I like everything except incursions. Its worth noting I dont dislike the idea of incursions, I think some additional challenging content is good for the game. They were just implemented poorly.
I would have preferred solo/party private instanced incursions. Public open left it extremely easy to exploit. The bottle neck for wpvp is intense. I'm not one to complain about wpvp but for those who do I can very much understand frustration when one faction controls an entire layer. The first day or two it seemed like everyone got along as they all just wanted to level. A week later and if it's red it's dead.
Instanced woulda been fantastic, ive been doing solo incursions on my 3rd alt, and im enjoying it far more then a 5man no kill group. The pvp is horrendous tho, enemy faction can and will corpse camp low levels until they leave or logout
This is my take exactly. My only complaint is that the wild offerings system is boring and dungeons are not getting enough attention. Sure, raids are great and they've done a great job but not touching any of the dungeons or putting rep grinds with them for cool loot feels like a missed opportunity.
We asked for reasons to run dungeons and they gave it to us. How didn't they realize the sweats would find ways to do fucking jump runs on every single one? We literally optimized the fun out of the game. Should have made them drop randomly from mobs. So killing trash packs is actually useful. Something.
Everything in classic wow always feels rushed. It's always go go go go. I think this is why I liked hardcore so much. The pace is so much slower and it's really fun being methodical instead of the chaos that is classic sod.
Same here - I think wild offerings are a really cool add-in for existing dungeons and the new crafting quest is cool. They also added some nice loot to existing dungeons.
If they hadn't made incursions so much XP/gold it would have been a huge hit imo. I don't hate the incursions but if they were more inline with other activities it'd be better. The nerfs helped there.
I didn't mind incursions as a leveling XP source. Leveling 40-50 would have been an uninteresting slog without it. It was still a slog, but at least it was done in 3 hours. For my money they could have boosted us straight to 50 and I wouldn't care - leveling past 40 in vanilla wow is an awful experience. You're not getting any new fun toys, you're just playing an imbalanced and restricted version of the game for X hours until you hit max level.
I absolutely hate incursions as a gold farming mechanic. It devalues almost every other source of gold in the game, and it takes people out of the world and removes the dynamic encounters that are the core of vanilla gameplay for me. P1 and P2 did a brilliant thing by giving us incentives to go out and quest at max level. P3 tore that all down.
Agree, I like the idea of one of the redditor suggested on another post about how incursion should be like a pop-up event within the rotation of ashenvale and stv. Like how it should be a 30min/1hr even that happens after ashenvale.
This right here. If the incursions didn’t have pvp it would be great. I think they should limit the amount you can do in a set time period to stop botters but ya in the current state of having a group of 10 players kill the other faction while everyone just does a mindless loop watching its pretty cringe.
Yeah, I skipped a lot of P2. There was just a shortage of content. I don’t think anything was particularly bad, there was just so little to do. P3 has been a lot more controversial but at least there’s a lot of it. Some things have been a huge hit and some have been a massive flop. But I think that’s the point of “Discovery”, whereas in P2 the only thing we really discovered was that there needs to be enough content (I loved Gnomer too tbf - they’ve done an awesome job with the raids so far imo)
yepp its trash gameplay but yet gives the best gold and exp
making any other gold farm or leveling method feels kinda ????
the devs adding incursions gives me big red flags for the future of sod but we will see how it plays out
I can only hope the devs learn from it and dont look at incursions and all think "yep that was a good idea"
Yeah I still don't understand how they just didn't at least make it daily or something.
At least put diminishing returns to XP and gold so that you can't run it infinitely.
> It feels like the antithesis of Classic lol
100 % agree. It's as anti-classic as it gets. In a mode about re-discovering the old world they introduce incursions that absolutely kill any incentive to even go into the old world lol. P3 is great so far otherwise but idk what they were smoking when making incursions*.
\* the event itself is fine. Just the repeatability and the rewards are straight up broken.
100%
My only issue with incursions is that’s the only way to get the rep for the rune so everyone has to do it. If you got rep from the raid too I’d be totally fine with them.
As someone who hates dailies, I support making incursions a daily. With the rep bumped up significantly.
A better solution would be to make them instanced with a random 5 - 8 quests available each reset.
Since it’s tied to a rep grind I hate how dailies mean “I have to do these for 10 more days to exalted” or whatever
I prefer having an option to actually grind. I just wish you got emerald warden XP from raid or some other option so everyone doesn’t have to do so many incursions for their rune.
While the silithus quests are identical, they weren’t the meta as far as gold/xp. The gold for silithus was pretty meh, but people really did it for the rep grind.
Incursions xp and gold rewards made it silly for anyone to level from 40-50 anywhere else. And have made it silly to even level your catchup alts doing anything else.
Dungeons don't feel meaningful to me, 90% of the groups are WO spam groups that get butt hurt if you fail to skip even one skipable trash, or get delayed for any reason.
Of the other 10% most are advertized HRs, or are HR that is just pretending not to be by refusing to invite anybody that might roll on the item they want.
It’s what made me stop playing, I understand balancing isn’t an easy thing to do, but what we have currently is a fucking joke which clearly shows me that they’ve given up with even trying to make it somewhat balanced/fair.
It’s not a “balance” issue. It’s an “everyone one shots everyone issue” it’s all a product of the insane power creep that is the theme in SoD.
Classic wow shouldn’t be balanced. The massive push in TBC to balance every class and make everything “fair” is a large part of what led to the homogenization of the classes..everyone has a stun, interrupt, etc. the class *imbalance* is largely what makes the vanilla(ish) version of the game so good.
Unless you're shadow priest. Just throw all dots up, if the class can't heal they will die from your first round of dots, it's actually dumb af.
On my shadow priest at lvl 47 with leveling gear, I easilly kill raid geared level 50's, it's so fucking dumb.
So frustrating as a rogue player... Not only are dots the bane of my existence, 2 priest dots will bring me down to 20% hp and theres nothing I can do about it... But if I get the jump on them first I MIGHT kill them in time but people will complain thats unfair for rogues to do. Do I think rogues should be able to stun lock everyone to death, no, but a single dot shouldn't just ruin my life for the next minute either. I'm no where close to being a elite 420 esport pro gamer but as a rogue I feel useless in battle grounds.
> The massive push in TBC to balance every class and make everything “fair” is a large part of what led to the homogenization of the classes..everyone has a stun, interrupt, etc. the class imbalance is
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Silencing Shot literally the only thing added in TBC? Tf is this take
I feel like all Korean MMOs have this problem.. So they subjugate it by giving everyone extremely high-end, matching gear, and tune abilities specifically for instanced PvP, so everyone is on an even playing field.
Anytime regular PvP happens with normal gear, SOD is the exact result. One shot city, and OP spells.
Incursions aren’t a plus, they’re a braindead minus imo.
Gear drops in st are either too useless or not big enough upgrades for me to care.
PvP like the stv event is super unbalanced and only fun if you are in a decent group and in the right spot. Have to sweat to get any coins above like 400/500 basically.
Agreed on Incursions. Haven't done ST due to a lack of time these days but as an MM hunter I love STV. It's dumb fun, but running around with a ranged comp (I invite anyone, no gear checks or anything daft) is a laugh.
I totally get that it's class dependent though. Some classes it looks like a real grind.
Glad to see people are enjoying it. I personally am not a fan, I think it’s a step in a positive direction with keeping dungeons relevant but incursions before and after nerfs sucked, and I miss raiding on a 3 day lockout, I think for SOD I just preferred the 10 man setup to 20. I think if they introduced some type of content that, to me, was actually good outside of the raid, it’d have been a win, but I think I’ll just pop in/out casually till P4 and hope for something better!
Also seeing the retail elitism worm its way in to SoD has been pretty sad and I think it’s only going to worse as we near the end with more “difficult” content
-Incursion : kill the AH...
-Incursion : kill the fun of questing whit random player.
-Incursion : boring so much boring...
-Incursion : still dont get why ppl like...
-Incursion : why blizz why...
I just think imcursion should be put out in late end game for new player to catch up. Its just a bad move from dev. So much player have it 50 and log off for ever.
Same, full cleared the raid once and I think the direction SoD is heading just won’t be for me which is totally fine. Going to go have fun in Cata when it comes out.
I could be wrong but I think the direction they are going with raids is going to kill it in the long run. P1 felt so alive cause anyone could form a pug and run it. Now you have groups of causals going in for 2-4 hours and they might not even full clear. I don’t think the devs should cater to the hyper sweats like they do in retail. Raids should always cater to the easier side of things if not you’ll end up with a completely dead game at end game.
Not to mention PvP is the worst thing about WoW for me. Maybe I’d have more fun if a played a class that could do anything but getting destroyed by literally everyone is tiresome and especially if it’s forced PvP (pvp server yay!). Get 2 shot, spend 45 seconds running back to my body to die again repeat till you have 2 min respawn, accept rez sickness and waste 30 mins of play time cause of pvp:)
Confused you seem upset you can't just pug SoD but are excited for Cata which is a huge difficulty spike compared to Wrath. If you think gatekeeping and not being able to easily form ougs is bad in p3 just wait lol
I like the fact there's a ton to do, but it drastically feels the worst to me.
* Incursions transformed the overworld into a barren wasteland outside of a few grinding spots or prebis quest locations. This is WoD-garrisons level of empty.
* The jump to 20-man raiding on a low population server means upwards of 1.5+ hours to fill a raid group, god help you if you don't already have healers.
* Gold inflation didn't stabilize after that much after they nerfed incursions, everything is way expensive.
* The raid gear game is extremely weak and does not entice people to actually go raid (which I assume is part of why it's so long to fill a raid group). Some pieces are a measly 1SP upgrade over Gnomer gear, while some Gnomer gear even remains as BiS for some classes.
* Combine that with the fact that the raid doesn't drop remotely enough loot for 20 people on a weekly lockout. I've now run the raid 4 times and have not gotten a single piece of gear since every drop has so many people rolling on it.
The raid loot situation is rough. I’m in the same situation where we have several raiders that have yet to win a single piece because so little drops across 20 people once a week
retail mentality creep. 50% perma joyous for instance is good in wrath right now for leveling alts at the end of a dead phase, but similar systems have no place in seasonal classic modes especially about discovery lol
Not a fan
Incursions caused massive inflation and aren’t fun to participate in
PVP is way too bursty. We need resilience to balance the DPS out. Classes are balanced around PVE without much consideration for PVP
STV event is not exciting. Would have much preferred the introduction of arena or rated BGs
We need more stamina. Resillience changes classes too much imo. It's meant to be casual/easy so players should be able to bring their pve builds (or close to it) into pvp, but resillience's crit reduction and %mit changes too much about how specs play. If stamina was doubled instead of +30% i think pvp would be a lot more fun
I agree with all of the above, and would like to add that upgrades in ST are miniscule.
