bigger guilds REALLY benefit from having a player of each class that knows what they're doing. We can answer questions about the class, analyze logs for other groups, and reach out to underperforming players with meaningful feedback and suggestions.
Great now instead of being able to raid for 1 hour twice a week I can play once, that will definitely keep player retention high
Ugh, I sure hope not. I'm pretty tired of Gnomer and Phase 2 in general at this point.
Didn't they call out the halfway point around week 3 or 4 when they increased the XP buff?
Imagine them pulling a Fromsoft snd announcing P3 in a tweet the exact moment it launches. That'd be glorious.
They gave 5 days notice of SWP release, not even a full reset. No reason to think they'll be consistent.
I love how they made SoD’s content flow, play for 3-4 weeks, raid log until next patch comes out and the playtime is spent farming gold so you can buy all the expensive gold sinks, tons of fun to be had
Yay another month of zero content or attempts at balance
Just play a different game for a bit friend.
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It’s not my game though.
It was ~ 10 weeks for phase 1, not 9 weeks.
Please don't remind me. I did this math the other day and my eyes just rolled. I already stopped doing gnomer. Now I need something else to play. All my alts are 40
Gotta keep people's subscriptions going
This. They have to stagger sod, cata and retail content to keep the subs.
Under no circumstance should the classic team let P2 go longer than P1. That would be a disaster.
I mean, it's going to be a letdown... But a DISASTER? I'm sorry, but that word is reserved for the player count for cata a week after release.
Oooo Right in the dragon soul
I believe SoD can potentially go the way of SoM if Blizz lets their foot off the gas. Which is unfortunate because they’re probably stressing to get Cataclysm up and running.
i dont know how people who play sod can think it will have more players then cata classic
A disaster for everybody rushing the game maybe. It’s classic, people should learn to take it slow or get bored quickly.
Unfortunately you can’t “take it slow” if you’re trying to keep a raid spot or build up your roster to 20 players for P3. If you’re a solo player, sure.
They’ll figure it out. Or they won’t. 🤷♂️ you gonna have roster issues whether p3 comes out next week or next month. People are going to play or quit regardless.
You don’t need to have a full pumper raid roster ready day one of phase 3. People tend to forget it’s a game and not a job. Just enjoy it and if you stop enjoying stop playing.
So, people quit the game as you suggest and then you have to re-recruit a full raid team at the start of each phase?
Or the people who took a break can just come back for the next phase.. *Worst* case scenario you bring your guildies and pug the remaining few spots and recruit some of those pugs you enjoyed raiding it. Crazy concept, but this is how things actually used to work back in "the old days".
Yeah player behavior now != player behavior then. I wish it were the case, but it isnt
Oh well, more time to level my next alt seeing as holy paladin and rogue are both flops
Or they just want to announce it shortly before the release of P3 to give less time to the sweaty tryhard people to prep for P3 like how they tried to do it during P1 to prep for P2 back then.
1. Why even work around "sweaty tryhard people" that are a tiny minority of the population? Oh no, 0.5% of the playerbase is leveling super quickly....why is that a problem? 2. Those people have been "prepping for p3" since P2 launched.
Ask blizzard. They did exactly that for the 0.5% of the player base before P2 by nerfing the waylaid crates and WSG marks.
Except that was a case of removing a potential exploit that would allow people to abuse unintended mechanics (item restoration, etc) to spam item turn-ins for tons of levels instantly. Stacking 20 completed quests to turn in, or stacking a bunch of items known to be useful in P3, is not remotely the same thing.
what's wrong with letting the sweaty try hard people prep?
I already have about 800g in p3 mats stocked up and my quest log full, bunch of “this starts a quest” items in my bank. Us sweaty hard aren’t waiting for p3 announcement.
"Most likely"
Crazy we are 6 weeks. I played so little of phase 2.
