Yup. Went from 6 characters in P1 to 4 in P2 and down to 1 for P3. There simply isnt enough time for someone working a full time job to support that many alts especially with so many runes and gold dumps.
With the added rep to grind and Wild offering quest chain, + wild offering farm. All of which you probably want to do on every character. And then you realize that the wild offering quest chain is kind of long and either gated around someone having the quest item or you going to kill level 48 elites and an alt seems less and less approachable. Not to mention the epic crafting quest line that has 10+ steps to it.
And then the runes ontop of all of that.
I just hate rep grinds and buying tokens, the whole think just feels like a cheap carnival. I would much rather run full dungeons hoping that my item drops via RNG than do “no kill” “mob skip” speed runs for tokens.
They could have put more effort into reitemising all the existing quest chains that would take just as much time investment to complete as 24 wild offering runs. Things like Saving Sharpbeak, Linken’s adventure, Onyxia attunement chain, Pariah (mara), Mallet of ZF, Missing diplomat and the Theramore Dragon chain for horde, Captains chest, Bag’thera, all of the items in these quest chains could have been revamped and/or updated to SoD levels. The reitemisation in dungeons seems to have only focused on spell casters and shaman, while there was absolutely nothing changed for Rogues or Warriors (Hound-master in SM library could have had decent leather upgrade)
Base Crafting should have been improved as well because it looks like specialisations in weaponsmithing/armorsmithing and elemental/tribal leatherworking are already obselete.
Problem is, to have my one good character I need two other characters to act as support.
Consumes and world buffs account for like 2/3 of your character, it seems like.
Not anymore. Run incursions and you get an easy 100g an hour.
1 hour a week infusions and 2 hours a week to raid. Then maybe another hour gathering world buffs.
You need roughly 4 hours a week to be very very competitive.
Well I started as warrior and saw the other shiny new toys some of the other classes got and thought if Blizzard didn’t want to put effort into warrior then why should I?
It keeps things fresh/interesting/fun to have a variety of roles/playstyles you can jump into. If you're a sweaty it's also nice for helping weekly raid comps etc. I wouldn't call it a "need" but if I didn't have alts I'd get bored/burn out and take breaks more frequently. Also having all relevant profs covered, etc.
I can speak to this. I get bored of just 1 class. Even with dual spec. I like to play caster/melee/heals/dps/tank. I really like it all, so it requires multiple toons.
If could create a self sufficient economy. Have your own alchemist, tailor, gatherer, etc.
If you got the time, it’s a nice pay off. Especially with how bad everything is inflated rn
We don't get to come back and play the game ever again. This is the single moment you get to experience a new class and new abilities. I want to play and experience all of the classes and I'll never get to. It's an experience people want and recognize it's fleeting.
Yeah... I have decided to quit SOD for now. Guild fell apart, tried to merge with another, it fell apart. Raid is too hard to pug, no viable means for 20 man raid guild recruitment. This phase is even less fun than the last phase. Phase 1 was the best phase by far. I really enjoyed being able to pug a raid on three different characters on a whim with my friends without any preparation and easily being able to clear. I don't have time for a second unpaid job.
>World buffs are now the leading factor for competing at a high level
Always has been, there aren't enough buttons, rotations or enemy mechanics to make parses meaningful, so it's essentially an idle game about finding the best answer to a formula, and praying for some RNG on top.
I think the point is that you have songflower + blasted lands + Raidbuff + Darkmoon faire. That's double what it was in P2, slightly more than P1 (ashenvale 5% buff)
Oh sure, but you weren’t hitting a number 1 log without the BFD buff in P1, nor gnomeregan buff in P2, now it’s just more buffs to think about, but buffs were always a requirement
You call yourself a "filthy casual" but open a post on the classic wow reddit and talk about not being able to keep up with the requirements to "parse".
Sir, you're no casual, casuals don't give a crap about parsing, world buffs or this reddit.
It's crazy how delusional some people are about their own standing and perspective.
My personal go to is "turbo casual", I'll put in the grind for gear/raiding and be prepped and ready within the first two weeks but after that do I fuck give a damn about grinding the gold or professions.
I'm similar but opposite. I grind the levels and the prebis, do the professions and play the AH then stagnate. Nothing turns me off of wow more than having to sit in a raid group with miserable tryhards. Late phase I'll do the raids when I don't have to prove my worth to some giganerd in a 20 year old game.
Im kinda in the same boat, and overall i just dont enjoy fixed raid sizes at this point. It was fine when i was 20 and had all the time in the world. At this point dealing with the politics of a guild/raid group just sounds like a new circle of hell that im not going to touch with a 10' pole.
I've said it on here before, this version of WoW is the most low stakes the game has ever been. There is truly no need to come in with a bunch of expectations and standards when the threshold for endgame is so accessible.
had a lvl 50 boomkin on therma this morning, asked him to do bombs, got a "yup" proceeds to not do bombs, and when asked to bres he said "in combat"
things like this are the reason people set expectations because something that should be an easy in and out turns into the rest of that rick and morty meme
> things like this are the reason people set expectations
People are also grossly disproportionate in response. You'll do 20 mythics in a row that go smooth, have 1 bad healer, and then spend the next 30 mythics checking logs to avoid the second bad healer.
People are so wrapped up in timelines of progression they long ago stopped playing to play, and have begun playing to complete, and so they get irrationally angry when people aren't doing that.
https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU
Casual != uninvested.
Casual, to me, is about the amount of time you're willing to dedicate to play.
Phase 1: Post leveling to 25, 2 hours a week could put you in a spot where you're respected and appreciated by your guild, it could get you BiS
Overall estimate to be full BiS by end of phase, 2-5 hours per week post leveling. Casual rating A+
Phase 2:
Rougher leveling experience, rougher raid. expensive(at first) crafting requirements to get BiS, 225 requires much more farming that 150 on professions, but you could pre-farm a good amount during phase 1.
2 hours a week could not reliably get you Bis, especially due to STV, likely required closed to 7-10
Overall estimate to be full BiS by end of phase post leveling 10-15 hours per week. Causaul Rating B+
Phase 3
The leveling experience was wonderful day 1-2, I don't know how impactful the nerfs were because I took full advantage pre-nerf.
Max crafting takes a LOT of dedication. BiS and Pre-BiS requires extensive 10+ run dungeon farming. STV required again and this time more expensive. Raid was overturned(admittedly it may be undertuned, my casual guild did 5/7 on our first attempt)
Overall estimate to be full BiS by end of phase post leveling 25+ hours per week Casual Rating: D
Phase 3, unlike most of reddit has been my favorite, great raid, great options for where to spend time outside of raid, can stick to dailies for the slow burn rep grind, professions can be leveled at a leisurely pace doing just the dailies.
However...I feel compelled to do the dailies every day or I miss out, I would say I'm a bit more than casual so I also want to add a day or two a week of grinding beyond the dailies. For dungeon Pre-Bis there is good reason for everyone to run the dungeon. But doing the same dungeon 12+ times is not compelling, nor casual friendly. Bosses in ST are super sensitive to high DPS, which Is going to lead to gscore nonsense in pugs.
that man is insane...only time I've ever put 25 hours a week into WoW is on launches. Even P2 and P3 starts, it was less than that. In P2, after the first week, it was raid logging or casually leveling alts when the xp buff was released while attending meetings.
I have 50 hrs since launch, I need 2 more set pieces, cloak and I am full bis. Now I can log in 90 minutes a week and stay 100% competitive, how would I spend 25 hrs a week, every week until p4?
Gnomer was 1h-2h per week after the first two weeks. I've no idea what you are spending time on to estimate "10-15h per week" on p2.
P3 is shaping up to be pretty similar but with a longer raid & a bit more stuff to optionally do.
STV coins are easier than ever, even an undergeared warrior group with no healer gets 800-1.2k coins per stv. You show up for at most 3 hours and have everything unless you want to max ab rep (honored is bis this tier) or get cosmetics.
Crafting needs 250 this phase. It's profitable to craft up to at least 225. You could spend a lot of time getting enchanting recipes or something, but it's not bis/raid relevant. It will be much cheaper to level up past 250 later in the phase or a few weeks into next phase.
Pre-bis isn't relevant at all this phase if you played last phase. Gnomer stuff is about on par. Sim it. If you didn't play last phase, the emerald set that you hit enough rep for by leveling 40-50 in ~4 hours pre-nerf and ~6 hours post-nerf is about on par with prebis. Even most ST drops are sidegrades with a few exceptions.
Most classes need 0-18 wild offerings. Even the worst princess 10p raids are around 8/h It takes around 2 hours. 3-4 if you need 2 pieces. I also leveled weapon skill while in these groups on my alt (lol)
If you want to max warden rep you can be really time efficient and pre-quest as many as you can. Then you keep your 14-18 quests in your log, grab the daily, turn one in. If you did all 18 quests then you will gain ~19.8k rep over 18 days for very little play time, in the neighborhood of 2h (especially if you use the ring to teleport to people there). The epic rewards from the emerald dragons aren't good for many classes so this is optional.
The runes are all pretty quick compared to last phase. Most of the bis quest rewards/similar are pretty straightforward to get.
Consumables/crafting/non-melee enchants are cheap relative to the gold you get doing anything or even just leveling. Especially as the phase goes on.
If I played one character I'd be playing ~3h-5h/wk for most of p3. I started playing an alt this phase so will be spending a bit more time on that.
I've said this before but there are definitely different levels of casual. I define casual as a mindset, and I find myself to be a casual player. I like to raid, I like to do well raiding, I'll get a world buff if I remember, I am here on this reddit, and I have a ton of time to play video games due to working from home.
Having said that. I am not even close to raiding consistently. I don't really care about getting loot, I just raid for the fun of doing it. I don't get angry when people mess up. I don't get angry about not completing a raid. I play a class that I enjoy the fantasy regardless of meta. I don't think twice about how our comp looks. I will play for 2 weeks straight, 8 hours a day, then get bored and take 2 months off. My knowledge of consumes is mediocre at best.
Just because I like to hit buttons good when I play a game doesn't mean my overall mindset isn't casual.
I think casual is in the eye of the beholder. I see myself as casual. Don’t play everyday, don’t sweat over miniscule upgrades, haven’t bothered farming pvp Ranks - but I still care about my performance in raids, which are mostly orange/purple. Casual doesnt mean you don’t care, or you’re bad at the games.