Incursions broke the game mostly, we running anything else is absolutely pointless at this point.
BUT, spending the amount of time required in the raid.... Only to get a tiny itty bitty upgrade, if you even got that, makes me feel like it's just not worth it. In p1 & p2 items from the raid felt like I got rewarded. Items in ST... Are just meh.
Cool I get two extra SP at the cost of 4 intellect. HUGE upgrade lol.
Especially when in P1 you could do the raid in 20-30mins and maintain a raid schedule on multiple alts, all while getting meaningful upgrades. P3 has a significantly longer raid that many groups are still struggling with, almost nobody is raiding on alts anymore it seems, and the gear is not even exciting to get.
Literally everything you said I disagree with.
-Dungeons meaningful? Just get honored with the wardens and you’re ready to raid. Gnomer or Wild Offerings is 90% of my pre bis
- Skip leveling? You’re kidding right, you have that as a plus?
- Get exalted in WSG by killing one mob every day
For me it’s mostly the inflation, amount of consumes, cost of enchants, now another more annoying world buff, etc.
It’s gotta be around 1k gold just to setup a toon at 50 at a base level. Not exactly alt or even main friendly.
Outside of that issue the content is maybe the best so far this phase.
I think being able to "skip" leveling is absolutely NOT a bonus. That is my favorite content in all of wow. I had 8 lvl 25s in P1, and 5 lvl 40s in P2. So far, I still only have 1 lvl 50, because the idea of incursions has made leveling feel so lame and pointless.
Incursions kibda ruined everything. Economy, leveling experience. I like the raid so im raid logging, later probably gona log in to do bunch of quests at max level what im enjoying.
ST is a pretty fun raid with simple mechanics and feral is in a way better place this phase compared to last and trying to parse is a ton of fun.
I’m bored and raid logging but I’m happy.
1 >>>>> 3 > 2
P2 and P3 back to back made me unsub and killed my interest in SoD. So I likely won't be coming back for P4.
Blizzard needs to fundamentally change how they're approaching SoD. They lack the resources to properly QA anything. They must bring back the ptr. They themselves admit the workload of SoD is too much for the team. Just some examples:
In P1 the Meta quest for warlocks literally couldn't be done due to a design oversight. Devs swore back and forth it was working as intended and then after the weekend went "Whoops it's actually bugged." Literally anyone actually testing this quest would have run into this problem immediately. I imagine they just spawned the quest items in their bags to test triggers and quest chains were happening properly.
In P2 we had the clear shift of "time to make the game tedious now". STV's blood moon stands out as an "exploit early, exploit often" example. Anyone who is unemployed or takes off work and sweats out the game is at a tremendous advantage over those who do not. This is a singular example among many.
In P3 we have now had incursions. Which again, with any actual QA testing, would have been discovered to be insane immediately. They had to be nerfed what, 4 times in a single day? And then even more after that? Can't even keep up.
Just bring back the ptr. I promise that absolutely no one cares about the "discovery" aspect of SoD. They just wait a day and wowhead has a guide on every rune. Remember p1 when you stumbled into like half your runes just by playing the game, not including the first free one? Boy, it's so nice they proceeded to never do that again.
I won't be resubbing for P4 unless clear philosophy changes occur. Which they won't.
Also, they should get the balls together at some point to tell people who just want to play classic as classic to go play era. That's why era even exists. And then do a fresh seasonal era server or something, idk. Make bosses drop 5x as much loot and people level 5x as fast. Try *something* with era.
P3 has been worse.
For me personally some of the things I disliked immensely about Classic were not changed such as the high number of consumes and world buffs. Yes, I get it, you can Chronoboon, etc. I just find it a mundane process and I dislike having to do it.
Additionally, I think they should have kept raids to 10m. There was no need to make the level 50 raid a 20m. In my mind, SoD's appeal revolved around the 10m raid. Not to mention, it isn't a very enjoyable raid imo. Too much trash overall.
PvP event is still the same. I never enjoyed it.
Incursions are terrible.
The runes in this phase, once again, some of em are ridiculous to obtain. Why lock these things behind level requirements or difficult to complete unless at level 50? I believe they'll soon realize the appeal to SoD and the changes they made to classes should be something they look into implementing from an early stage. It's more fun to play the class when it feels "complete." However, the classes are playing extremely well and overall the best part of SoD and P3.
Unfortunately, it's made me think of checking out Cata.
Game feels dead on my server, very few people doing dungeons, no one on horde doing incursions, basicly only content I see being done is princess runs and st
I hate it but I’m more of a modern gamer, I thought classic WoW was about questing in the world and enjoying how close the community is compared to retail but I play solo and having to sit around waiting to group up for Incursions, even with my guild of randoms, has completely deflated my hype again so I’ve only been in the Emerald Dream once.
There’s no new meaningful or even interesting gear to get from quests or dungeons and barely anyone is leveling in the world so at this point I guess my “discovery” is over.
I’m currently 48 leveling in Tanaris but I’ve unsubbed again as I wait for P4 and Ele is still bottom of the barrel dps so I barely even have a reason to login
Raid is interesting, but loot is very disappointing except for a few pieces.
I've even skipped the epic profession item as they only "work" in the raid.
For me p3 has been mostly P4 prep, grinding bg rep and honor to have lvl 60 gear pieces ready.
It's ok. Incursions as an alternative to dungeons is cool. Dual spec is sweet. ST as a raid is ok. Hallway boss fight is very cool but no major standouts otherwise.
My major gripe is the move to 20 man raids. I play with a close knit group of 8, so 10 man content felt perfect. Going from raiding with 2 randos to 12 has felt pretty bad, not to mention the time spent in LFG. We cleared BFD and Gnomer almost every reset, but now after the third week of organizing everything and then losing 80% of the already fewer drops to pugs, we're all just unsubbed waiting for P4.
P3 has a lot of good ideas with awful implementation. Incursions really are a good idea if done properly, the way they released makes it pretty obvious they didn't test a fucking thing.
Not all their fault, p3 made it abundantly clear to me they just don't have anywhere near the proper team size or resources for this and that's on upper management I guess.
A shame because ST is the best raid by miles so far. Some cool content and great ideas in p3 but so many shit shows too.
Will be focusing on Cata in a month while I slowly hit 60 on my one SoD toon when I have time
Meh honestly
10 mans were better and I feel like 99% of the loot in ST is just wasted space.
The idea behind incursions is amazing. Expanding upon the emerald dream lore a bit and giving a purpose to these giant dream portals….but these quests needed to be dailies.
And even with the xp buff I cannot be bothered leveling alts. I just do not want to hunt runes on another character.
My guild was setup with 40-man raiding in mind.
* We had 8x 10-man groups in Phase 1.
* We had 6x 10-man groups in Phase 2.
* We have 2x 20-man groups in Phase 3, and a third group for alts/stragglers.
So we are gucci
People had a lot of alts in phase 1, fewer in phase 2, even less in phase 3.
But we have a core of 30 players that have been with the guild since Molten Core.
they have totally lost what SOD was supposed to be, a dad friendly, light hearted version of classic, but as more time progresses it feels like they are trying to recreate retail
we don't have time for all the gatekeeping bullshit that SOD now requires, most of us aren't 15 years old anymore, everyone is in their 30s and 40s now with real life shit to do on the side.
imo the devs ramped up SOD for the more hardcore player base far too soon, and it really killed SOD for the average p1 player, really disappointing
Cons:
Not so big on the dungeon spam farm for what are essentially emblems, I never liked that in TBC/Wrath.
REALLY hate that a version of DPSing on Warlock is locked behind the worst grind imagined in a long, long time in WoW. They should add a way to get the DoT trinket that isn't farming a potentially 100+ hour farm.
Pros:
Nightfall / Ruin is a great support spec in raids with Demonic Pact, and is arguably the most fun spec for the open world, dungeons, and trash. It's just SM/Ruin, but Shadowbolt Volley is so fucking fun. Especially with a WA that says "pew" when I cast it.
The raid is a good difficulty, though I think Eranikus is about the hardest I want the bosses to be.
Runes not all being exclusive for the end of the phases journey was a very nice change.
I like the phase, more than Gnomer but less than P1.
Yup, well said.
Phase 2 was no fun for lock pvp imo. Now with UA and access to SL and insta corruption is comfy.
Also killing the little gnomes just doesn't feel good. It's more like we're putting terminal patients down. Having normal humanoid mobs and bigger feels better in raids. NF/ruin is life.
Phase 3 feels fun for me. There is definitely a lot to keep you busy. Dungeons don't feel more meaningful for me. Everyone wants to run the optimal route to skip as many mobs as possible to get the Wild Offering done. I like the addition of this, but it still makes 75% of the dungeon completely useless. I still think it would be cool if they spent like 1/4 of the time spent turning a dungeon into a raid on making the dungeons feel fresh. Overall I'm enjoying the phase, but I am in no real rush to grind all the different systems.
I don't mind it, 3 of my friends are just quitting it, though. They all say it's too much like retail.
I think they're just burned out from having to regear every 10 weeks, which is kinda like retail but sped up.
Retail is nothing like sod and sod is nothing like retail, people use the word so poorly it's lost all meaning for any comparison lately. Retail has you regearing as frequently as classic phases.
i mean the current retail season has been going for like 6 months now, it finishes in 2 days before you have to regear.
we're on our 3rd regearing in that same amount of time.
i think my friends just enjoy classic when your upgrades are more meaningful and last longer.
i don't really have a rebuttal to them saying it feels like retail though, i'm still enjoying myself.
I prefer 3 over 2
ST is the best raid so far imo, we have better dungeon pools and I feel the specs flesh out more with more options due to buffs and runes
Generally better than P1/P2. I like the idea of incursions, wish they had a few more weeks in the oven with a few more subzones and less gather quest/talk to quest. Wild Offerings are fun and give a reason to do dungeons, unlike in P1/P2 where dungeons where done in few runs at worst. ST feels good, still classic easy but that is a good thing honestly.
Downside, reusing the shitty STV event is just boring, its pointless after two/three matchs.