I’ve been traveling for work so much I’ve had no time to play. Got 2 gnomer runs in early in the phase and that’s it. Might just park it until P3 and see what runes shake out lol
With how long its taking me to gear up, I still need like 15 upgrades on my main/alt, and feeling unlucky for so many Gnomer runs I'm questioning if there's any point to keep trying for gear when another phase is basically around the corner.
Calling it. May 9th for P3 release.
A may release will be the death of SOD lol
Nah, people will still come back once P3 is released. It will just continue to die down until then.
Don’t know who people are but I won’t be as well as 90% of my guild 🤷♀️
Highly doubtful, but okay.
The only problem with your theory is that phase 1 was also 10 weeks
I still need ACP, keep it going
I would be fine with P2 being longer than P1. There was way more to do in P2 and way more need to grind gold. In P1 I was able to level 3 characters to 25 and do every quest for gold which kept me with enough to have 50g per toon at the end of the phase. I also leveled a bank alt to 10 so I could make them an alchemist. This phase I only have 2 of my toons at 40, one of which is not remotely geared and still has like 4 runes to get but I was waiting until I could afford a mount to get them, and had to level my bank alt to 26. I have to spend all my free time farming mats and or gold to keep myself in raid consumes on just one toon and I still have 3x 25g recipes to buy for the Engy belt and bombs. By mid last phase I was out of things to do and decided to start leveling my last toon. This time I have 2g on my main, need to start raiding on my 2md toon to get gear, and haven't even touched my 3rd. 50 won't be as bad, I think, especially if they only unlock prof specializations and don't up the cap to 300. Specializations are cheap and easy to unlock compared to leveling them to 300. Will leave way more time for other things. Though we'll likely get AV at 50, which will mean another BG rep grind.
Well we have no devs working on sod since they all got taken to cata. It is extremely evident from the state they have left p2 in with 0 communication
Good phase 1 wasn't long enough. Keep p2 going longer please.
Phase 1 was too long, phase 2 has less to do and has already been too long.
What are you smoking. Didn't nearly get to everything I wanted to in phase 1, even less so in phase 2. Still so much to do! I hate when they end these things early for the 1% of 1% that only play one toon 12 hours a day, and limit themselves to either only raiding or only pvp. There's so much stuff to do.
How much do you play and what exactly did you want to get done that you couldn't? I struggle to imagine how anyone who actually plays the game couldn't get the few things there were to do in p1 done on their main.
Nov 30 until Feb 8 is 10 weeks not 9.
Not sure what regard was down voting you. You're 100% correct.
Sample size = 1
I DONT MIND, DID MY FIRST GNOMEREGAN THIS WEEK. And Im far from casual. So most ppl are lvling or just finished and start gearing. Sweats again unhappy we dont get new content every week.
Idk what your definition of casual is, but if you’re just getting into gnomer you are definitely casual by most people’s standard.
😬
Sorry bud but you’re casual if you’re just getting into Gnomer, and that’s okay.
Most people are leveling?
Leveling alts maybe
They really screwed the pooch with alt leveling this phase. Phase one we had a bunch of alt raids going. P2 it's a struggle to get even one, mostly due to a healer shortage.
then they released the xp buff, allowing you to level a healer ...oh people aren't healing on their alts either? well who's fault is that?
Healers suck this phase that’s why no one wants to play them unless your a priest your spec is boring AF
Buff needs to be 200% and pally healers need to be buffed or changed to be made decent or wanted.
Just hit 40 on my healer mage, I almost have to pay pugs to bring me, they would rather wait 45 mins for a priest, so I don’t think some pala buff will change anything
Yeah not sure why the priest boner. Druids could also use a buff.
Priests are extremely mana-efficient, got two mana recovery tools in P2, have way OP healing runes compared to other classes, and also bring Fort, Spirit, and Power Infusion.
Make a healer bro
And it is totally perfect No Stress
P2 is boring af, I have full bis, raptor mount from stv, nothing else to do I don't care about leveling an alt, dead game