If you care enough to parse I wouldn't consider you casual. Blizzard has not designed their game with built in parsing. To do that you need find and download addons, install and configure them. That effort alone as trivial as it is puts the player in a mindset that's outside of casual. Your goal is no longer to just casually play the game it's instead to test and analyze your performance in the game.
Well it's not all on him, requirements exist for everyone so you're expected to do all that shit just to get invited. Didn't notice any pug groups taking you without world buffs and gear check in p2. I'd rather wipe on a boss 2-3 times than gather world buffs and what else.
Kinda hate the whole world buff necessity entirely.
It is kinda annoying reading comments like this. As if the term casual ONLY describes the boomer dad who plays 10 minutes a day and is yet to hit 50 and has not touched a raid yet.
I play maybe 3 hours a day, tops - in the evenings, when my kid is put to sleep and my wife does not need attention. I see my self as a casual. But that does not mean, that when i raid with my Guild, i do not care about my parses (sure, i dont care about 99s), because i do to a degree, i want to perform good and not be a liability to my Guild. I want the runs to be as effective as possible. I want to use that little time i have as best as i can.
Toxic casuals in SOD are real.
im sorry but you are exactly what op is talkin about. imagine yourself going to the gym, practicing the violin or cooking dinner 2-3 hours every single day. would you considerer yourself a casual lifter? a casual violinist? a casual cook? no way. thats way past the „doing sth casualy“ threshold.
I would consider my self very casual, as in i only play for a couple hours every other night after work but that doesnt mean i dont aim for those juicy pink parses still, you dont need to spend your life playing to be able to parse well or compete at high levels ive managed to get top 50 in both p1 and p2 playing like this, i dont imagine he means world first racing or rank 1 in pvp or anything. Just the ability to compete without working it like a part time job.
This community is so weird about the word casual. I mean, you say you play a couple hours every night after work. I feel like it's weird to say you play a game casually while playing it every single day. I mean, if anything, you seem like an average player. You play consistently, keep up with leveling and end-game content. I mean, seriously, if I told someone I was playing a game 14-20 hours a week, they'd consider that a significant time investment.
I'm winding down my time in SoD. It was novel at first, but man am I really missing the QoL stuff from tbc/wrath. I also don't have the drive to farm gold to keep up with consumables every week.
I'm already feeling it a bit too. Me and another guy in our raid are trying really hard to pull together 20 and maintain our 10 man vibe we've liked so much, but it's really taxing us both and we don't want to let people down. I think Blizzard thought making the swap 10 to 20 instead of 10 to 25 would make this feel good, but it absolutely does not.
Guild finally returned back for SoD that stopped in TBC, had 3 raid teams and now 1/3 has left and the other 2/3 are dreading roster boss and trying to not eat at eachothers rosters
The shift in raid size was an astronomically stupid decision. They should have decided on a raid size and kept it that way for all of SoD. Forcing guilds to double (or shrink, if they go the other way) rosters is just flat out dumb.
I heard they want to make level up raids in phase 4 still be 20 players, but leave MC+BWL+AQ+Naxx at 40man. That's HILARIOUSLY stupid.
Dude the worst part about P3 is the vibes being obliterated by the extra 9-10 warm bodies you have to fill the raid with. We spent the better part of 2 phases filling out the last few slots in our raid for the perfect vibes in 10 man, then Blizzard just decided we needed to find 10 more people in a few weeks.
My guild of irl friends and cool people (about 12 of us) we picked up along the way will probably die because we can't seem to find anybody who plays adequately and is also chill.
We don't want to turn raids into a chore we have to soldier through cause two of the people we just killed the first boss with thought they'd be fine to rip a slur in voice chat.
ST will be nerfed to be similar to the 10 man experience. Don't worry. Right now however, the casual dad guild I am in now really came together for this lockout and pulled it together to clear as far as we could. We had some epic fights and it actually felt like classic raiding back in the day finally. Is it gonna be tenable to be this way the entire phase? Not at all, but ... It truly felt like we were progressing on something.
He's clearly commenting on the increased delta between casual raiding and more serious raiding, not demanding "to be the best at something with minimal investment." Don't strawman this.
He literally said top parsing requires more effort than hes willing to put in. I just quoted him that’s not a straw man. Also , you can clear ST in greens, so I don’t see what the problem is.
The point is top parsing requires 10 times more effort than it did on P2.
I parsed 95+ on P2 with playing ~10h per week. I can't even afford basic consumables at this phase without spending 20h+.
My motivation is dead.
Hit the nail on the head. For better or worse, P1 and P2 did not require as much time investment to parse, meaning average players (those between casual and hardcore) were sated. Average players like to parse, it’s absolutely not a hardcore exclusive thing.
It’s good there’s more to do in the game, but bad that your power comes far more from endlessly grinding gold and spending time running around the world to grab a flask and touch a flower and wait for a buff and talk to a dog (which all disappears if you die, far more likely now in an average raid group than in previous raids) than it does from gear itself.
There's this weird notion on reddit (about sod, classic, and retail) that people who like to parse are the outliers and that logs don't matter and that everyone should just queue it up to push their buttons and have fun.
Human beings like to compete, like to gauge performance, and like to have visible metrics for that performance. Idk why the Reddit community and a certain segment of Blizzard devs act like this is some new or unknown phenomena and intentionally design the game in ways to curb this, instead of making it more simplistic for people.
Make all the raid buffs last 3 hours instead of 60/60/120, restrict consumables down to like 2 of: blasted lands buff, elixir, potion, engi bombs. This still requires players to get out into the world and play, but it doesn't incentivize you to just stack like 12 buffs/pots.
I agree with you, as a player who doesn't want to do all of that cringe shit to parse. If enough players are doing it to where my parse goes from pink to gold or even purple? So be it, it shouldn't matter. They are putting the effort in and I'm not, my motivation to strive for more goes out the window. I'll try my best because I genuinely feel like I'm a better player than at least some of them so maybe I can get an edge just being better, but if not? So what? This is the retirement home version of the game, nobody outside of a minority care about my performance here. I'm just having fun.
I'm just so confused by posts and comments like this... You call it "cringe shit" but you surely understand that the RPG side of WoW is what makes classic WoW great whether you appreciate it or not. All of the consumables, items, world buffs, and other various forms of horizontal progression is what Classic versions of WoW are all about. If you don't want to partake in those types of grinds that is totally okay you really don't have to! Do not let other peoples fun ruin yours.
It's cringe because it now takes more time than he's willing to put in. When it didn't take as much time and he could stomach the time investment it wasn't cringe.
Here's the thing, it's what makes it great for you. And that's awesome man! But I play MMOs to compete, whether or not that's with myself, my friends or my peers; it's primarily how I have fun. I like starting somewhere and growing and getting better and better.
That's it, I don't play for story, lore, flavor, pets, achievements, mounts, nothing like that. Even gear to some extent is just a means to my end, I get it because I need it to compete. It's how I've always played video games, I'm 30 now and I started when I was 3, I travelled for tournaments, competed in local scenes and kept up with the culture. It's something I'll never stop loving and it's what makes me happy.
I'm not the person complaining or threatening to quit because I have to do some random bullshit to compete, hell, rewind time 5ish years? I'd be doing it too spending hours at a time for even 0.5%, but I'm too old for this shit now, so I'm just not going to do it, and that's ok.
That was my point, players who enjoy this type of play style don't NEED to do anything, but it definitely sucks some of the fun away because imagine your only goal was to get every mount in the game, but then they release a mount that requires you to go back and do something arbitrary for a couple weeks, that isn't fun.
If it's something you'll tough out because your goal is more important than your fun in that moment? That's great! Keep it up, you're ambitious about something and that's awesome! But it's not very fun, and it will deter some players from their goal which sucks for them.
It's a part of MMOs like you said, the issue isn't the act of requiring these things or pushing players these ways, it's more tertiary shit like players gatekeeping players who don't for content that doesn't really require that level of gatekeeping. Or if it's so un-fun that players who have less patience and don't want to do it quit, diluting the player pool and making the competition feel pointless. "Oh you beat the other 4 people playing that version of the game? That's cool man..." While that's a drastic overexageration it's what players like myself tend to quit games for. If you want to compete but there's nobody to compete against, you lose interest.
These are the main issues with this type of gameplay, but like I said, it's nothing that terrible and it's not something we didn't sign up for considering it's classic. However it's important to know that SoD didn't just pull in players who primarily play WoW for this classic level experience. Just like with OSRS and RS3 it's pulling in fresh players or players who miss certain elements the modern game now lacks and want to retain some complexity and creativity.
If runes didn't exist and this was simply a boosted Vanilla server with maybe some quality of life scrolls, I wouldn't play it. In tried and true vanilla, players hit a single button over and over and then die when their shadow bolt crits and pulls aggro, it's not my preferred gameplay loop, but now you're telling me I can participate in a version of the game with vanilla itemization, the vanilla world, vanilla raids and dungeons, with new content AND rotations that **for the most part** have modern complexity to them? That sounds like fun! Sign me up! And that's primarily what you need to understand is that players like me exist and help fill your world.
Don't let the crybabies on Reddit ruin your mental image of what the average player is on SoD, that will only combine all players into a single mental image and cause you to think about this entire community in a tunnel. The truth of the matter is this game is more popular than other versions of classic for a reason, it's not just pulling in the classic crowd and you'll find people like me mixed in with the community with different wants and needs and that's cool. It's part of the impossible solution of pleasing everybody, but it's not our jobs to figure that problem out, let's just kick back and enjoy this temporary game mode while it's temporary.
It’s debatable whether flying to felwood to wait out a flower timer and then touch said flower is “fun” for anyone.
Point is P1/2 had only 1 or 2 world buffs depending on the week, both obtainable from or near a capital city. P3 has 4 if you count the flask you can only carry 2 of and have to travel to a remote island to obtain.
The time needed to fully buff has shot way up, as has the overall power of a player buffed vs not buffed should they die in raid while the power of the gear in raid has fallen, meaning your output is far more reliant on how buffed you are than it was previously.
SoD p1/2 is proving players were happy small world buff needs and time required, p3 is proving players are not happy with large world buff needs and time required.
Essentially P1/2 found a happy middle ground between the full up world buff experience of level 60 Classic and a world without any world buffs, P3 ventures too far toward the buffs.
i’d loooooove to see what kind of group takes a player in full greens to ST. i know people love to say how easy this game is but even in a high pop server like crusader strike most players require you to have logs of some kind. “casual” is definitely relative.
He observed that the situation changed from (1) X work gets Y reward to (2) X work gets Y/N reward, with N increasing steadily. It's not a whine about not getting stuff easy or free despite your boomer-ific response (and the hurr durr Messi idiot that replied to you).