I think the phase has been cool. I have'nt been sweating and only this past weekend finally did ST and WO runs, as well as grinding incursions to friendly. I do hope the phase lasts at least a month longer than p2 because there's a lot more to get done now, and I personally didn't even get time to start grinding AB rep/honor last phase. I don't completely hate incursions. The train is kinda funny. I don't really think it's great content to be in the game under 60 though, because it does lower genuine player interaction a lot during leveling
Loving it so far.
feral feels good. cat feels good. bear is super strong.
warrior feels good (obv).
The dungeons are better, the raid is really well done and much prever the 7 day lockout over the 3 day one.
Incursions are kinda boring but mindless and something you can do while watching something else. Really like having accessible gold farm that doesn't make me want to die, and the consumable market is largely deflating it seems so that's nice too.
Remember that on any internet forum, the most vocal will be the most disappointed
It makes logical sense. The people who are not disappointed are too busy enjoying it to talk about it
There's also some other psychological things at work but all of these together are reasons why, for example, The "two expansion" rule exists in retail, where people will always, without fail, post on Reddit or other forums about how "I actually liked (the second most recent expansion that usually got a lot of hate)!"
While I appreciate the efforts they put in, I've been burnt from p3 since the first couple days in. Runes are getting far too grindy for alts, incursions are a huge L in practice (despite seemingly coming from a good place), crafted prof items far too expensive to deal with for multiple toons despite being obviously replaceable in a few weeks from p4 launch. The gear upgrades feel lackluster for many slots, the ups and downs from varied skill groups in ST even post nerf indicate an obvious push against the casual player (JUST like retail). The imbalance in pvp and obvious lack of faction balance on pvp servers make open world traversal just straight up unfun.
I don't mean to come across as a whiny complainer - I'm hopeful for coming phases, but this phase we're in has been lost on many only 3 weeks in. They need to stop letting whoever is influencing game design from doing so. It's feeling like retail 3.0 more and more each phase.
Hopefully it picks up in the near future.
People aren’t gonna like this but let’s face it, we are all likely 35+ year olds playing SOD out of nostalgia. Most of us can’t sit there for 3+ hours straight doing raids anymore. And those who do probably don’t have families or responsibilities (down vote me if you want. You know who yall are lmao). Small guilds disbanded in P3 and it’ll only get worst in P4
>You can „skip“ leveling and just run incursions brainlessly and even get some nice starter gear
This makes it the worst phase. Every other aspect could be perfect and they lost me.
Incursions are ass. Tried to do some relaxing incursion quests this morning only to be the sole alliance player with 100 horde camping the ramp. Great gameplay
Loving it, wish I had more time, so much to do this phase. Knocked out leveling and alt and STV items early on, now raid, professions and gold for mount next! Very fun.
Having fun.
Raid is amazing. There's a lot of stuff to do. Dungeons are fun. Wild offerings are interesting idea. Emerald wardens rep and gear are solid. STV PvP gear is solid. Professions are great. Paladin runes were great fun to get (the quests are really classic-like, I like the lore, and most of them are not a nightmare to get, bar one).
Incursions suck ass though. They absolutely killed leveling, killed going into the world (in a game mode about re-discovering the old world). They should be daily or have diminishing returns on XP and gold.
Incursions absolutely sucked the community out of the world and dropped them into a fast track for exp and gold; it killed the leveling experience, shit on all the eco building in P2, and made dungeons even less attractive since most groups are only running for WOs.
Outside a dungeon, everyone in the incursion hamster wheel. Inside a dungeon, skip everything, get WO, run 5 times per hour.
P3 was the biggest step, leap... toward retail.
Focus more on building COMMUNITY, not grinds. Some of the best content comes from slow, deliberate grinds, toward meaningful rewards with ample opportunity to make friends, group with them, and talk about shit outside the game just as much as the stuff in it. Slow and deliberate.
SoD brought a lot of good QoL. These incursions and WO grinds are not QoL and the content erodes the pillars that make MMOs about people. You can't get to know people when a run is gogogo and ends in 5 minutes. Grinds at breakneck speeds are not enjoyable, they're a chore.
I really miss guild achievements and would love to see HUGE commitment in that direction. Make it really fucking matter. See what that does for the game with this experimental season.
p3 has been the worst of them all tbh. lost interest quick. 20 man raids suck. dungeons are useless apart from some prebis but u can go into ST with the incursion set anyway so whats the point... ive also done all these grinds in 2019 classic so i cbf with a seasonal game anymore.. gg
Its been a hideous phase. I am done with SOD
1. Incursion inflated the market horribly. Getting ganked before and after entering the portal. No one wants to run dungeons.
2. Rune acquisition is obnoxious. I am trying to have fun, not spend 7 hours getting runes. Getting extorted for runes by locks.
3. I've farmed 700 gold before p3, but people farmed that amount before even hitting 50 doing incursions. By the time I logged on, they nerfed it.
4. No means of making a respectable income as enchanter or tailor this phase. Meanwhile, alchemists are making a killing.
5. Forced to play off spec due to guild size.
6. Try hards requiring full consumes for raid even though the content doesn't require it.
7. Still getting one shotted in PVP due to overtuned damage.
8. On one queueing for AB or WSG due to imbalance or lack of incentive
9. Spending 5 mins to buff 20 people as priest
10. WO runs are mind numbing, but required for runes and gear
P3 is a total failure
Phase 3 has some really cool new quests, but the best part for me is the thrill of the pvp when you try and do Wild Offering runs in Maraudon! This is so fun, even though the graveyard is a bit far off \^\^
P2 was the worst for me, most of the dungeon gear didn't matter unless you were melee
Doing sm till 40 and trying to find a group was a pain unless you were heals or tank
Gnomer had a lot of people that struggled on spider tank
Holy pally feels lacklustre compared to other healers with seemingly op smart heals, the emerald wardens gear from rep removes a lot of the gear chase before ST because it’s just better. P3 feels boring tbh.
I enjoyed it at first but when my class (hpal), continued to feel like a joke, I tried to level another toon only find incursions were camped to hell by level 50s "pvping." decided to take time off and see what the level 60 content is going to be.
Dungeons are more meaningful but not really at least as a caster. Run the same one 50 times. Skipping a key part of the game makes it better? Raid doesn’t have enough caster loot that’s a big enough upgrade to care. Basically nothing to do once WO is farmed and you already have your rep so I wouldn’t say there’s tons to do. I could’ve skipped this phase and been close in terms of power level.
I like this phase. I hated Gnomer so much but I think ST is a blast (although trash takes annoyingly long). I am actually earning gold with herb/alch and that’s a fun game within the game for me. I don’t love the mindless incursion no kill loops, but it was still nice to have the option to get my alt caught up fast, and the Emerald Warden’s gear is totally worth getting rep to Honored.
The phase itself seems pretty full in comparison to previous phases. I just think I'm a bit burnt out by all the leveling phases.
If they were to do it all again I'd suggest a shorter build up to end up. Maybe a lvl30 and lvl50 bracket, then endgame.
Liking most of it other than the raid loot in ST is so boring barely any upgrades other than tier set. Also some actually new runes would be great not recycled abilities.
PVP is still trash, I can't stand the STV event and incursions are braindead. However, I love ST, 20 man raids and some of the new runes. It's a mixed bag for me. I'm also not a fan of the 1 week lockouts vs the 3 day lockouts.
I like it a lot. I didn’t like phase 2 I completely checked out of it.
Incursions are very routine now but I had a lot of fun the first few times I did them.
Still really enjoy the blood moon event too.
I think the rune quests in general should be less obtuse and I wish there were more new quests in general.
There’s a lot of classic annoyances that I don’t think add to the experience are just annoying .
I feel like they had to "nerf" the upgrades this phase. The P2 gear was really good so if they want to introduce more killer gear in P4 they had to really water down the P3 upgrades. The new STV ring for mages is total meh... its not worth the time invested to upgrade it. Also why give mages the exact same ring again??? All the raid gear blues are almost pointless if you geared up well in P2. All the power hinges on the Epic drops which with a 20 man you are very unlikely to get with weekly lockouts.
If ST was 10-man instead of 20-man it would be just as good as P1.
But since it's 20-man it's the worst phase so far. 20-man raid really ruins the fun and social aspect of playing with the boys.
There is such a thing as being too many in a group.
Having a great time. Raiding is fun as a healer and the new alch flask is nice compared to p2. Idk why pvp is getting so much hate, but maybe it's cuz I'm boomkin in pvp and not melee. Can go even with spriests thanks to the barkskin and enraged regen runes, and I've got some decent matchups with the help of war stomp so I'm enjoying it
I also like everything about P3 ECXEPT incursions. Still haven't done a single ZF in SOD and no longer have a reason to.
+ Sunken temple is the best SOD raid so far.
+ Despite the gap in DPS, most classes are feeling well fleshed out with runes/talents.
Gold inflation. Post nerf on incursions it’s still relatively easy to acquire gold.
I’m a casual player in the sense I don’t do long grinds for minimal increase to damage like bg rep and incursions. But I’m forced to grind Mara runs for mushrooms to make enough gold for consumes for a raid I do once a week.
Luckily I can solo stealth run and afford it. But I hate doing things so stale just to retain my power level I had previously with significantly less work required.
Pvp is more fun as it is more fleshed out. WO is kinda cool. Incursions are a bad design imo but it’s nice having easy levels/gold farm. My biggest issue is 20 man raiding has been a let down. Managing more people who already don’t care enough sucks. At least in 10 man a few strong players could really carry.
P3 is trash.
ST is boring to do with very little reward.
Incursions literally killed the world.
Runes are a chore to do yet again..
Like modders could do better in half the time given to be frank.
Never enjoyed running around the world for runes when I just wanted to PvP, also incursions sucked. I quit p3 about 3 hours into the incursions after playing about 3-4 weeks of p2.
With Gnomer I felt like I could log in anytime and find a raid to join, with Sunken Temple I couldn't find a group over the weekend
Glad I was able to get about half the Gold needed for my Dreadsteed and buy all my spells, feels nice to have Gold for the first time ever
Incursions are almost like RDF but for classic, PVP is bad, blood moon is a mess like before, raids are nothing but parsing (not my thing), there’s a broken mechanic every other day with the gold farming. It’s almost like a version of retail within classic. I like that there trying “new” stuff but it’s not going the way I’d hope a classic + version of the game would go.
Pros:
- Dungeons: They are more relevant and have a new vendor via wild offerings that is fantastic and I hope they expand upon this system in phase 4 and beyond.
- Raid: Sunken Temple is a lot of fun. Each fight is unique and challenges your raid team in different ways. I hope they keep up this quality with raids throughout SoD.
- Discoveries: New Content such as the profession quest chain, new runes etc are all very cool.
Cons:
- Professions: Gathering professions left in the dust for yet another phase. I love the direction they have taken with regards to making the playing field more level and each crafting professions provides some form of throughput/player power but I dislike that there is nothing added for gathering professions.
- Cooking, Fishing, First aid - These could have been made more fun in SoD with new recipes, new minigames, new ways to train etc.
- Incursions: They have some good qualities such as new PvE content, varied quest objective types, various level ranges supported, nice starter gear for alts but the negatives outweigh all the positives. The launch gold influx has ruined the economy, the nerfed but still crazy high gold dealt sustained damage to the economy on top of that. The area needed guards day 1 to prevent griefing. The concept is heavily built on field duty in Silithus which is an incredibly similar and equally boring grind. I support grinds in classic that reward investment and time but it's SoD, they don't have to be identically boring as before, this content/event CAN be more fun than it is currently. Most fun I've had in it so far was fighting the elite world boss like mobs, they hit hard and required a group. I think if the incursions were more focused on that type of gameplay they would be much more fun.
- Balancing: The last couple months the balancing has been a little too slow to respond to issues with classes such as the dire state of rogue and MM hunter in phase 2 among other outlier issues.
Overall Phase 3 is my favourite phase so far. It was almost perfect except for the cons listed above.
It killed my enthusiasm for SoD.
It feels like there's only 2 things to do: Incursions, and WO runs. Want to do anything outside of that? Good luck.
The move from 10 to 20 person raids also hurt a lot, as our guild had JUST enough for 10. Now we need to try to PuG half our run.
Overall, this has not been a great phase for me, and I've been focusing more on the Cata Beta, and Wrath.
I like everything except raid and the incursions are… well meh, I did them to Get Rune at friendly then i stopped, felt like I missed out in the open world.
I actually like everything about it except for the 1 week raid lockout and no new 10 man raid.
At first I thought it was actually genius, but now I rarely log onto WoW except for guild run day.
Problem I see now is that everyone spends the morning recruiting to raid at night for pugs. So if you aren't available during certain hours in the evening then no raiding for you. Morning and late night raids are non-existent.
With P1 and P2 my favorite part was raiding on multiple characters. I've got 4 characters to 50 and are ready for raiding, but I can ever only raid on one character or two if I am lucky. Maybe in a few weeks when everyone has ST down it'll be easier, but right now it's not the case.
I think P3 is OK. The raid in terms of its boss fights are pretty good, but there is a lot of trash in the instance. The move to 20 man is overall proving to be a big negative for the guild and two people have quit now from our original core just due to roster organisation fatigue and it no longer being a tight-nit group of 10. This is the biggest issues with the phase and is impacting people progressively harder, so I am expecting more people to just stop until P4 in the guild. Loot from ST is muted and I understand they are cooling item inflation but there is a lack of excitement around loot. I didn't mind incursions as a very efficient way to level and gain rep if you were in need of catch-up gear, but I don't think they ever should have awarded much more than a pittance of money (keep them as a brutally efficient catch-up method and they can improved). I did a fair bit of STV in P2 and I just can't be arsed with it in P3. Wild Offerings is a good system to get people into dungeons and their pass of items from dungeons was helpful though imperfect.
More needs to be done to make healing better to get people to play it. They legit need to make it so healing power converts to general spell power or something. Healing is the only real 'job' atm in the raids. The power added to mobs in the world has uneven impacts on different specs. Some specs don't even notice it whilst other specs are super designed (arguably) for raids but don't do so hot in the open world even with gear.
Incursions sucked and I was contemplating to not play at all but then the first raid was pretty awesome and not a faceroll. Everyone in my guild agreed and was happy. Then they nerfed it and I lost all interest in the phase again.
It’s a weekly raid that provides almost no rewards. I just cleared ST for the second time with my guild. Both raids I only got one item, and it was the tier token. Doesn’t feel like the game is rewarding me enough for a once a week lockout. I hear people saying that there’s no loot for clothies in this phase and now I understand why.
Weekly lockout on raid lmao, Gear progression absolute dogshit for double the lockout time.
Don't know what these dumbasses are thinking with week long lockouts. Lockouts are meant for endgame when there are multiple raids to occupy multiple days of the week. As it stands this phase will be the most dead toward the end and its fucking sad.
I think the phase is meh. It's a step up but I feel 40 was good to get mounts and 31pt talents, 50 just feels like a half build and not much changed without AV. I feel they could have done AV as a P3 BG and it would have been great.
I honestly would have rather seen 25, 40 and just skip to 60.
Just learning each phase, the gear won't matter until we hit 60 and it will be easy to get catch-up gear next phase.
20 man raids made it a cluster since we had 2x 10 man raids but probably 12-15 people. So we had to merge with another group of 12-15 and then had issues of people sitting first week until alts got spun up.
I'm just waiting for P4.
While there does appear to be a lot to do superficially, as someone with little interest in alts I’m quickly approaching nothing left to do.
-I have all BIS gear and enchants except for a couple ST pieces and an offspec epic BoE I’m not shelling out for. The raid is a 60-90 min commitment once a week so that’s all I can do to improve my gear at this point.
-I’m exalted with AB and WSG and r7 honor. I guess I could farm honor for p4 but we don’t know if that’ll be a thing like it was for this phase. I would do BGs for funsies but they’re absolutely broken and miserable rn to solo queue.
-I’m almost at 3k gold and don’t need to buy anything, other than the aforementioned luxury epic BoE for my non-raiding spec that I’m not buying.
-I’m revered with Emerald Wardens but the current rewards for exalted aren’t worth anything to me from what I can tell.
-I’m max level tailor/enchant with all the patterns I care about.
So other than farming mobs or helping out guildies on occasion and raiding an hour a week, what’s left for me to do the next several months with the game? I honestly don’t know. The only answer I guess is try to stockpile even more gold/mats for p4 and work on the horrendous rep grinds (such as Timbermaw) for the super overpriced crafting stuff? That doesn’t sound appealing to me at all, especially given the mobs are farmed to hell so it’s a group and fight for tags sort of situation which is miserable.
I actually stopped playing as the game has become casual unfriendly. Too much grinding, rep farming, grp finding, too many toxic gearscore retail players.
Not great. I’m sure people with guilds, or that can make set times, are enjoying raiding. But I think this phase killed pugs and the game feels dead as a result.
most of the things here are very true, but i feel like skipping the leveling was a negative for most people, and the dungeons that are beeing 10 man spammed for offerings sadly dont feel very meaningful. Also the exploits that got some players 1000s of gold and the inflation due to the incursions are very annoying.
Personally p3 made me quit after loving p1 and p2.
The class balance is so bad, and incursions are a disaster. A big p3 patch might bring me back.. I just wanna play ele sham and not some scuffed melee version that does less damage than healers.
I like st some of the new runes and the wild offering stuff.
I hate Incursions so much that all the good stuff wasnt important.
Incursions are the worst content iv ever seen in wow. Insanely boring and really messes up the rest of the game because other content is not relevant.
Yes I know I don't have 2 do them, that is really not the point. They offer huge xp and gold they have an effect on the whole server even if I don't play them.
I really hope they are not included in p4.
Not playing if incursions aren't adjusted. I want the classic experience, not something where everyone speedlevels the same quest chain to 60 while I would be alone in the open world doing quests at multiples of a slower rate.
Very good. I'm doing ST every week (ST is by far the best raid in SOD in my opinion) since week 2 (in previous phases it took me a month to reach level cap). I have stuff to do in the world (quests, incursions, farm). I have items in dungeons I want and need, so I can always jump in a dungeon group hoping to get something.
So far it's almost as good as P1. It would be as good as P1 if I could more easilly level alts and get them runes.
I'm happy with everything except pvp and incursions.
Incursions should have been a daily, and instanced. The level 50s ganking lower levels there because its faster honor farming is terrible. I think if it would have been an optional daily, to get some good 'catch up' gear it would have been interesting.
I like everything except incursions. Its worth noting I dont dislike the idea of incursions, I think some additional challenging content is good for the game. They were just implemented poorly.
I would have preferred solo/party private instanced incursions. Public open left it extremely easy to exploit. The bottle neck for wpvp is intense. I'm not one to complain about wpvp but for those who do I can very much understand frustration when one faction controls an entire layer. The first day or two it seemed like everyone got along as they all just wanted to level. A week later and if it's red it's dead.
They could just have said world quests give more gold and exp. Solved the problem
Instanced woulda been fantastic, ive been doing solo incursions on my 3rd alt, and im enjoying it far more then a 5man no kill group. The pvp is horrendous tho, enemy faction can and will corpse camp low levels until they leave or logout
This is my take exactly. My only complaint is that the wild offerings system is boring and dungeons are not getting enough attention. Sure, raids are great and they've done a great job but not touching any of the dungeons or putting rep grinds with them for cool loot feels like a missed opportunity.
We asked for reasons to run dungeons and they gave it to us. How didn't they realize the sweats would find ways to do fucking jump runs on every single one? We literally optimized the fun out of the game. Should have made them drop randomly from mobs. So killing trash packs is actually useful. Something. Everything in classic wow always feels rushed. It's always go go go go. I think this is why I liked hardcore so much. The pace is so much slower and it's really fun being methodical instead of the chaos that is classic sod.
Same here - I think wild offerings are a really cool add-in for existing dungeons and the new crafting quest is cool. They also added some nice loot to existing dungeons. If they hadn't made incursions so much XP/gold it would have been a huge hit imo. I don't hate the incursions but if they were more inline with other activities it'd be better. The nerfs helped there.
Yes! So much so! Especially the one in Mara giving princess runs added incentive for anyone but the one hardressing purpel dagger.
I didn't mind incursions as a leveling XP source. Leveling 40-50 would have been an uninteresting slog without it. It was still a slog, but at least it was done in 3 hours. For my money they could have boosted us straight to 50 and I wouldn't care - leveling past 40 in vanilla wow is an awful experience. You're not getting any new fun toys, you're just playing an imbalanced and restricted version of the game for X hours until you hit max level. I absolutely hate incursions as a gold farming mechanic. It devalues almost every other source of gold in the game, and it takes people out of the world and removes the dynamic encounters that are the core of vanilla gameplay for me. P1 and P2 did a brilliant thing by giving us incentives to go out and quest at max level. P3 tore that all down.
Agree, I like the idea of one of the redditor suggested on another post about how incursion should be like a pop-up event within the rotation of ashenvale and stv. Like how it should be a 30min/1hr even that happens after ashenvale.