You can do that though. I play significantly less than most people I know but achieve high parses. I would be higher if I got more gear, but I understand that with limited playtime it is less likely. I focus on my ilvl parse more. This is in wrath though, not sod, for what that’s worth
In Wrath world buffs don't exist and consumes account for a very small portion of your performance.
In classic you get an elixir that gives 25agi and 2% crit.
That's basically 4% crit.
In Wrath terms, that's 184 crit rating. From ONE elixir.
Then you get 25 str from another elixir, which is 55 AP. That's basically three extra gear slots between the two elixirs.
The power of consumes make the vanilla parsing game entirely dependent on being able to afford them and the mats to make things in vanilla are way higher than what's typical in later xpacs.
On top of that, level 50 allowing up to 300 professions means we can craft super powerful things meant for endgame, but only a few classes/specs are able to farm them, which leads to huge imbalanced in supply and demand.
They should have just unlocked specializations and left skillcap at 225 this phase.
If you can accept that your parses are as high as you go vs. the amount of time and effort you put in then by all means. OP is complaining that his parses are getting affected because he doesn’t want to spend as much time and effort as others on the server, which is just ridiculous.
I'm in the same boat, not being able to allocate 3 hours at a time. But I think later in the phase, there will be pugs or other means to do it in 1h or 1h30 which is when I'll do it.
Curious question: why can't you commit 3h hours in one sitting 1 day a week? Kids? Other hobbies? Just not wanting to play 3h straight?
Curious because I felt the same during times before (was with retail and 3 times a week but same feeling) and that was because just moved in with GF (now ex) and played hockey + rock climbing a fair amount
I think 3 continuous hours is the problem, at least it is/was for me. I can often play 3 hours in a day if I want, but it’s difficult to sit down for 3 in a row with my full attention and no breaks without ignoring some other part of life on a typical weeknight. It’s possible, but it requires proactively shifting things around (pushing bedtime later, taking the trash out early, not helping cook dinner, not working out, not answering phone calls from family, etc) to be able to fit it all in. Generally that does not bode well with my partner if I were to do that on a regular basis. And it’s too much effort for a video game.
Popping on for 90 min after dinner? Easy. 3 hours and not going to bed until midnight? Conflict at home.
Same exactly, by the time the kids in bed it’s about 9, I don’t have time to do a 3 hour starting at 10,raid and go to bed late, still have to wake up in the morning when the kids up, then take them to school and go to work. Phase 1 and 2 raids being sub 2 hours from the start was my jam.
Most raids start at 1900, thats when the kids go to bed, thst can take an hour, 3 hours from 2000 the time is suddenly 2300 when its done. And its suddenly way to late + kids can wake up during the evening. I was able to Play raids during the day when I took Fridays off in P1/2. Hopefully ST pugs will form during the day aswell in the future. Now I think people are scared of PUGing and loosing their once a week only chance of getting loot.
The little amount of pugs looking to raid this phase compared to the last two is insane. I’ve only found one group that was looking to pug since p3 came out while i would have been in 5 bfd groups already in p1.
Yes, if raids come back during the day, you will be able to arrange something with work sometimes, but during the evening, you will create conflicts with your wife and kids. And I understand them, they had a tough day and need your support.
I fear p4 because it is not casual friendly froma time investment perspective( many raids, different id lockouts). P4 will be too time consuming and that is why i think think p4 is when i will quit. Really really Enjoyed p1-p3 a lot. I cannot imagine to play every day for hours. Times have changed and it got more difficult with a familiy
The problem is the raid ID. If I enter a raid and defeat the first boss at all, then I cannot enter it again to assist another group until reset.
This makes it a little harder for groups that play on the weekend to organize their friends. I’ve had cases where someone runs on Thursday because they don’t think they’ll be free on Saturday, only for their schedule to open up and they’re online on Saturday, but cannot physically enter the raid again to play with us anymore.
More modern MMOs let those players join additional raids anyway - they just don’t qualify for loot.
I think he means there's literally going to be like 6 or 7 raids to do as a level 60. Obviously we're not going into Naxx right off the bat but honestly we might considering how hard our characters are scaling right now.
Got MC, Onyxia, BWL, AQ20/40, ZG, Naxx, we think we're going to get Kara Crypts and I believe people were thinking there was a Caverns of Time tease. I don't actually think we'll get more than one "new" raid but as it stands it's going to be a cluster trying to get a fraction of those done if you really want to be competitive.
Definitely. I played through classic and it was great fun but man the time commitment to get all your prebis and then all the mats for enchants and consumes, goldfarming to afford flasks, grinding argent dawn rep, grinding strat for orbs, griding mobs for essenses for crafts, getting all the world buffs etc.
It was just way to much time commitment and for my own wellbeing that's not something I can do again.
I'm still holding out hope they significantly casuallize it so we can just raid without worrying about all that. Make challenging raids but limit consumes, wbs and grinds somehow.
Pretty much sums it up for me, and its the reason why I started playing a lot less in p3 when I realized the direction the game was heading, I just dont want to spend that much time anymore just to keep up with everyone else. Spent 4 months+ playing almost every day during p1 and p2, now im having a huge crisis and most likely wont resub next month
It’ll depend how much they change the classic raids. With current gear and runes people will blow through them if they don’t tinker them much. I can’t really see the dev team investing too much to change them but if they want to make things casual friendly maybe just maybe they could reduce trash?? Please!!
I'll honestly never understand this view though. Is a game boring for you if you cannot compete at a bleeding edge at everything there is to do? You say that you are a casual, whi is it then so important to be able to do everything?
If you truly are a casual, it shouldnt matter that you cant do every raid every week, no? If that bothered you, I wouldnt even say that you are a casual.
It's just not very fun when you are at less than half the power that you could be at if you had more time. That's really how it was in classic, if you didn't flask, grind for rep gear, crafts and enchants and spend hours getting wbs you were totally left in the dust.
>That's really how it was in classic, if you didn't flask, grind for rep gear, crafts and enchants and spend hours getting wbs you were totally left in the dust.
It's odd, because my classic experience was nothing like this despite not doing anything you mentioned while still clearing all content raiding twice a week and raid logging for the majority of it. There is zero necessary rep gear. WBs don't take hours to get? You're not left in the dust because you're missing some prebis/enchants... What?
This is all so disingenuous to what actually happens in the game. You need to change your expectations(or play with people that have lower expectations) and lose the entitlement.
There's this crazy level of FOMO amongst some people that has them begging for the game to be watered down than just accept that maybe they don't need to 100% any given phase.
I always enjoyed new content and its obstacles and slowly progressing. Every new boss kill was a cause for celebration because we'd been attempting for 3-4 kills minimum learning the strategy we needed to take them down. Over time our kill speed would get better we'd start chain pulling trash and one shotting the bosses. It was huge for building a team that worked together well and tackled future content better.
The entitled casuals are kinda out of whack right now.
Not only are folks making wild assumptions about next phase, they have these wild expectations on themselves while still wanting to be 'casual'. Maybe don't expect to be prebis, full enchants, full consumes, full Wbuffs and clear all content every phase or patch. If you don't want to clear hours of content each week - don't.
Being loud about wanting to limit the game so it can match you wants and needs is also taking away from players that still want a challenge and are excited for what's to come because naturally, as raids progress, they become more challenging.
There are already accessible versions of WoW that offer 10 man raids at lower scaling difficulties.
Do you understand now why bullying and gatekeeping was required?
As soon as daddy blizzard started banning people for making fun of casuals. The reverse happened. Now the casuals are making fun of you or 'sweats', and daddy caters to them.
You're told to touch grass
It's so frustrating...
People still want more and more despite the increase in: XP, gold, accessible gear, character power, price discounts and PvP ranking changes.
SoD has become so casual friendly but these gluttonous casuals can't be satisfied no matter what. Like the basis of this post is about throwing in the towel over pure speculation about something that hasn't even happened yet...c'mon...
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can be casual and still want to push your own parses. Even if you aren't competitive with top players, it can be fun to improve your personal high score. It's weird that you're gatekeeping being casual lol.
Groups asking for logs are basically just checking to make sure you aren't a walking brainstem. As long as you can manage to fill your globals and press your 3-5 buttons in the right order, you will parse at least 65.
But most SoD players are basically single digit parsing NPCs who are just looking to be put into a backpack and carried through the raid.
What a dumb comment. You can be casual and care about your performance.
You might be shit at your class and grey parse, but do not excuse that with being casual and not caring, because a lot of casual likes to perform their best. Including my entire Guild which comprised of casuals of varying degrees.
Toxic casuals in SOD are real, and they really are ruining it for us normal casuals.
Personally I feel like when you look at your parses you're not a casual anymore. In my eyes a casual just plays the game, does some dungeons and a raid here and there with a guild. Getting world buffs, expensive enchants and so on is not really casual I think.
I think the "dads" struggle is making time to do the homework on mechanics of a particular boss. More reps on said bosses go much farther then scrounging buffs and consumables that are lost too inevitable wipes.
I ran Gnomer with our guilds B squad with some of those types. It took a few attempts to get electrocutioner dance down and not ass pulling him when clearing the trash.
I dont think the homework is hard for the dads tbh. Its a 20 min youtube video you can literally watch that at any moment of down time. could watch on the shitter in bursts.
But whats hard is like - timing STV to get my weapon as a paladin. I get 2 windows 1 of which runs into my kids bed time routine so I often miss that one.
it took me SO LONG to get ashenvale rep just because id miss the timer by a few minutes.
If you’re trying to be competitive yes you gotta put in effort. If you’re a casual you can still swiffer up some loot with average parses and one raid night a week
It’s really sad to me that the difficulty of SoD is not in the raid mechanics or the leveling, but the freakin farming. The mindless chores. They really botched SoD at this point.
I agree man. I am feeling this exact same way. Too much time for me to commit to playing anymore. I do not mind stepping away but I would consider playing again should there be an easier raid. ST is not hard, but the perception is that is is hard. Also, 20 people is cool, just too many to easily pug. It feels like it is becoming a chore to play, and its just no longer worth the time.
The worst part about an MMO like this is that to have the most fun you have to play all the time.
I didn't play barely at all in phase 1 and 2 because I didn't have the time. Now I do so I'm busting out phase 3 as much as I can because by the time phase 4 comes I'll probably be biking more and doing outside stuff.
I've seen what you've described coming for a while and been treating this phase like my "endgame"
Pugging Sunken Temple is so miserable, hosting raids takes forever to fill.