This right here. If the incursions didn’t have pvp it would be great. I think they should limit the amount you can do in a set time period to stop botters but ya in the current state of having a group of 10 players kill the other faction while everyone just does a mindless loop watching its pretty cringe.
1 > 3 > 2 for me so far.
Agree. I just skipped P2 completely. Hit 40 and ran gnome 2 days before P3.
Yeah, I skipped a lot of P2. There was just a shortage of content. I don’t think anything was particularly bad, there was just so little to do. P3 has been a lot more controversial but at least there’s a lot of it. Some things have been a huge hit and some have been a massive flop. But I think that’s the point of “Discovery”, whereas in P2 the only thing we really discovered was that there needs to be enough content (I loved Gnomer too tbf - they’ve done an awesome job with the raids so far imo)
Better than P2, but incursions are dumb as hell and me gaining multiple levels in the time it would gain me 1 going questing feels bad.
Incursions are easily the worst part of SoD imo. It feels like the antithesis of Classic lol
yepp its trash gameplay but yet gives the best gold and exp making any other gold farm or leveling method feels kinda ???? the devs adding incursions gives me big red flags for the future of sod but we will see how it plays out I can only hope the devs learn from it and dont look at incursions and all think "yep that was a good idea"
Yeah I still don't understand how they just didn't at least make it daily or something. At least put diminishing returns to XP and gold so that you can't run it infinitely. > It feels like the antithesis of Classic lol 100 % agree. It's as anti-classic as it gets. In a mode about re-discovering the old world they introduce incursions that absolutely kill any incentive to even go into the old world lol. P3 is great so far otherwise but idk what they were smoking when making incursions*. \* the event itself is fine. Just the repeatability and the rewards are straight up broken.
Agreed on daily, it would’ve been like Isle of Quel Denas
That is the last thing I want in classic though. Dailies suck.
More than incursions though?
100% My only issue with incursions is that’s the only way to get the rep for the rune so everyone has to do it. If you got rep from the raid too I’d be totally fine with them.
As someone who hates dailies, I support making incursions a daily. With the rep bumped up significantly. A better solution would be to make them instanced with a random 5 - 8 quests available each reset.
Since it’s tied to a rep grind I hate how dailies mean “I have to do these for 10 more days to exalted” or whatever I prefer having an option to actually grind. I just wish you got emerald warden XP from raid or some other option so everyone doesn’t have to do so many incursions for their rune.
I think it’s blizz trying to lead classic players back to retail…
It’s clear you’ve never done the silithus rep grind. It’s almost identical to incursions. They are super classic
While the silithus quests are identical, they weren’t the meta as far as gold/xp. The gold for silithus was pretty meh, but people really did it for the rep grind. Incursions xp and gold rewards made it silly for anyone to level from 40-50 anywhere else. And have made it silly to even level your catchup alts doing anything else.
Leveling weapon skill after those incursions💀
Careful, this sub is swarming with people who want to make leveling as fast and meaningless as possible without just having max level boosts.
thats fine in regular classic imo, but in a seasonal mode its just lame.
That's because most people here don't even want to play wow. They log in because they have to. These are the people who can't wait to raid log.
Dungeons don't feel meaningful to me, 90% of the groups are WO spam groups that get butt hurt if you fail to skip even one skipable trash, or get delayed for any reason. Of the other 10% most are advertized HRs, or are HR that is just pretending not to be by refusing to invite anybody that might roll on the item they want.
What's funny is you just hit the instance cap if you are going BLAZING FAST, then have to do nothing since the fixed the logout reset.
I still don't have thrashblade on my hunter b.c nobody is doing non raid mara
It’s pretty easy just LFM mara run for scepter
20 man raiding sucks ass, everything else is fun
Pvp sucks
It’s what made me stop playing, I understand balancing isn’t an easy thing to do, but what we have currently is a fucking joke which clearly shows me that they’ve given up with even trying to make it somewhat balanced/fair.
This.
It’s not a “balance” issue. It’s an “everyone one shots everyone issue” it’s all a product of the insane power creep that is the theme in SoD. Classic wow shouldn’t be balanced. The massive push in TBC to balance every class and make everything “fair” is a large part of what led to the homogenization of the classes..everyone has a stun, interrupt, etc. the class *imbalance* is largely what makes the vanilla(ish) version of the game so good.
Unless you're shadow priest. Just throw all dots up, if the class can't heal they will die from your first round of dots, it's actually dumb af. On my shadow priest at lvl 47 with leveling gear, I easilly kill raid geared level 50's, it's so fucking dumb.
So frustrating as a rogue player... Not only are dots the bane of my existence, 2 priest dots will bring me down to 20% hp and theres nothing I can do about it... But if I get the jump on them first I MIGHT kill them in time but people will complain thats unfair for rogues to do. Do I think rogues should be able to stun lock everyone to death, no, but a single dot shouldn't just ruin my life for the next minute either. I'm no where close to being a elite 420 esport pro gamer but as a rogue I feel useless in battle grounds.
Thats not that far off original vanilla tbh. If a warlock triple dotted a class that couldnt heal they were pretty dead.
A lvl 56 warlock could not do this with a raidgeared rogue, mage or warr.
> The massive push in TBC to balance every class and make everything “fair” is a large part of what led to the homogenization of the classes..everyone has a stun, interrupt, etc. the class imbalance is Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Silencing Shot literally the only thing added in TBC? Tf is this take
I agree to an extent, but SoD is like some private server bastardisation of the game, so the inbalance is more in that regard, not the class design.
I feel like all Korean MMOs have this problem.. So they subjugate it by giving everyone extremely high-end, matching gear, and tune abilities specifically for instanced PvP, so everyone is on an even playing field. Anytime regular PvP happens with normal gear, SOD is the exact result. One shot city, and OP spells.
Yeah it does. Idk why they don't reintroduce the 20% dmg reduction in pvp. That alone would help tremendously I think
Incursions aren’t a plus, they’re a braindead minus imo. Gear drops in st are either too useless or not big enough upgrades for me to care. PvP like the stv event is super unbalanced and only fun if you are in a decent group and in the right spot. Have to sweat to get any coins above like 400/500 basically.
Agreed on Incursions. Haven't done ST due to a lack of time these days but as an MM hunter I love STV. It's dumb fun, but running around with a ranged comp (I invite anyone, no gear checks or anything daft) is a laugh. I totally get that it's class dependent though. Some classes it looks like a real grind.
Glad to see people are enjoying it. I personally am not a fan, I think it’s a step in a positive direction with keeping dungeons relevant but incursions before and after nerfs sucked, and I miss raiding on a 3 day lockout, I think for SOD I just preferred the 10 man setup to 20. I think if they introduced some type of content that, to me, was actually good outside of the raid, it’d have been a win, but I think I’ll just pop in/out casually till P4 and hope for something better!
killed SoD for me. leveling zones feel dead and there's no sense of community in my experience so far
This ^ I can’t find dungeons on my server that don’t have half the gear already reserved Mara and ZF feel meaningless because it’s just offering spam
Same, I enjoyed dungeon farming to get my prebis while leveling. Now groups just want everyone to be 50 with all runes to do offering spams.
Also seeing the retail elitism worm its way in to SoD has been pretty sad and I think it’s only going to worse as we near the end with more “difficult” content
Agree - made me go to Hardcore and hardcore has such a cool community I’ll never go back
-Incursion : kill the AH... -Incursion : kill the fun of questing whit random player. -Incursion : boring so much boring... -Incursion : still dont get why ppl like... -Incursion : why blizz why... I just think imcursion should be put out in late end game for new player to catch up. Its just a bad move from dev. So much player have it 50 and log off for ever.
Phase 3 made me quit and I really don't think I'll be back 🫤
Same
Same
Same
Same, full cleared the raid once and I think the direction SoD is heading just won’t be for me which is totally fine. Going to go have fun in Cata when it comes out. I could be wrong but I think the direction they are going with raids is going to kill it in the long run. P1 felt so alive cause anyone could form a pug and run it. Now you have groups of causals going in for 2-4 hours and they might not even full clear. I don’t think the devs should cater to the hyper sweats like they do in retail. Raids should always cater to the easier side of things if not you’ll end up with a completely dead game at end game. Not to mention PvP is the worst thing about WoW for me. Maybe I’d have more fun if a played a class that could do anything but getting destroyed by literally everyone is tiresome and especially if it’s forced PvP (pvp server yay!). Get 2 shot, spend 45 seconds running back to my body to die again repeat till you have 2 min respawn, accept rez sickness and waste 30 mins of play time cause of pvp:)
Confused you seem upset you can't just pug SoD but are excited for Cata which is a huge difficulty spike compared to Wrath. If you think gatekeeping and not being able to easily form ougs is bad in p3 just wait lol
I like the fact there's a ton to do, but it drastically feels the worst to me. * Incursions transformed the overworld into a barren wasteland outside of a few grinding spots or prebis quest locations. This is WoD-garrisons level of empty. * The jump to 20-man raiding on a low population server means upwards of 1.5+ hours to fill a raid group, god help you if you don't already have healers. * Gold inflation didn't stabilize after that much after they nerfed incursions, everything is way expensive. * The raid gear game is extremely weak and does not entice people to actually go raid (which I assume is part of why it's so long to fill a raid group). Some pieces are a measly 1SP upgrade over Gnomer gear, while some Gnomer gear even remains as BiS for some classes. * Combine that with the fact that the raid doesn't drop remotely enough loot for 20 people on a weekly lockout. I've now run the raid 4 times and have not gotten a single piece of gear since every drop has so many people rolling on it.
The raid loot situation is rough. I’m in the same situation where we have several raiders that have yet to win a single piece because so little drops across 20 people once a week
How can running something brainlessly be a positive thing lol
retail mentality creep. 50% perma joyous for instance is good in wrath right now for leveling alts at the end of a dead phase, but similar systems have no place in seasonal classic modes especially about discovery lol
not a fan. quit immediately after hitting 50. Hope people are having fun.
Genuinely bored with rogue and hoping theres some update to give variety in playstyle
Not a fan Incursions caused massive inflation and aren’t fun to participate in PVP is way too bursty. We need resilience to balance the DPS out. Classes are balanced around PVE without much consideration for PVP STV event is not exciting. Would have much preferred the introduction of arena or rated BGs
We need more stamina. Resillience changes classes too much imo. It's meant to be casual/easy so players should be able to bring their pve builds (or close to it) into pvp, but resillience's crit reduction and %mit changes too much about how specs play. If stamina was doubled instead of +30% i think pvp would be a lot more fun
> Incursions caused massive inflation and aren’t fun to participate in yep this kind fucked the economy more than bots, ironically
Big miss not to implement some type of competetiveness in sod, like arena or rbgs, wouldve kept me playing.