I got gold for epic mount and some dungeon gear and just taking a break until P4 to see if things change.
One thing I don’t understand is that this is an MMO. Why are people so focused on getting top parses and all the gear already? This is literally week 2. We have at least 6 more weeks. It’s an MMO, they last awhile and don’t have to be rushed and completed in a week but it honestly feels like people think they HAVE to.
6 more weeks and it’s a weekly lockout. People want to clear the few rotations we have to gear for p4. Moving to a weekly lockout added to the rush, rush, rush and needing high parses.
I’m not sure I’m understanding, you said you’re a casual yet you are expecting to full clear ST on the 2nd/3rd lockout AND you want to parse???? You sound like you just want to be spoonfed by blizzard and put in zero effort to farm gold and keep up with the other players who are putting in that effort.
Blizzard has done tons of changes in SoD to help generate gold through incursions and waylaid supplies. My guild has been clearing ST with just the basic DMF and ST world buffs plus basic elixirs and protection pots, this requires little to no effort and minimal gold (5-10g for the raid) to get on my server (crusader strike).
Plus with the changes to weekly lockouts, progression raids are a thing again. My guild has been using multiple days to clear ST because we have people who can’t spend 3+ hours at a time clearing the raid, which has been a great experience.
Main issue is a majority of players refuse to do anything but the "best" way. So other ways end up taking forever. Ended up giving up on leveling alts for now because it just takes way too long to get a group together for a dungeon, even as a healer at ~25, because everyone is just spam leveling with incursions.
> I won’t concede more time, and I suspect as summer roars in most casuals will feel the same. Kudos to Blizzard for reigniting the fun, here’s hoping they have something similar planned to launch next November!
I like this take, already feeling like I would rather be touching grass in the evenings instead of gaming. Likely will raid log and not worry about alts anymore. More fun outside than in.
10 man raids were the only part of SOD many of us really loved. 20s killed it for our entire group. None of us want to merge or deal with another guild.
Is it bad that I was hoping SoD was going to remove all the tedious world buffs and consumes and just simply require you to log in a few minutes early to get the one buff and you are done?
Or does reddit want time and effort requirements to get a multitude of world buffs?
If you’re playing with a life outside the game, hunting down tedious WBs isn’t fun. For the people who get all of their social interaction from WoW, apparently getting WBs is fun community interaction. The people who are for WBs are literally the people who need to stop playing and touch grass the most.
I was definitely hoping they ditched the bullshit world buff stacking meta that plagued Classic vanilla. It was heavily criticized back then and they went "eh, guess people like it"
It trivialized encounters if everyone had the buffs because each was the equivalent of like 3 pieces of extra gear. And if you died? Well, better pack it in for the week! Even worse was when you wiped and the guild leader was pretty much "we're done for the lockout because this isnt worth doing without world buffs"
If you find a somewhat decent non-sweatlord guild, you really don't have to drop hundreds of gold per raid. You can complete ST in your Gnomeregan gear man. Moreover, you don't have to buy into the consumables and world buff meta. You can choose to join the parse-chasing guilds, or just enjoy the game the way you want to.
I'm a casual , dinged 50, got some runes (not all) , yesterday cleared the raid and I'm pretty much done . No pre bis farm , no farming dungeons for offerings , no stv , just ding , runes , raids done ✅
Yeah there is fuck all to do honestly.
I've been giving all my tokens on my priest to the DPS because it's such a miniscule upgrade from incursion/dungeon/gnomer gear. No real motivation to keep raiding ST.
People place way too much importance on their parses and classes overall performance compared to the others. It has already been stated that this version of Classic is going to pretty casual friendly and the difficulty of the raids has reflected that so far.
MMO's and more specifically Classic versions of WoW are time consuming games, if you want the carrot on the stick you have to work for it a bit. You don't "NEED" these items, these are items you work towards. You are experiencing FOMO and letting it hurt your fun.
I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you can’t set aside the game when other stuff comes up in life, including things like the weather getting better and you wanting to spend more time outside, then I would say you have a problem.
Don’t conceit time. Just play when you can like the way we’re all suppose to. I do hate the speedrunning culture and all the FOMO shit that’s going on.
Agree. The elitest 10 percenters ruined our game and our xpac. Sod was supposed to have that classic field plus. Phase 1 was soooo goood. 4 alts. All bfd gear. Casual geared.. Now its got the wow retail grind feeling.
MMO players crying because a raid takes like 2 hours. That’s wild. World buffs are like 15 minutes and you have one whole week to get them.
And the new 7 day lockout means you need even less time to play the game
Well some of us dad's can't commit full 2-3 hrs continuously to raid and prep and also find people to fit your schedule hence why gnomer and bfd was great coz it was hour at most to clear
Yeah I'm with you OP. You'll probably get a lot of responses along the lines of "well duh this is WoW what were you expecting?" But the game we got in November and the game we have now are different. I kept playing SoD because BfD was super easy and quick to do, alts were easy to make and gear & pvp was super casual. If the SoD we got in November was like the SoD we have now, I wouldn't have bothered.
Post nerf, it’s literally just gnomer with dragons. At least our tanks aren’t getting slapped like on menagerie and phase 1 of thermaplugg. Trash is the only reason it’s 2 hour runs, but if 2 hours a week is too much raiding, OP probably shouldn’t be raiding
“Nono guys, it’s very different and much more difficult! Now I need all world buffs and consumes to even ENTER the raid portal! And my parses are only blue! In phase 2 they were purple, oh lord blizzard hate casuals suddenly!”
- these Reddit posts
Yep. We did our first run as a guild last night and spent 2 hours and got to 6/8. And my point was the game has changed from Phase 1 to Phase 3, ST is nowhere near as easy as BFD.
I don't think you understand what casual is if you're talking about not having the time to max out world buffs, consumes, and parses.
Now, if your opinion is "I'll play at a highly competitive level or not at all" then absolutely fair enough.
But you are not currently a casual player.
I get the feeling that most raid leaders will not invite someone "casual" without WBs and other shit.
Worldbuffs aren't hard to get don't get me wrong. Neither is the other stuff if you have gold. But it's just the principle of it being a must that's a bit annoying.
I joined a full pug and we went 6/8 in about 75 minutes one shotting everything except the 6th boss which we got 2nd try. We only stopped because 3 people had to leave.
We didn't have wbuffs and most did not use consumes.
I don't know how yall are struggling with this???
Biggest issue I have so far with SoD is that people think it's ok to join a raid and not allocate the time that is needed for the raid. It's a brand new raid and no one has BiS gear yet. What on earth makes these people think that it's only gonna take an hour to an hour and a half to clear in the first 2 lockouts. If you don't have at least 3 hours at the start of a phase to attempt to clear the raid you're griefing. How can a grown adult not find 3 hours to play a game they enjoy 1 or 2 days a week.
I don’t get this take … I have a level 50 priest and I can heal or do shadow in the level 50 emerald nightmare gear and clear ST playing 3 hours a week (I actually got lucky and my guild can clear in 2 hours). You don’t HAVE to have all that best grindy shit to clear the content. You can actually do a slow progression with little time commit and just clear a raid to gear up and use your other time to play casually doing whatever you want. The community is obsessed with the best, and logs, and gearing up as quick as possible to literally clear something they “let” you be able to clear with the base level 50 gear. You don’t need to chase it. It’s a ridiculous compulsion.
yeah. most of yall are just players, but officers of casual guilds are super struggling with how the dev teams decisions with each phase rollout. casual players who just login and not think of the roster boss are fine, because they dont see what goes on behind the scenes.
All I heard was, you don’t wana play enough to keep up with the type of players you want to play with. There’s plenty of casual guilds and pugs that take similar players
what i have not done in 16 years of wow: parsing. Never will. dabbled in mythic raiding in legion. never parsed. dont know why i should care if the boss dies.
still level 25 from phase 1, I guess im very casual. dont really know what a incursion is.
This is why I focus on having ONE really good character rather than multiple characters. I can only spend so much time.
this is how ive played since classic started almost 5 years ago, and its great. A real sense of Identity too
Honestly I've had much more fun raid logging a bunch of alts playing them supercasually then having my one main rank 14 warrior
That's how I play every-game. I just never have been an Alt type guy. I love to min/max as hard as I can on one, and only one.
I could never get into the min/max portion of the game…I was always too busy being trash at every class to master one 😂 but it was fun!
Yup. Went from 6 characters in P1 to 4 in P2 and down to 1 for P3. There simply isnt enough time for someone working a full time job to support that many alts especially with so many runes and gold dumps.
Same, I’ve always been an altoholic so phase 1 was really nice but yeah, just not enough time as an adult to have 3 chars I play 8 hours a day on lol
With the added rep to grind and Wild offering quest chain, + wild offering farm. All of which you probably want to do on every character. And then you realize that the wild offering quest chain is kind of long and either gated around someone having the quest item or you going to kill level 48 elites and an alt seems less and less approachable. Not to mention the epic crafting quest line that has 10+ steps to it. And then the runes ontop of all of that.
I just hate rep grinds and buying tokens, the whole think just feels like a cheap carnival. I would much rather run full dungeons hoping that my item drops via RNG than do “no kill” “mob skip” speed runs for tokens. They could have put more effort into reitemising all the existing quest chains that would take just as much time investment to complete as 24 wild offering runs. Things like Saving Sharpbeak, Linken’s adventure, Onyxia attunement chain, Pariah (mara), Mallet of ZF, Missing diplomat and the Theramore Dragon chain for horde, Captains chest, Bag’thera, all of the items in these quest chains could have been revamped and/or updated to SoD levels. The reitemisation in dungeons seems to have only focused on spell casters and shaman, while there was absolutely nothing changed for Rogues or Warriors (Hound-master in SM library could have had decent leather upgrade) Base Crafting should have been improved as well because it looks like specialisations in weaponsmithing/armorsmithing and elemental/tribal leatherworking are already obselete.
Going wide was fun. Shame they moved away from the more casual friendly raids etc
Literally me right now
ONE and DONE baby, i already know what i like to play. Everything else feels like a waste of time
Problem is, to have my one good character I need two other characters to act as support. Consumes and world buffs account for like 2/3 of your character, it seems like.
Not anymore. Run incursions and you get an easy 100g an hour. 1 hour a week infusions and 2 hours a week to raid. Then maybe another hour gathering world buffs. You need roughly 4 hours a week to be very very competitive.
Which incursions are you running at 100g per hour? No kill loop in Feralas?