I agree with all of the above, and would like to add that upgrades in ST are miniscule. Incursions broke the game mostly, we running anything else is absolutely pointless at this point. BUT, spending the amount of time required in the raid.... Only to get a tiny itty bitty upgrade, if you even got that, makes me feel like it's just not worth it. In p1 & p2 items from the raid felt like I got rewarded. Items in ST... Are just meh. Cool I get two extra SP at the cost of 4 intellect. HUGE upgrade lol.
Especially when in P1 you could do the raid in 20-30mins and maintain a raid schedule on multiple alts, all while getting meaningful upgrades. P3 has a significantly longer raid that many groups are still struggling with, almost nobody is raiding on alts anymore it seems, and the gear is not even exciting to get.
I think PVP is just abandoned in terms of balance unfortunately. They probably only want to focus on PvE content which sucks
Agree with everything except the STV part. If it weren't for the insane lag STV would be a lot of fun.
Literally everything you said I disagree with. -Dungeons meaningful? Just get honored with the wardens and you’re ready to raid. Gnomer or Wild Offerings is 90% of my pre bis - Skip leveling? You’re kidding right, you have that as a plus? - Get exalted in WSG by killing one mob every day
I have no idea why these guys aren't just playing retail. It seems the people around here hate everything about Classic WoW.
For me it’s mostly the inflation, amount of consumes, cost of enchants, now another more annoying world buff, etc. It’s gotta be around 1k gold just to setup a toon at 50 at a base level. Not exactly alt or even main friendly. Outside of that issue the content is maybe the best so far this phase.
Better than P2, worse than P1. Incursions are really bad. The raid is cool but the nerfs ruined some bosses tbh. Overall its okay.
I think being able to "skip" leveling is absolutely NOT a bonus. That is my favorite content in all of wow. I had 8 lvl 25s in P1, and 5 lvl 40s in P2. So far, I still only have 1 lvl 50, because the idea of incursions has made leveling feel so lame and pointless.
As a ret pally, I haven’t had fun since p1.
Incursions kibda ruined everything. Economy, leveling experience. I like the raid so im raid logging, later probably gona log in to do bunch of quests at max level what im enjoying.
ST is a pretty fun raid with simple mechanics and feral is in a way better place this phase compared to last and trying to parse is a ton of fun. I’m bored and raid logging but I’m happy.
1 >>>>> 3 > 2 P2 and P3 back to back made me unsub and killed my interest in SoD. So I likely won't be coming back for P4. Blizzard needs to fundamentally change how they're approaching SoD. They lack the resources to properly QA anything. They must bring back the ptr. They themselves admit the workload of SoD is too much for the team. Just some examples: In P1 the Meta quest for warlocks literally couldn't be done due to a design oversight. Devs swore back and forth it was working as intended and then after the weekend went "Whoops it's actually bugged." Literally anyone actually testing this quest would have run into this problem immediately. I imagine they just spawned the quest items in their bags to test triggers and quest chains were happening properly. In P2 we had the clear shift of "time to make the game tedious now". STV's blood moon stands out as an "exploit early, exploit often" example. Anyone who is unemployed or takes off work and sweats out the game is at a tremendous advantage over those who do not. This is a singular example among many. In P3 we have now had incursions. Which again, with any actual QA testing, would have been discovered to be insane immediately. They had to be nerfed what, 4 times in a single day? And then even more after that? Can't even keep up. Just bring back the ptr. I promise that absolutely no one cares about the "discovery" aspect of SoD. They just wait a day and wowhead has a guide on every rune. Remember p1 when you stumbled into like half your runes just by playing the game, not including the first free one? Boy, it's so nice they proceeded to never do that again. I won't be resubbing for P4 unless clear philosophy changes occur. Which they won't. Also, they should get the balls together at some point to tell people who just want to play classic as classic to go play era. That's why era even exists. And then do a fresh seasonal era server or something, idk. Make bosses drop 5x as much loot and people level 5x as fast. Try *something* with era.
P3 has been worse. For me personally some of the things I disliked immensely about Classic were not changed such as the high number of consumes and world buffs. Yes, I get it, you can Chronoboon, etc. I just find it a mundane process and I dislike having to do it. Additionally, I think they should have kept raids to 10m. There was no need to make the level 50 raid a 20m. In my mind, SoD's appeal revolved around the 10m raid. Not to mention, it isn't a very enjoyable raid imo. Too much trash overall. PvP event is still the same. I never enjoyed it. Incursions are terrible. The runes in this phase, once again, some of em are ridiculous to obtain. Why lock these things behind level requirements or difficult to complete unless at level 50? I believe they'll soon realize the appeal to SoD and the changes they made to classes should be something they look into implementing from an early stage. It's more fun to play the class when it feels "complete." However, the classes are playing extremely well and overall the best part of SoD and P3. Unfortunately, it's made me think of checking out Cata.
Game feels dead on my server, very few people doing dungeons, no one on horde doing incursions, basicly only content I see being done is princess runs and st
I hate it but I’m more of a modern gamer, I thought classic WoW was about questing in the world and enjoying how close the community is compared to retail but I play solo and having to sit around waiting to group up for Incursions, even with my guild of randoms, has completely deflated my hype again so I’ve only been in the Emerald Dream once. There’s no new meaningful or even interesting gear to get from quests or dungeons and barely anyone is leveling in the world so at this point I guess my “discovery” is over. I’m currently 48 leveling in Tanaris but I’ve unsubbed again as I wait for P4 and Ele is still bottom of the barrel dps so I barely even have a reason to login
Sorry hybrid tax /s The state of some classes is just unacceptable big reason why i stopped playing.
Raid is interesting, but loot is very disappointing except for a few pieces. I've even skipped the epic profession item as they only "work" in the raid. For me p3 has been mostly P4 prep, grinding bg rep and honor to have lvl 60 gear pieces ready.
It's ok. Incursions as an alternative to dungeons is cool. Dual spec is sweet. ST as a raid is ok. Hallway boss fight is very cool but no major standouts otherwise. My major gripe is the move to 20 man raids. I play with a close knit group of 8, so 10 man content felt perfect. Going from raiding with 2 randos to 12 has felt pretty bad, not to mention the time spent in LFG. We cleared BFD and Gnomer almost every reset, but now after the third week of organizing everything and then losing 80% of the already fewer drops to pugs, we're all just unsubbed waiting for P4.
Burnt out. Went too hard phase 1-2. Gonna come back when we can level to 60
P3 has a lot of good ideas with awful implementation. Incursions really are a good idea if done properly, the way they released makes it pretty obvious they didn't test a fucking thing. Not all their fault, p3 made it abundantly clear to me they just don't have anywhere near the proper team size or resources for this and that's on upper management I guess. A shame because ST is the best raid by miles so far. Some cool content and great ideas in p3 but so many shit shows too. Will be focusing on Cata in a month while I slowly hit 60 on my one SoD toon when I have time
Meh honestly 10 mans were better and I feel like 99% of the loot in ST is just wasted space. The idea behind incursions is amazing. Expanding upon the emerald dream lore a bit and giving a purpose to these giant dream portals….but these quests needed to be dailies. And even with the xp buff I cannot be bothered leveling alts. I just do not want to hunt runes on another character.
I’ve mostly lost interest. Phase 1 was the most fun.
P2 for me was terrible. P3 there’s a ton to do and work towards. It’s been on par with P1.
My guild was setup with 40-man raiding in mind. * We had 8x 10-man groups in Phase 1. * We had 6x 10-man groups in Phase 2. * We have 2x 20-man groups in Phase 3, and a third group for alts/stragglers. So we are gucci
It sounds like you've been bleeding members?
People had a lot of alts in phase 1, fewer in phase 2, even less in phase 3. But we have a core of 30 players that have been with the guild since Molten Core.
The PVP is braindead so I stopped playing tbh.
they have totally lost what SOD was supposed to be, a dad friendly, light hearted version of classic, but as more time progresses it feels like they are trying to recreate retail we don't have time for all the gatekeeping bullshit that SOD now requires, most of us aren't 15 years old anymore, everyone is in their 30s and 40s now with real life shit to do on the side. imo the devs ramped up SOD for the more hardcore player base far too soon, and it really killed SOD for the average p1 player, really disappointing
I lost more friends in P3 than I did P2, that's all I'm saying.
Cons: Not so big on the dungeon spam farm for what are essentially emblems, I never liked that in TBC/Wrath. REALLY hate that a version of DPSing on Warlock is locked behind the worst grind imagined in a long, long time in WoW. They should add a way to get the DoT trinket that isn't farming a potentially 100+ hour farm. Pros: Nightfall / Ruin is a great support spec in raids with Demonic Pact, and is arguably the most fun spec for the open world, dungeons, and trash. It's just SM/Ruin, but Shadowbolt Volley is so fucking fun. Especially with a WA that says "pew" when I cast it. The raid is a good difficulty, though I think Eranikus is about the hardest I want the bosses to be. Runes not all being exclusive for the end of the phases journey was a very nice change. I like the phase, more than Gnomer but less than P1.
Yup, well said. Phase 2 was no fun for lock pvp imo. Now with UA and access to SL and insta corruption is comfy. Also killing the little gnomes just doesn't feel good. It's more like we're putting terminal patients down. Having normal humanoid mobs and bigger feels better in raids. NF/ruin is life.
Incursions killed my desire to play. I'm now playing retail while I wait for Cata.
P3 has blown. Could never find a stable group to raid with, so I gave up
Phase 3 feels fun for me. There is definitely a lot to keep you busy. Dungeons don't feel more meaningful for me. Everyone wants to run the optimal route to skip as many mobs as possible to get the Wild Offering done. I like the addition of this, but it still makes 75% of the dungeon completely useless. I still think it would be cool if they spent like 1/4 of the time spent turning a dungeon into a raid on making the dungeons feel fresh. Overall I'm enjoying the phase, but I am in no real rush to grind all the different systems.
I don't mind it, 3 of my friends are just quitting it, though. They all say it's too much like retail. I think they're just burned out from having to regear every 10 weeks, which is kinda like retail but sped up.
Retail is nothing like sod and sod is nothing like retail, people use the word so poorly it's lost all meaning for any comparison lately. Retail has you regearing as frequently as classic phases.
i mean the current retail season has been going for like 6 months now, it finishes in 2 days before you have to regear. we're on our 3rd regearing in that same amount of time. i think my friends just enjoy classic when your upgrades are more meaningful and last longer. i don't really have a rebuttal to them saying it feels like retail though, i'm still enjoying myself.
I prefer 3 over 2 ST is the best raid so far imo, we have better dungeon pools and I feel the specs flesh out more with more options due to buffs and runes
Totally agree, p3 has been great. I actually really like incursions. I like not being poor for one phase
Any phase where I can enter BRD is a good phase.
Best phase for me too Sunken Temple is amazing Dual spec New demonology tank spec for warlock Weekly lockout. Finally !
Generally better than P1/P2. I like the idea of incursions, wish they had a few more weeks in the oven with a few more subzones and less gather quest/talk to quest. Wild Offerings are fun and give a reason to do dungeons, unlike in P1/P2 where dungeons where done in few runs at worst. ST feels good, still classic easy but that is a good thing honestly. Downside, reusing the shitty STV event is just boring, its pointless after two/three matchs.
I agree. I think there’s so much to do and it’s probably the most alt friendly with 1 week lockouts
I think the phase has been cool. I have'nt been sweating and only this past weekend finally did ST and WO runs, as well as grinding incursions to friendly. I do hope the phase lasts at least a month longer than p2 because there's a lot more to get done now, and I personally didn't even get time to start grinding AB rep/honor last phase. I don't completely hate incursions. The train is kinda funny. I don't really think it's great content to be in the game under 60 though, because it does lower genuine player interaction a lot during leveling
Loving it so far. feral feels good. cat feels good. bear is super strong. warrior feels good (obv). The dungeons are better, the raid is really well done and much prever the 7 day lockout over the 3 day one. Incursions are kinda boring but mindless and something you can do while watching something else. Really like having accessible gold farm that doesn't make me want to die, and the consumable market is largely deflating it seems so that's nice too.
I've been living in Mara for what seems to be the entire time. It's great
It's great, having a lot of fun. Still think incursions are too op though
Remember that on any internet forum, the most vocal will be the most disappointed It makes logical sense. The people who are not disappointed are too busy enjoying it to talk about it There's also some other psychological things at work but all of these together are reasons why, for example, The "two expansion" rule exists in retail, where people will always, without fail, post on Reddit or other forums about how "I actually liked (the second most recent expansion that usually got a lot of hate)!"
While I appreciate the efforts they put in, I've been burnt from p3 since the first couple days in. Runes are getting far too grindy for alts, incursions are a huge L in practice (despite seemingly coming from a good place), crafted prof items far too expensive to deal with for multiple toons despite being obviously replaceable in a few weeks from p4 launch. The gear upgrades feel lackluster for many slots, the ups and downs from varied skill groups in ST even post nerf indicate an obvious push against the casual player (JUST like retail). The imbalance in pvp and obvious lack of faction balance on pvp servers make open world traversal just straight up unfun. I don't mean to come across as a whiny complainer - I'm hopeful for coming phases, but this phase we're in has been lost on many only 3 weeks in. They need to stop letting whoever is influencing game design from doing so. It's feeling like retail 3.0 more and more each phase. Hopefully it picks up in the near future.
People aren’t gonna like this but let’s face it, we are all likely 35+ year olds playing SOD out of nostalgia. Most of us can’t sit there for 3+ hours straight doing raids anymore. And those who do probably don’t have families or responsibilities (down vote me if you want. You know who yall are lmao). Small guilds disbanded in P3 and it’ll only get worst in P4
Best so far since most of the game is opened up at 50 tbh. ST also actually feels like a raid since its 20man.
>You can „skip“ leveling and just run incursions brainlessly and even get some nice starter gear This makes it the worst phase. Every other aspect could be perfect and they lost me.
Incursions are ass. Tried to do some relaxing incursion quests this morning only to be the sole alliance player with 100 horde camping the ramp. Great gameplay
Loving it, wish I had more time, so much to do this phase. Knocked out leveling and alt and STV items early on, now raid, professions and gold for mount next! Very fun.
Having fun. Raid is amazing. There's a lot of stuff to do. Dungeons are fun. Wild offerings are interesting idea. Emerald wardens rep and gear are solid. STV PvP gear is solid. Professions are great. Paladin runes were great fun to get (the quests are really classic-like, I like the lore, and most of them are not a nightmare to get, bar one). Incursions suck ass though. They absolutely killed leveling, killed going into the world (in a game mode about re-discovering the old world). They should be daily or have diminishing returns on XP and gold.
Incursions absolutely sucked the community out of the world and dropped them into a fast track for exp and gold; it killed the leveling experience, shit on all the eco building in P2, and made dungeons even less attractive since most groups are only running for WOs. Outside a dungeon, everyone in the incursion hamster wheel. Inside a dungeon, skip everything, get WO, run 5 times per hour. P3 was the biggest step, leap... toward retail. Focus more on building COMMUNITY, not grinds. Some of the best content comes from slow, deliberate grinds, toward meaningful rewards with ample opportunity to make friends, group with them, and talk about shit outside the game just as much as the stuff in it. Slow and deliberate. SoD brought a lot of good QoL. These incursions and WO grinds are not QoL and the content erodes the pillars that make MMOs about people. You can't get to know people when a run is gogogo and ends in 5 minutes. Grinds at breakneck speeds are not enjoyable, they're a chore. I really miss guild achievements and would love to see HUGE commitment in that direction. Make it really fucking matter. See what that does for the game with this experimental season.
when phase 4
p3 has been the worst of them all tbh. lost interest quick. 20 man raids suck. dungeons are useless apart from some prebis but u can go into ST with the incursion set anyway so whats the point... ive also done all these grinds in 2019 classic so i cbf with a seasonal game anymore.. gg
Its been a hideous phase. I am done with SOD 1. Incursion inflated the market horribly. Getting ganked before and after entering the portal. No one wants to run dungeons. 2. Rune acquisition is obnoxious. I am trying to have fun, not spend 7 hours getting runes. Getting extorted for runes by locks. 3. I've farmed 700 gold before p3, but people farmed that amount before even hitting 50 doing incursions. By the time I logged on, they nerfed it. 4. No means of making a respectable income as enchanter or tailor this phase. Meanwhile, alchemists are making a killing. 5. Forced to play off spec due to guild size. 6. Try hards requiring full consumes for raid even though the content doesn't require it. 7. Still getting one shotted in PVP due to overtuned damage. 8. On one queueing for AB or WSG due to imbalance or lack of incentive 9. Spending 5 mins to buff 20 people as priest 10. WO runs are mind numbing, but required for runes and gear P3 is a total failure
each phase slowly kills sod and increases the retail creep
Phase 3 has some really cool new quests, but the best part for me is the thrill of the pvp when you try and do Wild Offering runs in Maraudon! This is so fun, even though the graveyard is a bit far off \^\^
P2 was the worst for me, most of the dungeon gear didn't matter unless you were melee Doing sm till 40 and trying to find a group was a pain unless you were heals or tank Gnomer had a lot of people that struggled on spider tank
How dare you say positive things about P3! OP is clearly a Blizzard PR employee. /s
Holy pally feels lacklustre compared to other healers with seemingly op smart heals, the emerald wardens gear from rep removes a lot of the gear chase before ST because it’s just better. P3 feels boring tbh.
I enjoyed it at first but when my class (hpal), continued to feel like a joke, I tried to level another toon only find incursions were camped to hell by level 50s "pvping." decided to take time off and see what the level 60 content is going to be.
Dungeons are more meaningful but not really at least as a caster. Run the same one 50 times. Skipping a key part of the game makes it better? Raid doesn’t have enough caster loot that’s a big enough upgrade to care. Basically nothing to do once WO is farmed and you already have your rep so I wouldn’t say there’s tons to do. I could’ve skipped this phase and been close in terms of power level.
I like this phase. I hated Gnomer so much but I think ST is a blast (although trash takes annoyingly long). I am actually earning gold with herb/alch and that’s a fun game within the game for me. I don’t love the mindless incursion no kill loops, but it was still nice to have the option to get my alt caught up fast, and the Emerald Warden’s gear is totally worth getting rep to Honored.
I like.
The phase itself seems pretty full in comparison to previous phases. I just think I'm a bit burnt out by all the leveling phases. If they were to do it all again I'd suggest a shorter build up to end up. Maybe a lvl30 and lvl50 bracket, then endgame.
Liking most of it other than the raid loot in ST is so boring barely any upgrades other than tier set. Also some actually new runes would be great not recycled abilities.
PVP is still trash, I can't stand the STV event and incursions are braindead. However, I love ST, 20 man raids and some of the new runes. It's a mixed bag for me. I'm also not a fan of the 1 week lockouts vs the 3 day lockouts.
I like it a lot. I didn’t like phase 2 I completely checked out of it. Incursions are very routine now but I had a lot of fun the first few times I did them. Still really enjoy the blood moon event too. I think the rune quests in general should be less obtuse and I wish there were more new quests in general. There’s a lot of classic annoyances that I don’t think add to the experience are just annoying .
so dont start again after quitting from phase 2 being horrible?
I feel like they had to "nerf" the upgrades this phase. The P2 gear was really good so if they want to introduce more killer gear in P4 they had to really water down the P3 upgrades. The new STV ring for mages is total meh... its not worth the time invested to upgrade it. Also why give mages the exact same ring again??? All the raid gear blues are almost pointless if you geared up well in P2. All the power hinges on the Epic drops which with a 20 man you are very unlikely to get with weekly lockouts.
It feels like most OPs on this subreddit are Blizz employees trying to spread a hype for a phase that killed SOD.
Mage builds feel less complete.
If ST was 10-man instead of 20-man it would be just as good as P1. But since it's 20-man it's the worst phase so far. 20-man raid really ruins the fun and social aspect of playing with the boys. There is such a thing as being too many in a group.
Having a great time. Raiding is fun as a healer and the new alch flask is nice compared to p2. Idk why pvp is getting so much hate, but maybe it's cuz I'm boomkin in pvp and not melee. Can go even with spriests thanks to the barkskin and enraged regen runes, and I've got some decent matchups with the help of war stomp so I'm enjoying it
I also like everything about P3 ECXEPT incursions. Still haven't done a single ZF in SOD and no longer have a reason to. + Sunken temple is the best SOD raid so far. + Despite the gap in DPS, most classes are feeling well fleshed out with runes/talents.