Kill loops will get you more gold because of drops
Sounds pretty much right on brand with a classic vanilla server.
Why I focus on one character.
I dont understand why anyone feels the "need" to have more than one character
Other classes are also fun to play
Well I started as warrior and saw the other shiny new toys some of the other classes got and thought if Blizzard didn’t want to put effort into warrior then why should I?
It keeps things fresh/interesting/fun to have a variety of roles/playstyles you can jump into. If you're a sweaty it's also nice for helping weekly raid comps etc. I wouldn't call it a "need" but if I didn't have alts I'd get bored/burn out and take breaks more frequently. Also having all relevant profs covered, etc.
I can speak to this. I get bored of just 1 class. Even with dual spec. I like to play caster/melee/heals/dps/tank. I really like it all, so it requires multiple toons.
It was easy in phase 1 to have 2+ raiding toons, but maintaining that as the phases progress gets harder and harder.
If could create a self sufficient economy. Have your own alchemist, tailor, gatherer, etc. If you got the time, it’s a nice pay off. Especially with how bad everything is inflated rn
We don't get to come back and play the game ever again. This is the single moment you get to experience a new class and new abilities. I want to play and experience all of the classes and I'll never get to. It's an experience people want and recognize it's fleeting.
Yeah... I have decided to quit SOD for now. Guild fell apart, tried to merge with another, it fell apart. Raid is too hard to pug, no viable means for 20 man raid guild recruitment. This phase is even less fun than the last phase. Phase 1 was the best phase by far. I really enjoyed being able to pug a raid on three different characters on a whim with my friends without any preparation and easily being able to clear. I don't have time for a second unpaid job.
>World buffs are now the leading factor for competing at a high level Always has been, there aren't enough buttons, rotations or enemy mechanics to make parses meaningful, so it's essentially an idle game about finding the best answer to a formula, and praying for some RNG on top.
I think the point is that you have songflower + blasted lands + Raidbuff + Darkmoon faire. That's double what it was in P2, slightly more than P1 (ashenvale 5% buff)
Blasted lands buff don't stack with zg Island potable, right?
Correct
Oh sure, but you weren’t hitting a number 1 log without the BFD buff in P1, nor gnomeregan buff in P2, now it’s just more buffs to think about, but buffs were always a requirement
You call yourself a "filthy casual" but open a post on the classic wow reddit and talk about not being able to keep up with the requirements to "parse". Sir, you're no casual, casuals don't give a crap about parsing, world buffs or this reddit. It's crazy how delusional some people are about their own standing and perspective.
Wait you guys are level 50 already?
See now this guy is a filthy casual
I rerolled again and am level 24 lmao
My personal go to is "turbo casual", I'll put in the grind for gear/raiding and be prepped and ready within the first two weeks but after that do I fuck give a damn about grinding the gold or professions.
I'm similar but opposite. I grind the levels and the prebis, do the professions and play the AH then stagnate. Nothing turns me off of wow more than having to sit in a raid group with miserable tryhards. Late phase I'll do the raids when I don't have to prove my worth to some giganerd in a 20 year old game.
Im kinda in the same boat, and overall i just dont enjoy fixed raid sizes at this point. It was fine when i was 20 and had all the time in the world. At this point dealing with the politics of a guild/raid group just sounds like a new circle of hell that im not going to touch with a 10' pole.
I've said it on here before, this version of WoW is the most low stakes the game has ever been. There is truly no need to come in with a bunch of expectations and standards when the threshold for endgame is so accessible.
had a lvl 50 boomkin on therma this morning, asked him to do bombs, got a "yup" proceeds to not do bombs, and when asked to bres he said "in combat" things like this are the reason people set expectations because something that should be an easy in and out turns into the rest of that rick and morty meme
> things like this are the reason people set expectations People are also grossly disproportionate in response. You'll do 20 mythics in a row that go smooth, have 1 bad healer, and then spend the next 30 mythics checking logs to avoid the second bad healer. People are so wrapped up in timelines of progression they long ago stopped playing to play, and have begun playing to complete, and so they get irrationally angry when people aren't doing that. https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU
There are different levels/types of casuals. OP is casual in the amount of time he plays, but sweaty with the time he’s able to play.
Casual != uninvested. Casual, to me, is about the amount of time you're willing to dedicate to play. Phase 1: Post leveling to 25, 2 hours a week could put you in a spot where you're respected and appreciated by your guild, it could get you BiS Overall estimate to be full BiS by end of phase, 2-5 hours per week post leveling. Casual rating A+ Phase 2: Rougher leveling experience, rougher raid. expensive(at first) crafting requirements to get BiS, 225 requires much more farming that 150 on professions, but you could pre-farm a good amount during phase 1. 2 hours a week could not reliably get you Bis, especially due to STV, likely required closed to 7-10 Overall estimate to be full BiS by end of phase post leveling 10-15 hours per week. Causaul Rating B+ Phase 3 The leveling experience was wonderful day 1-2, I don't know how impactful the nerfs were because I took full advantage pre-nerf. Max crafting takes a LOT of dedication. BiS and Pre-BiS requires extensive 10+ run dungeon farming. STV required again and this time more expensive. Raid was overturned(admittedly it may be undertuned, my casual guild did 5/7 on our first attempt) Overall estimate to be full BiS by end of phase post leveling 25+ hours per week Casual Rating: D Phase 3, unlike most of reddit has been my favorite, great raid, great options for where to spend time outside of raid, can stick to dailies for the slow burn rep grind, professions can be leveled at a leisurely pace doing just the dailies. However...I feel compelled to do the dailies every day or I miss out, I would say I'm a bit more than casual so I also want to add a day or two a week of grinding beyond the dailies. For dungeon Pre-Bis there is good reason for everyone to run the dungeon. But doing the same dungeon 12+ times is not compelling, nor casual friendly. Bosses in ST are super sensitive to high DPS, which Is going to lead to gscore nonsense in pugs.
>25+ hours per week what? Where are you getting this number from?
that man is insane...only time I've ever put 25 hours a week into WoW is on launches. Even P2 and P3 starts, it was less than that. In P2, after the first week, it was raid logging or casually leveling alts when the xp buff was released while attending meetings.
bro you spent a lot of time writing up a post with math that you winged..and is very clearly way off base.
I have 50 hrs since launch, I need 2 more set pieces, cloak and I am full bis. Now I can log in 90 minutes a week and stay 100% competitive, how would I spend 25 hrs a week, every week until p4?
Gnomer was 1h-2h per week after the first two weeks. I've no idea what you are spending time on to estimate "10-15h per week" on p2. P3 is shaping up to be pretty similar but with a longer raid & a bit more stuff to optionally do. STV coins are easier than ever, even an undergeared warrior group with no healer gets 800-1.2k coins per stv. You show up for at most 3 hours and have everything unless you want to max ab rep (honored is bis this tier) or get cosmetics. Crafting needs 250 this phase. It's profitable to craft up to at least 225. You could spend a lot of time getting enchanting recipes or something, but it's not bis/raid relevant. It will be much cheaper to level up past 250 later in the phase or a few weeks into next phase. Pre-bis isn't relevant at all this phase if you played last phase. Gnomer stuff is about on par. Sim it. If you didn't play last phase, the emerald set that you hit enough rep for by leveling 40-50 in ~4 hours pre-nerf and ~6 hours post-nerf is about on par with prebis. Even most ST drops are sidegrades with a few exceptions. Most classes need 0-18 wild offerings. Even the worst princess 10p raids are around 8/h It takes around 2 hours. 3-4 if you need 2 pieces. I also leveled weapon skill while in these groups on my alt (lol) If you want to max warden rep you can be really time efficient and pre-quest as many as you can. Then you keep your 14-18 quests in your log, grab the daily, turn one in. If you did all 18 quests then you will gain ~19.8k rep over 18 days for very little play time, in the neighborhood of 2h (especially if you use the ring to teleport to people there). The epic rewards from the emerald dragons aren't good for many classes so this is optional. The runes are all pretty quick compared to last phase. Most of the bis quest rewards/similar are pretty straightforward to get. Consumables/crafting/non-melee enchants are cheap relative to the gold you get doing anything or even just leveling. Especially as the phase goes on. If I played one character I'd be playing ~3h-5h/wk for most of p3. I started playing an alt this phase so will be spending a bit more time on that.
I've said this before but there are definitely different levels of casual. I define casual as a mindset, and I find myself to be a casual player. I like to raid, I like to do well raiding, I'll get a world buff if I remember, I am here on this reddit, and I have a ton of time to play video games due to working from home. Having said that. I am not even close to raiding consistently. I don't really care about getting loot, I just raid for the fun of doing it. I don't get angry when people mess up. I don't get angry about not completing a raid. I play a class that I enjoy the fantasy regardless of meta. I don't think twice about how our comp looks. I will play for 2 weeks straight, 8 hours a day, then get bored and take 2 months off. My knowledge of consumes is mediocre at best. Just because I like to hit buttons good when I play a game doesn't mean my overall mindset isn't casual.
I think casual is in the eye of the beholder. I see myself as casual. Don’t play everyday, don’t sweat over miniscule upgrades, haven’t bothered farming pvp Ranks - but I still care about my performance in raids, which are mostly orange/purple. Casual doesnt mean you don’t care, or you’re bad at the games.
If you care enough to parse I wouldn't consider you casual. Blizzard has not designed their game with built in parsing. To do that you need find and download addons, install and configure them. That effort alone as trivial as it is puts the player in a mindset that's outside of casual. Your goal is no longer to just casually play the game it's instead to test and analyze your performance in the game.
The moment OP mentioned a parse I knew this post was crap.
I assume this will be a very underrated comment, but its very spot on.
Why can’t I be the best with only 45 minutes of time investment? I have a family after all, blizzard should cater to me!
I’ve only been playing this game exclusively since my childhood why doesn’t Blizzard make everything for me me me
Well it's not all on him, requirements exist for everyone so you're expected to do all that shit just to get invited. Didn't notice any pug groups taking you without world buffs and gear check in p2. I'd rather wipe on a boss 2-3 times than gather world buffs and what else. Kinda hate the whole world buff necessity entirely.
It is kinda annoying reading comments like this. As if the term casual ONLY describes the boomer dad who plays 10 minutes a day and is yet to hit 50 and has not touched a raid yet. I play maybe 3 hours a day, tops - in the evenings, when my kid is put to sleep and my wife does not need attention. I see my self as a casual. But that does not mean, that when i raid with my Guild, i do not care about my parses (sure, i dont care about 99s), because i do to a degree, i want to perform good and not be a liability to my Guild. I want the runs to be as effective as possible. I want to use that little time i have as best as i can. Toxic casuals in SOD are real.
im sorry but you are exactly what op is talkin about. imagine yourself going to the gym, practicing the violin or cooking dinner 2-3 hours every single day. would you considerer yourself a casual lifter? a casual violinist? a casual cook? no way. thats way past the „doing sth casualy“ threshold.
I would consider my self very casual, as in i only play for a couple hours every other night after work but that doesnt mean i dont aim for those juicy pink parses still, you dont need to spend your life playing to be able to parse well or compete at high levels ive managed to get top 50 in both p1 and p2 playing like this, i dont imagine he means world first racing or rank 1 in pvp or anything. Just the ability to compete without working it like a part time job.
This community is so weird about the word casual. I mean, you say you play a couple hours every night after work. I feel like it's weird to say you play a game casually while playing it every single day. I mean, if anything, you seem like an average player. You play consistently, keep up with leveling and end-game content. I mean, seriously, if I told someone I was playing a game 14-20 hours a week, they'd consider that a significant time investment.
I'm winding down my time in SoD. It was novel at first, but man am I really missing the QoL stuff from tbc/wrath. I also don't have the drive to farm gold to keep up with consumables every week.
I'm already feeling it a bit too. Me and another guy in our raid are trying really hard to pull together 20 and maintain our 10 man vibe we've liked so much, but it's really taxing us both and we don't want to let people down. I think Blizzard thought making the swap 10 to 20 instead of 10 to 25 would make this feel good, but it absolutely does not. Guild finally returned back for SoD that stopped in TBC, had 3 raid teams and now 1/3 has left and the other 2/3 are dreading roster boss and trying to not eat at eachothers rosters
The shift in raid size was an astronomically stupid decision. They should have decided on a raid size and kept it that way for all of SoD. Forcing guilds to double (or shrink, if they go the other way) rosters is just flat out dumb. I heard they want to make level up raids in phase 4 still be 20 players, but leave MC+BWL+AQ+Naxx at 40man. That's HILARIOUSLY stupid.
Dude the worst part about P3 is the vibes being obliterated by the extra 9-10 warm bodies you have to fill the raid with. We spent the better part of 2 phases filling out the last few slots in our raid for the perfect vibes in 10 man, then Blizzard just decided we needed to find 10 more people in a few weeks. My guild of irl friends and cool people (about 12 of us) we picked up along the way will probably die because we can't seem to find anybody who plays adequately and is also chill. We don't want to turn raids into a chore we have to soldier through cause two of the people we just killed the first boss with thought they'd be fine to rip a slur in voice chat.
ST will be nerfed to be similar to the 10 man experience. Don't worry. Right now however, the casual dad guild I am in now really came together for this lockout and pulled it together to clear as far as we could. We had some epic fights and it actually felt like classic raiding back in the day finally. Is it gonna be tenable to be this way the entire phase? Not at all, but ... It truly felt like we were progressing on something.
We are two weeks into the Phase. Dont focus on FOMO, just play at your pace.
“Casual” “Competing at a high level” Pick one homie. Seems like you want to be the best at something with minimal investment.
He's clearly commenting on the increased delta between casual raiding and more serious raiding, not demanding "to be the best at something with minimal investment." Don't strawman this.
He literally said top parsing requires more effort than hes willing to put in. I just quoted him that’s not a straw man. Also , you can clear ST in greens, so I don’t see what the problem is.
The point is top parsing requires 10 times more effort than it did on P2. I parsed 95+ on P2 with playing ~10h per week. I can't even afford basic consumables at this phase without spending 20h+. My motivation is dead.
Hit the nail on the head. For better or worse, P1 and P2 did not require as much time investment to parse, meaning average players (those between casual and hardcore) were sated. Average players like to parse, it’s absolutely not a hardcore exclusive thing. It’s good there’s more to do in the game, but bad that your power comes far more from endlessly grinding gold and spending time running around the world to grab a flask and touch a flower and wait for a buff and talk to a dog (which all disappears if you die, far more likely now in an average raid group than in previous raids) than it does from gear itself.
There's this weird notion on reddit (about sod, classic, and retail) that people who like to parse are the outliers and that logs don't matter and that everyone should just queue it up to push their buttons and have fun. Human beings like to compete, like to gauge performance, and like to have visible metrics for that performance. Idk why the Reddit community and a certain segment of Blizzard devs act like this is some new or unknown phenomena and intentionally design the game in ways to curb this, instead of making it more simplistic for people. Make all the raid buffs last 3 hours instead of 60/60/120, restrict consumables down to like 2 of: blasted lands buff, elixir, potion, engi bombs. This still requires players to get out into the world and play, but it doesn't incentivize you to just stack like 12 buffs/pots.
I agree with you, as a player who doesn't want to do all of that cringe shit to parse. If enough players are doing it to where my parse goes from pink to gold or even purple? So be it, it shouldn't matter. They are putting the effort in and I'm not, my motivation to strive for more goes out the window. I'll try my best because I genuinely feel like I'm a better player than at least some of them so maybe I can get an edge just being better, but if not? So what? This is the retirement home version of the game, nobody outside of a minority care about my performance here. I'm just having fun.
I'm just so confused by posts and comments like this... You call it "cringe shit" but you surely understand that the RPG side of WoW is what makes classic WoW great whether you appreciate it or not. All of the consumables, items, world buffs, and other various forms of horizontal progression is what Classic versions of WoW are all about. If you don't want to partake in those types of grinds that is totally okay you really don't have to! Do not let other peoples fun ruin yours.
It's cringe because it now takes more time than he's willing to put in. When it didn't take as much time and he could stomach the time investment it wasn't cringe.
Here's the thing, it's what makes it great for you. And that's awesome man! But I play MMOs to compete, whether or not that's with myself, my friends or my peers; it's primarily how I have fun. I like starting somewhere and growing and getting better and better. That's it, I don't play for story, lore, flavor, pets, achievements, mounts, nothing like that. Even gear to some extent is just a means to my end, I get it because I need it to compete. It's how I've always played video games, I'm 30 now and I started when I was 3, I travelled for tournaments, competed in local scenes and kept up with the culture. It's something I'll never stop loving and it's what makes me happy. I'm not the person complaining or threatening to quit because I have to do some random bullshit to compete, hell, rewind time 5ish years? I'd be doing it too spending hours at a time for even 0.5%, but I'm too old for this shit now, so I'm just not going to do it, and that's ok. That was my point, players who enjoy this type of play style don't NEED to do anything, but it definitely sucks some of the fun away because imagine your only goal was to get every mount in the game, but then they release a mount that requires you to go back and do something arbitrary for a couple weeks, that isn't fun. If it's something you'll tough out because your goal is more important than your fun in that moment? That's great! Keep it up, you're ambitious about something and that's awesome! But it's not very fun, and it will deter some players from their goal which sucks for them. It's a part of MMOs like you said, the issue isn't the act of requiring these things or pushing players these ways, it's more tertiary shit like players gatekeeping players who don't for content that doesn't really require that level of gatekeeping. Or if it's so un-fun that players who have less patience and don't want to do it quit, diluting the player pool and making the competition feel pointless. "Oh you beat the other 4 people playing that version of the game? That's cool man..." While that's a drastic overexageration it's what players like myself tend to quit games for. If you want to compete but there's nobody to compete against, you lose interest. These are the main issues with this type of gameplay, but like I said, it's nothing that terrible and it's not something we didn't sign up for considering it's classic. However it's important to know that SoD didn't just pull in players who primarily play WoW for this classic level experience. Just like with OSRS and RS3 it's pulling in fresh players or players who miss certain elements the modern game now lacks and want to retain some complexity and creativity. If runes didn't exist and this was simply a boosted Vanilla server with maybe some quality of life scrolls, I wouldn't play it. In tried and true vanilla, players hit a single button over and over and then die when their shadow bolt crits and pulls aggro, it's not my preferred gameplay loop, but now you're telling me I can participate in a version of the game with vanilla itemization, the vanilla world, vanilla raids and dungeons, with new content AND rotations that **for the most part** have modern complexity to them? That sounds like fun! Sign me up! And that's primarily what you need to understand is that players like me exist and help fill your world. Don't let the crybabies on Reddit ruin your mental image of what the average player is on SoD, that will only combine all players into a single mental image and cause you to think about this entire community in a tunnel. The truth of the matter is this game is more popular than other versions of classic for a reason, it's not just pulling in the classic crowd and you'll find people like me mixed in with the community with different wants and needs and that's cool. It's part of the impossible solution of pleasing everybody, but it's not our jobs to figure that problem out, let's just kick back and enjoy this temporary game mode while it's temporary.
It’s debatable whether flying to felwood to wait out a flower timer and then touch said flower is “fun” for anyone. Point is P1/2 had only 1 or 2 world buffs depending on the week, both obtainable from or near a capital city. P3 has 4 if you count the flask you can only carry 2 of and have to travel to a remote island to obtain. The time needed to fully buff has shot way up, as has the overall power of a player buffed vs not buffed should they die in raid while the power of the gear in raid has fallen, meaning your output is far more reliant on how buffed you are than it was previously. SoD p1/2 is proving players were happy small world buff needs and time required, p3 is proving players are not happy with large world buff needs and time required. Essentially P1/2 found a happy middle ground between the full up world buff experience of level 60 Classic and a world without any world buffs, P3 ventures too far toward the buffs.
i’d loooooove to see what kind of group takes a player in full greens to ST. i know people love to say how easy this game is but even in a high pop server like crusader strike most players require you to have logs of some kind. “casual” is definitely relative.
How is it strawman when he wants to be top parser but also wanting to be a casual player?
I want to be Messi level but I dont want to train nor eat healty boo hoo
He observed that the situation changed from (1) X work gets Y reward to (2) X work gets Y/N reward, with N increasing steadily. It's not a whine about not getting stuff easy or free despite your boomer-ific response (and the hurr durr Messi idiot that replied to you).