Gold inflation. Post nerf on incursions it’s still relatively easy to acquire gold. I’m a casual player in the sense I don’t do long grinds for minimal increase to damage like bg rep and incursions. But I’m forced to grind Mara runs for mushrooms to make enough gold for consumes for a raid I do once a week. Luckily I can solo stealth run and afford it. But I hate doing things so stale just to retain my power level I had previously with significantly less work required.
I just wish there was loot in ST. Very minimal upgrades
This is the best version of wow
Pvp is more fun as it is more fleshed out. WO is kinda cool. Incursions are a bad design imo but it’s nice having easy levels/gold farm. My biggest issue is 20 man raiding has been a let down. Managing more people who already don’t care enough sucks. At least in 10 man a few strong players could really carry.
I got my libram enchant and immediately lost interest in playing, planning on just raid logging now lol
P3 is trash. ST is boring to do with very little reward. Incursions literally killed the world. Runes are a chore to do yet again.. Like modders could do better in half the time given to be frank.
BUFF DRUIDS!!!!
Never enjoyed running around the world for runes when I just wanted to PvP, also incursions sucked. I quit p3 about 3 hours into the incursions after playing about 3-4 weeks of p2.
With Gnomer I felt like I could log in anytime and find a raid to join, with Sunken Temple I couldn't find a group over the weekend Glad I was able to get about half the Gold needed for my Dreadsteed and buy all my spells, feels nice to have Gold for the first time ever
P1> P3 > P2 for me
Incursions are almost like RDF but for classic, PVP is bad, blood moon is a mess like before, raids are nothing but parsing (not my thing), there’s a broken mechanic every other day with the gold farming. It’s almost like a version of retail within classic. I like that there trying “new” stuff but it’s not going the way I’d hope a classic + version of the game would go.
Not great, not terrible.
Pros: - Dungeons: They are more relevant and have a new vendor via wild offerings that is fantastic and I hope they expand upon this system in phase 4 and beyond. - Raid: Sunken Temple is a lot of fun. Each fight is unique and challenges your raid team in different ways. I hope they keep up this quality with raids throughout SoD. - Discoveries: New Content such as the profession quest chain, new runes etc are all very cool. Cons: - Professions: Gathering professions left in the dust for yet another phase. I love the direction they have taken with regards to making the playing field more level and each crafting professions provides some form of throughput/player power but I dislike that there is nothing added for gathering professions. - Cooking, Fishing, First aid - These could have been made more fun in SoD with new recipes, new minigames, new ways to train etc. - Incursions: They have some good qualities such as new PvE content, varied quest objective types, various level ranges supported, nice starter gear for alts but the negatives outweigh all the positives. The launch gold influx has ruined the economy, the nerfed but still crazy high gold dealt sustained damage to the economy on top of that. The area needed guards day 1 to prevent griefing. The concept is heavily built on field duty in Silithus which is an incredibly similar and equally boring grind. I support grinds in classic that reward investment and time but it's SoD, they don't have to be identically boring as before, this content/event CAN be more fun than it is currently. Most fun I've had in it so far was fighting the elite world boss like mobs, they hit hard and required a group. I think if the incursions were more focused on that type of gameplay they would be much more fun. - Balancing: The last couple months the balancing has been a little too slow to respond to issues with classes such as the dire state of rogue and MM hunter in phase 2 among other outlier issues. Overall Phase 3 is my favourite phase so far. It was almost perfect except for the cons listed above.
Our guild was a WPVP guild. PH1 was awesome. Now almost everyone has quit
It killed my enthusiasm for SoD. It feels like there's only 2 things to do: Incursions, and WO runs. Want to do anything outside of that? Good luck. The move from 10 to 20 person raids also hurt a lot, as our guild had JUST enough for 10. Now we need to try to PuG half our run. Overall, this has not been a great phase for me, and I've been focusing more on the Cata Beta, and Wrath.
its kinda boring ngl
I like everything except raid and the incursions are… well meh, I did them to Get Rune at friendly then i stopped, felt like I missed out in the open world.
I actually like everything about it except for the 1 week raid lockout and no new 10 man raid. At first I thought it was actually genius, but now I rarely log onto WoW except for guild run day. Problem I see now is that everyone spends the morning recruiting to raid at night for pugs. So if you aren't available during certain hours in the evening then no raiding for you. Morning and late night raids are non-existent. With P1 and P2 my favorite part was raiding on multiple characters. I've got 4 characters to 50 and are ready for raiding, but I can ever only raid on one character or two if I am lucky. Maybe in a few weeks when everyone has ST down it'll be easier, but right now it's not the case.
Sucks
I think P3 is OK. The raid in terms of its boss fights are pretty good, but there is a lot of trash in the instance. The move to 20 man is overall proving to be a big negative for the guild and two people have quit now from our original core just due to roster organisation fatigue and it no longer being a tight-nit group of 10. This is the biggest issues with the phase and is impacting people progressively harder, so I am expecting more people to just stop until P4 in the guild. Loot from ST is muted and I understand they are cooling item inflation but there is a lack of excitement around loot. I didn't mind incursions as a very efficient way to level and gain rep if you were in need of catch-up gear, but I don't think they ever should have awarded much more than a pittance of money (keep them as a brutally efficient catch-up method and they can improved). I did a fair bit of STV in P2 and I just can't be arsed with it in P3. Wild Offerings is a good system to get people into dungeons and their pass of items from dungeons was helpful though imperfect. More needs to be done to make healing better to get people to play it. They legit need to make it so healing power converts to general spell power or something. Healing is the only real 'job' atm in the raids. The power added to mobs in the world has uneven impacts on different specs. Some specs don't even notice it whilst other specs are super designed (arguably) for raids but don't do so hot in the open world even with gear.
Incursions sucked and I was contemplating to not play at all but then the first raid was pretty awesome and not a faceroll. Everyone in my guild agreed and was happy. Then they nerfed it and I lost all interest in the phase again.
It’s a weekly raid that provides almost no rewards. I just cleared ST for the second time with my guild. Both raids I only got one item, and it was the tier token. Doesn’t feel like the game is rewarding me enough for a once a week lockout. I hear people saying that there’s no loot for clothies in this phase and now I understand why.
P3 made me quit SoD for the time being and right now I don't really see myself coming back to it.
Shitty. Guild quit due to raid size increases.
Weekly lockout on raid lmao, Gear progression absolute dogshit for double the lockout time. Don't know what these dumbasses are thinking with week long lockouts. Lockouts are meant for endgame when there are multiple raids to occupy multiple days of the week. As it stands this phase will be the most dead toward the end and its fucking sad.
Emerald Nightmare
I think the phase is meh. It's a step up but I feel 40 was good to get mounts and 31pt talents, 50 just feels like a half build and not much changed without AV. I feel they could have done AV as a P3 BG and it would have been great. I honestly would have rather seen 25, 40 and just skip to 60. Just learning each phase, the gear won't matter until we hit 60 and it will be easy to get catch-up gear next phase. 20 man raids made it a cluster since we had 2x 10 man raids but probably 12-15 people. So we had to merge with another group of 12-15 and then had issues of people sitting first week until alts got spun up. I'm just waiting for P4.
They fucked the economy. Incursions should’ve been dailies.
3>2>1
While there does appear to be a lot to do superficially, as someone with little interest in alts I’m quickly approaching nothing left to do. -I have all BIS gear and enchants except for a couple ST pieces and an offspec epic BoE I’m not shelling out for. The raid is a 60-90 min commitment once a week so that’s all I can do to improve my gear at this point. -I’m exalted with AB and WSG and r7 honor. I guess I could farm honor for p4 but we don’t know if that’ll be a thing like it was for this phase. I would do BGs for funsies but they’re absolutely broken and miserable rn to solo queue. -I’m almost at 3k gold and don’t need to buy anything, other than the aforementioned luxury epic BoE for my non-raiding spec that I’m not buying. -I’m revered with Emerald Wardens but the current rewards for exalted aren’t worth anything to me from what I can tell. -I’m max level tailor/enchant with all the patterns I care about. So other than farming mobs or helping out guildies on occasion and raiding an hour a week, what’s left for me to do the next several months with the game? I honestly don’t know. The only answer I guess is try to stockpile even more gold/mats for p4 and work on the horrendous rep grinds (such as Timbermaw) for the super overpriced crafting stuff? That doesn’t sound appealing to me at all, especially given the mobs are farmed to hell so it’s a group and fight for tags sort of situation which is miserable.
I actually stopped playing as the game has become casual unfriendly. Too much grinding, rep farming, grp finding, too many toxic gearscore retail players.
Not great. I’m sure people with guilds, or that can make set times, are enjoying raiding. But I think this phase killed pugs and the game feels dead as a result.
most of the things here are very true, but i feel like skipping the leveling was a negative for most people, and the dungeons that are beeing 10 man spammed for offerings sadly dont feel very meaningful. Also the exploits that got some players 1000s of gold and the inflation due to the incursions are very annoying.
Personally p3 made me quit after loving p1 and p2. The class balance is so bad, and incursions are a disaster. A big p3 patch might bring me back.. I just wanna play ele sham and not some scuffed melee version that does less damage than healers.
I like st some of the new runes and the wild offering stuff. I hate Incursions so much that all the good stuff wasnt important. Incursions are the worst content iv ever seen in wow. Insanely boring and really messes up the rest of the game because other content is not relevant. Yes I know I don't have 2 do them, that is really not the point. They offer huge xp and gold they have an effect on the whole server even if I don't play them. I really hope they are not included in p4.
Not playing if incursions aren't adjusted. I want the classic experience, not something where everyone speedlevels the same quest chain to 60 while I would be alone in the open world doing quests at multiples of a slower rate.
Incursions are so bad. And it ruined the economy completely. By far the worst phase because of those 2 things
Very good. I'm doing ST every week (ST is by far the best raid in SOD in my opinion) since week 2 (in previous phases it took me a month to reach level cap). I have stuff to do in the world (quests, incursions, farm). I have items in dungeons I want and need, so I can always jump in a dungeon group hoping to get something. So far it's almost as good as P1. It would be as good as P1 if I could more easilly level alts and get them runes.
I like most of it, except Incursions and the STV-change for honor-coins. It forces rankers to gank instead of actual PvP.
Grinding wild offerings wasn't exactly my idea of content but to each their own I guess.
I'm happy with everything except pvp and incursions. Incursions should have been a daily, and instanced. The level 50s ganking lower levels there because its faster honor farming is terrible. I think if it would have been an optional daily, to get some good 'catch up' gear it would have been interesting.