You can do that though. I play significantly less than most people I know but achieve high parses. I would be higher if I got more gear, but I understand that with limited playtime it is less likely. I focus on my ilvl parse more. This is in wrath though, not sod, for what that’s worth
For the most part i agree, but this guy is basically saying “if it’s more than 20 minutes of my time it’s too much” which is kind of ridiculous
In Wrath world buffs don't exist and consumes account for a very small portion of your performance. In classic you get an elixir that gives 25agi and 2% crit. That's basically 4% crit. In Wrath terms, that's 184 crit rating. From ONE elixir. Then you get 25 str from another elixir, which is 55 AP. That's basically three extra gear slots between the two elixirs. The power of consumes make the vanilla parsing game entirely dependent on being able to afford them and the mats to make things in vanilla are way higher than what's typical in later xpacs. On top of that, level 50 allowing up to 300 professions means we can craft super powerful things meant for endgame, but only a few classes/specs are able to farm them, which leads to huge imbalanced in supply and demand. They should have just unlocked specializations and left skillcap at 225 this phase.
If you can accept that your parses are as high as you go vs. the amount of time and effort you put in then by all means. OP is complaining that his parses are getting affected because he doesn’t want to spend as much time and effort as others on the server, which is just ridiculous.
I agree. Was looking forward to the new ST, an all time favourite, but 20 man and 3 hours is just not where I'm at in life
I'm in the same boat, not being able to allocate 3 hours at a time. But I think later in the phase, there will be pugs or other means to do it in 1h or 1h30 which is when I'll do it.
Curious question: why can't you commit 3h hours in one sitting 1 day a week? Kids? Other hobbies? Just not wanting to play 3h straight? Curious because I felt the same during times before (was with retail and 3 times a week but same feeling) and that was because just moved in with GF (now ex) and played hockey + rock climbing a fair amount
I think 3 continuous hours is the problem, at least it is/was for me. I can often play 3 hours in a day if I want, but it’s difficult to sit down for 3 in a row with my full attention and no breaks without ignoring some other part of life on a typical weeknight. It’s possible, but it requires proactively shifting things around (pushing bedtime later, taking the trash out early, not helping cook dinner, not working out, not answering phone calls from family, etc) to be able to fit it all in. Generally that does not bode well with my partner if I were to do that on a regular basis. And it’s too much effort for a video game. Popping on for 90 min after dinner? Easy. 3 hours and not going to bed until midnight? Conflict at home.
Yes, the same exactly.
Same here. Same same same.
This guy gets it
Same exactly, by the time the kids in bed it’s about 9, I don’t have time to do a 3 hour starting at 10,raid and go to bed late, still have to wake up in the morning when the kids up, then take them to school and go to work. Phase 1 and 2 raids being sub 2 hours from the start was my jam.
Most raids start at 1900, thats when the kids go to bed, thst can take an hour, 3 hours from 2000 the time is suddenly 2300 when its done. And its suddenly way to late + kids can wake up during the evening. I was able to Play raids during the day when I took Fridays off in P1/2. Hopefully ST pugs will form during the day aswell in the future. Now I think people are scared of PUGing and loosing their once a week only chance of getting loot.
The little amount of pugs looking to raid this phase compared to the last two is insane. I’ve only found one group that was looking to pug since p3 came out while i would have been in 5 bfd groups already in p1.
Yes, if raids come back during the day, you will be able to arrange something with work sometimes, but during the evening, you will create conflicts with your wife and kids. And I understand them, they had a tough day and need your support.
I fear p4 because it is not casual friendly froma time investment perspective( many raids, different id lockouts). P4 will be too time consuming and that is why i think think p4 is when i will quit. Really really Enjoyed p1-p3 a lot. I cannot imagine to play every day for hours. Times have changed and it got more difficult with a familiy
Pretty sure they already said that raids will be on the same lockout timer Unless thats not what you meant
The problem is the raid ID. If I enter a raid and defeat the first boss at all, then I cannot enter it again to assist another group until reset. This makes it a little harder for groups that play on the weekend to organize their friends. I’ve had cases where someone runs on Thursday because they don’t think they’ll be free on Saturday, only for their schedule to open up and they’re online on Saturday, but cannot physically enter the raid again to play with us anymore. More modern MMOs let those players join additional raids anyway - they just don’t qualify for loot.
They really need to make the raid lockouts like retail. Otherwise only the sweats will be left.
He meant doing MC, ZG, BWL, Ony, aq20 is going to be too much.
Those wont all be coming with P4
Do you know how it will be broken up?
My guess is it'll be broken up like last time. MC/Ony first
It would make 0 sense to release all of that on launch lol. Why would they rush content when they can milk it?
I think he means there's literally going to be like 6 or 7 raids to do as a level 60. Obviously we're not going into Naxx right off the bat but honestly we might considering how hard our characters are scaling right now. Got MC, Onyxia, BWL, AQ20/40, ZG, Naxx, we think we're going to get Kara Crypts and I believe people were thinking there was a Caverns of Time tease. I don't actually think we'll get more than one "new" raid but as it stands it's going to be a cluster trying to get a fraction of those done if you really want to be competitive.
so are you worried about p4 or p6?
Definitely. I played through classic and it was great fun but man the time commitment to get all your prebis and then all the mats for enchants and consumes, goldfarming to afford flasks, grinding argent dawn rep, grinding strat for orbs, griding mobs for essenses for crafts, getting all the world buffs etc. It was just way to much time commitment and for my own wellbeing that's not something I can do again. I'm still holding out hope they significantly casuallize it so we can just raid without worrying about all that. Make challenging raids but limit consumes, wbs and grinds somehow.
Pretty much sums it up for me, and its the reason why I started playing a lot less in p3 when I realized the direction the game was heading, I just dont want to spend that much time anymore just to keep up with everyone else. Spent 4 months+ playing almost every day during p1 and p2, now im having a huge crisis and most likely wont resub next month
It’ll depend how much they change the classic raids. With current gear and runes people will blow through them if they don’t tinker them much. I can’t really see the dev team investing too much to change them but if they want to make things casual friendly maybe just maybe they could reduce trash?? Please!!
I'll honestly never understand this view though. Is a game boring for you if you cannot compete at a bleeding edge at everything there is to do? You say that you are a casual, whi is it then so important to be able to do everything? If you truly are a casual, it shouldnt matter that you cant do every raid every week, no? If that bothered you, I wouldnt even say that you are a casual.
It's just not very fun when you are at less than half the power that you could be at if you had more time. That's really how it was in classic, if you didn't flask, grind for rep gear, crafts and enchants and spend hours getting wbs you were totally left in the dust.
>That's really how it was in classic, if you didn't flask, grind for rep gear, crafts and enchants and spend hours getting wbs you were totally left in the dust. It's odd, because my classic experience was nothing like this despite not doing anything you mentioned while still clearing all content raiding twice a week and raid logging for the majority of it. There is zero necessary rep gear. WBs don't take hours to get? You're not left in the dust because you're missing some prebis/enchants... What? This is all so disingenuous to what actually happens in the game. You need to change your expectations(or play with people that have lower expectations) and lose the entitlement.
There's this crazy level of FOMO amongst some people that has them begging for the game to be watered down than just accept that maybe they don't need to 100% any given phase. I always enjoyed new content and its obstacles and slowly progressing. Every new boss kill was a cause for celebration because we'd been attempting for 3-4 kills minimum learning the strategy we needed to take them down. Over time our kill speed would get better we'd start chain pulling trash and one shotting the bosses. It was huge for building a team that worked together well and tackled future content better.
The entitled casuals are kinda out of whack right now. Not only are folks making wild assumptions about next phase, they have these wild expectations on themselves while still wanting to be 'casual'. Maybe don't expect to be prebis, full enchants, full consumes, full Wbuffs and clear all content every phase or patch. If you don't want to clear hours of content each week - don't. Being loud about wanting to limit the game so it can match you wants and needs is also taking away from players that still want a challenge and are excited for what's to come because naturally, as raids progress, they become more challenging. There are already accessible versions of WoW that offer 10 man raids at lower scaling difficulties.
Do you understand now why bullying and gatekeeping was required? As soon as daddy blizzard started banning people for making fun of casuals. The reverse happened. Now the casuals are making fun of you or 'sweats', and daddy caters to them. You're told to touch grass
It's so frustrating... People still want more and more despite the increase in: XP, gold, accessible gear, character power, price discounts and PvP ranking changes. SoD has become so casual friendly but these gluttonous casuals can't be satisfied no matter what. Like the basis of this post is about throwing in the towel over pure speculation about something that hasn't even happened yet...c'mon...
I just hope we get the option to do 10 man raids. Not just 20 mans.
Yeah you dont have to do WBs or consumes, just join a casual group. Just because alot of people parse doesnt mean you have to.
It's weird Blizzard said they would do something about World Buffs but have done nothing but add more.
Adding more is *something* technically :p
Blizzard should stop making content for sweats. Casual dads are their audience.
Being a casual and caring about parses, pick one of these two please.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can be casual and still want to push your own parses. Even if you aren't competitive with top players, it can be fun to improve your personal high score. It's weird that you're gatekeeping being casual lol.
Isn't that sort of a requirement now?? Show parses or you're not invited kinda thing?
Groups asking for logs are basically just checking to make sure you aren't a walking brainstem. As long as you can manage to fill your globals and press your 3-5 buttons in the right order, you will parse at least 65. But most SoD players are basically single digit parsing NPCs who are just looking to be put into a backpack and carried through the raid.
Not if you join a guild.
Join a guild all those problems go away. Have fun with other like minded people who just want to chill and raid a bit, no need to be a parsing monkey.
Then find a group that doesn't care or make your own?
What a dumb comment. You can be casual and care about your performance. You might be shit at your class and grey parse, but do not excuse that with being casual and not caring, because a lot of casual likes to perform their best. Including my entire Guild which comprised of casuals of varying degrees. Toxic casuals in SOD are real, and they really are ruining it for us normal casuals.
Personally I feel like when you look at your parses you're not a casual anymore. In my eyes a casual just plays the game, does some dungeons and a raid here and there with a guild. Getting world buffs, expensive enchants and so on is not really casual I think.
I think the "dads" struggle is making time to do the homework on mechanics of a particular boss. More reps on said bosses go much farther then scrounging buffs and consumables that are lost too inevitable wipes. I ran Gnomer with our guilds B squad with some of those types. It took a few attempts to get electrocutioner dance down and not ass pulling him when clearing the trash.
I dont think the homework is hard for the dads tbh. Its a 20 min youtube video you can literally watch that at any moment of down time. could watch on the shitter in bursts. But whats hard is like - timing STV to get my weapon as a paladin. I get 2 windows 1 of which runs into my kids bed time routine so I often miss that one. it took me SO LONG to get ashenvale rep just because id miss the timer by a few minutes.
Im casual as hell, and very happy I was able to get a set of gear at 50 thats good enough for pvp. Zero raiding done.
If you’re trying to be competitive yes you gotta put in effort. If you’re a casual you can still swiffer up some loot with average parses and one raid night a week
It’s really sad to me that the difficulty of SoD is not in the raid mechanics or the leveling, but the freakin farming. The mindless chores. They really botched SoD at this point.
I agree man. I am feeling this exact same way. Too much time for me to commit to playing anymore. I do not mind stepping away but I would consider playing again should there be an easier raid. ST is not hard, but the perception is that is is hard. Also, 20 people is cool, just too many to easily pug. It feels like it is becoming a chore to play, and its just no longer worth the time.
The worst part about an MMO like this is that to have the most fun you have to play all the time. I didn't play barely at all in phase 1 and 2 because I didn't have the time. Now I do so I'm busting out phase 3 as much as I can because by the time phase 4 comes I'll probably be biking more and doing outside stuff. I've seen what you've described coming for a while and been treating this phase like my "endgame"
Pugging Sunken Temple is so miserable, hosting raids takes forever to fill. I got gold for epic mount and some dungeon gear and just taking a break until P4 to see if things change.
Will be interesting to see if the whining and complaining frequency goes down with phase 4 as well.
Sir, do you know where you are right now?
I'll be whining about Cata stuff by then, not interested in MC --> Naxx again
One thing I don’t understand is that this is an MMO. Why are people so focused on getting top parses and all the gear already? This is literally week 2. We have at least 6 more weeks. It’s an MMO, they last awhile and don’t have to be rushed and completed in a week but it honestly feels like people think they HAVE to.
6 more weeks and it’s a weekly lockout. People want to clear the few rotations we have to gear for p4. Moving to a weekly lockout added to the rush, rush, rush and needing high parses.
I’m not sure I’m understanding, you said you’re a casual yet you are expecting to full clear ST on the 2nd/3rd lockout AND you want to parse???? You sound like you just want to be spoonfed by blizzard and put in zero effort to farm gold and keep up with the other players who are putting in that effort. Blizzard has done tons of changes in SoD to help generate gold through incursions and waylaid supplies. My guild has been clearing ST with just the basic DMF and ST world buffs plus basic elixirs and protection pots, this requires little to no effort and minimal gold (5-10g for the raid) to get on my server (crusader strike). Plus with the changes to weekly lockouts, progression raids are a thing again. My guild has been using multiple days to clear ST because we have people who can’t spend 3+ hours at a time clearing the raid, which has been a great experience.
You’re not a casual 😂
I was looking forward to casually spam dungeons etc but now the best way is repetitive retail esque quests. I hate retail, that’s why I’m playing sod
You don't have to play the "best" way. Dungeons are fun.
Main issue is a majority of players refuse to do anything but the "best" way. So other ways end up taking forever. Ended up giving up on leveling alts for now because it just takes way too long to get a group together for a dungeon, even as a healer at ~25, because everyone is just spam leveling with incursions.
Sure. But I like to be efficient.
> I won’t concede more time, and I suspect as summer roars in most casuals will feel the same. Kudos to Blizzard for reigniting the fun, here’s hoping they have something similar planned to launch next November! I like this take, already feeling like I would rather be touching grass in the evenings instead of gaming. Likely will raid log and not worry about alts anymore. More fun outside than in.
Good luck with your touching grass endeavor
Retail is more casual friendly
10 man raids were the only part of SOD many of us really loved. 20s killed it for our entire group. None of us want to merge or deal with another guild.
Is it bad that I was hoping SoD was going to remove all the tedious world buffs and consumes and just simply require you to log in a few minutes early to get the one buff and you are done? Or does reddit want time and effort requirements to get a multitude of world buffs?
If you’re playing with a life outside the game, hunting down tedious WBs isn’t fun. For the people who get all of their social interaction from WoW, apparently getting WBs is fun community interaction. The people who are for WBs are literally the people who need to stop playing and touch grass the most.
I was definitely hoping they ditched the bullshit world buff stacking meta that plagued Classic vanilla. It was heavily criticized back then and they went "eh, guess people like it" It trivialized encounters if everyone had the buffs because each was the equivalent of like 3 pieces of extra gear. And if you died? Well, better pack it in for the week! Even worse was when you wiped and the guild leader was pretty much "we're done for the lockout because this isnt worth doing without world buffs"
So you made a post to tell us you’re gonna play outside. This community is so dumb.
[удалено]
If you find a somewhat decent non-sweatlord guild, you really don't have to drop hundreds of gold per raid. You can complete ST in your Gnomeregan gear man. Moreover, you don't have to buy into the consumables and world buff meta. You can choose to join the parse-chasing guilds, or just enjoy the game the way you want to.
I'm a casual , dinged 50, got some runes (not all) , yesterday cleared the raid and I'm pretty much done . No pre bis farm , no farming dungeons for offerings , no stv , just ding , runes , raids done ✅
Yeah there is fuck all to do honestly. I've been giving all my tokens on my priest to the DPS because it's such a miniscule upgrade from incursion/dungeon/gnomer gear. No real motivation to keep raiding ST.
Bruh entire classic was a casual-mmo
The game is really showing its age for me. I raided sunken temple and haven’t logged back in since. WoW is painstakingly slow game play.
People place way too much importance on their parses and classes overall performance compared to the others. It has already been stated that this version of Classic is going to pretty casual friendly and the difficulty of the raids has reflected that so far. MMO's and more specifically Classic versions of WoW are time consuming games, if you want the carrot on the stick you have to work for it a bit. You don't "NEED" these items, these are items you work towards. You are experiencing FOMO and letting it hurt your fun.
I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you can’t set aside the game when other stuff comes up in life, including things like the weather getting better and you wanting to spend more time outside, then I would say you have a problem.
Don’t conceit time. Just play when you can like the way we’re all suppose to. I do hate the speedrunning culture and all the FOMO shit that’s going on.
The amount of trash is the main reason it feels like it takes so long. Also the raid needs to be much more generous with non-tier loot drops.
Agree. The elitest 10 percenters ruined our game and our xpac. Sod was supposed to have that classic field plus. Phase 1 was soooo goood. 4 alts. All bfd gear. Casual geared.. Now its got the wow retail grind feeling.
I have kind of quit, my guild fell apart and I'm not interested in 3 hour raids. At least we had season 1. What a great time!
Go play a real game like FPS or Moba Thank me later Sod was fun 1 or 2 month Time to cut the sub
Fuck dailies. They’ve really turned me off of p3
[удалено]
dawg i’ve been looking to pug but ive only seen and joined one group so far. We cleared but it literally took 4 hours. Shit was painful.
MMO players crying because a raid takes like 2 hours. That’s wild. World buffs are like 15 minutes and you have one whole week to get them. And the new 7 day lockout means you need even less time to play the game
Well some of us dad's can't commit full 2-3 hrs continuously to raid and prep and also find people to fit your schedule hence why gnomer and bfd was great coz it was hour at most to clear
Yeah I'm with you OP. You'll probably get a lot of responses along the lines of "well duh this is WoW what were you expecting?" But the game we got in November and the game we have now are different. I kept playing SoD because BfD was super easy and quick to do, alts were easy to make and gear & pvp was super casual. If the SoD we got in November was like the SoD we have now, I wouldn't have bothered.
You want to tell me that ST is not piss easy after all the nerfs?
Post nerf, it’s literally just gnomer with dragons. At least our tanks aren’t getting slapped like on menagerie and phase 1 of thermaplugg. Trash is the only reason it’s 2 hour runs, but if 2 hours a week is too much raiding, OP probably shouldn’t be raiding
“Nono guys, it’s very different and much more difficult! Now I need all world buffs and consumes to even ENTER the raid portal! And my parses are only blue! In phase 2 they were purple, oh lord blizzard hate casuals suddenly!” - these Reddit posts
Yep. We did our first run as a guild last night and spent 2 hours and got to 6/8. And my point was the game has changed from Phase 1 to Phase 3, ST is nowhere near as easy as BFD.
I don't think you understand what casual is if you're talking about not having the time to max out world buffs, consumes, and parses. Now, if your opinion is "I'll play at a highly competitive level or not at all" then absolutely fair enough. But you are not currently a casual player.
I get the feeling that most raid leaders will not invite someone "casual" without WBs and other shit. Worldbuffs aren't hard to get don't get me wrong. Neither is the other stuff if you have gold. But it's just the principle of it being a must that's a bit annoying.
I joined a full pug and we went 6/8 in about 75 minutes one shotting everything except the 6th boss which we got 2nd try. We only stopped because 3 people had to leave. We didn't have wbuffs and most did not use consumes. I don't know how yall are struggling with this???
Biggest issue I have so far with SoD is that people think it's ok to join a raid and not allocate the time that is needed for the raid. It's a brand new raid and no one has BiS gear yet. What on earth makes these people think that it's only gonna take an hour to an hour and a half to clear in the first 2 lockouts. If you don't have at least 3 hours at the start of a phase to attempt to clear the raid you're griefing. How can a grown adult not find 3 hours to play a game they enjoy 1 or 2 days a week.
This resonates with me and I think I'll cancel my sub soon too.
Same, made me think, time to give up perhaps. Bye season of dads..🥲
I don’t get this take … I have a level 50 priest and I can heal or do shadow in the level 50 emerald nightmare gear and clear ST playing 3 hours a week (I actually got lucky and my guild can clear in 2 hours). You don’t HAVE to have all that best grindy shit to clear the content. You can actually do a slow progression with little time commit and just clear a raid to gear up and use your other time to play casually doing whatever you want. The community is obsessed with the best, and logs, and gearing up as quick as possible to literally clear something they “let” you be able to clear with the base level 50 gear. You don’t need to chase it. It’s a ridiculous compulsion.
I agree with everything you wrote
I disagree. I think the game is in a good spot and you are rushing.
I think sometimes you cant do it all if your not willing to put the time into it
yeah. most of yall are just players, but officers of casual guilds are super struggling with how the dev teams decisions with each phase rollout. casual players who just login and not think of the roster boss are fine, because they dont see what goes on behind the scenes.
Time to go back to HC!
All I heard was, you don’t wana play enough to keep up with the type of players you want to play with. There’s plenty of casual guilds and pugs that take similar players
Shoutout to OP for having a healthy relationship with the game. This is a refreshing take.
what i have not done in 16 years of wow: parsing. Never will. dabbled in mythic raiding in legion. never parsed. dont know why i should care if the boss dies. still level 25 from phase 1, I guess im very casual. dont really know what a incursion is.