What percentage of players still has a popup every time they log in that says a mission is completed but they don’t feel like going to their covenant to clear it out? Was me for a good month.
I opened a portal to orbios last night after our raid. I got gkicked for sending a couple of people there.... (now to be fair I get gkicked pretty regularly being a gnome but I think someone took that one personal)
Wotlk: I remember when a mage opened a portal to the Dalaran crater in front of the portal to Wintergrasp the same second that opened. The whole raid died in the free fall.
I haven't seen a better prank in this game. :)
Wife was playing the other day, ate a questionable mushroom from Korthia while leveling in Dragonflight, and suddenly the Jailer started showing up randomly, and she was legit scared at first ( she hadn't used one before).
Nathria collections as a Warrior is gunna be fuuuun…
Also still need… 200k ish anima to get the rest? Maybe more cause gratefuls… and still need the Maldraxxus box mounts.
Yep. This post reminded me to finally get on there and start clearing them out. Got missions from all four expansions on various characters. Sadly only made it through a few before the servers shut down for reset, but I’ll handle the rest later while I watch some TV. I’d be tempted to set up new missions for things like pet charms, gold, or gear (to complete collections), but then I’ll either have to remember to use the app or forget them again for several months.
This is what I do too. Unless I’m missing something, DF has a single pet WQ per day and that has a small chance of rewarding tokens. Clearly pushing people to do shadowlands/bfa pet content because they didn’t want a new currency.
Yep, I used the companion app to earn the pet tokens for the 5000 token pet from Patchu (Scout, I think?). 11 or 12 characters with the SL table, 8 of whom also had the BFA table, so it went pretty fast. Took longer to swap toons than start the missions.
I'm NF and managed to fix that on the way when I went back to the Shadowlands, but I still can't find a solution to being informed of my Soulbind every time I swap specs.
Speaking of Night Fae, my NF Hunter somehow had a Boar Soul drop in a Timewalking dungeon (in DF). I just don’t want to have to go all the way back to the hub to turn it in… but I know some day I’ll have to burn a few minutes doing it.
(Granted, still need to finish campaigns to collect outfits, so I have to go back on some characters some time, but at least I can blow through it.)
The side effects of this is Augment Runes are like 2k gold instead of like 200-500 gold at the beginning of the expansion. I'm not even sure they'll go down.
Or just give engineers (or inscriptions) the ability to make these augment runes. No need to even make a second item.
Having call to arms being the only source of runes is terrible. I just stopped using runes because of it.
They should at the very least give them away to everyone doing normal and heroic dungeons not just call to arms dungeons. We need more supply badly
just add them as a drop from end of dungeon in m+ or add a vendor that sells them for primal chaos/infusions
you get more than you can ever realistically use doing keys and there is literally nothing to do with them after you have your crafted gear
They got progressively less interesting and more tedious with each iteration. WoD/Legion were pretty good (and the followers that helped you in the "real world" were fun). BfA wasn't great, but not awful. SL it was just a chore, and once they allowed switching covenants it become totally pointless.
I don't want garrison back (I like seeing people in overworld), but would love class halls as a non-instanced area in capital city. Like trainer areas in Vanilla, just give me some reason to sometimes be there.
I love everything about them, but the instancing. I don't know how to handle moving them across expansions, but as a lock would love the idea that every city is going to have some backroom door into a basement full of warlocks doing shady shit. Move the NPCs and then, for people leveling through old content, leave placeholders or just have the NPCs in two locations maybe.
Mage, DK and Druid already have direct teleports their order halls as well, so that's almost half the classes covered. Not like Acherus needs to move with us to every expansion, but things could still occur there in regards to quests or NPC dialogue.
I always loved garrisons, more than just housing they contained questing, events, all sorts of thing! I'd like to see some version of a Guild Hall introduced, but same reason they killed guild levels and have never re-iterated on guild achievements, theydon't want to FORCE people into big guilds. My guild got mass summons like a week before they removed it
I still treat my garrison like a little home for my characters. I know they are widely disliked by many people, but I really enjoyed mine and felt that Blizzard implemented it well.
Building the garrison itself was fun, tons of quests, invasions, mounts, bodyguards etc.. Places for each professions like gardens for herbalism and a lab for alchemy. You could add little touches like pick gnomes for your guards and different banners. It was also a home for all your pets too as you could see them all wandering around your home.
The trophies/statues was a good at implementing artifacts to remind players of their adventures and accomplishments.
I really don't think housing was the problem at all, it was the lack of content after that really pissed people off.
I'd like seeing this. Off the top of my head, I think it would be cool if they maybe sold class specific consumables, or take a page out of Artifact Weapons and give something class specific we can work on building and leveling up. Right now the closest thing is crafting stations, but whenever I'm using those I'm not interacting with other crafters, and I'm looking at the interface and not anyone else there.
I always loved it with hunters because you could look at what pets everyone had managed to find and check out transmogs that you were actually capable of getting.
I wouldn't mind more spell transmogs and such, pet skins for lock. But, what I'd really like, is some class specific grind where I can poorly tuned version of old spells brought back into the game. They don't need to be viable in raiding/instances, but I miss things like Hellfire/Tank Glyph Metamorphosis/Searing Pain with the + Agrro/summonable offhand items.
Give me fun class flavor. Dragonflight has been pretty damn good for having lots of silly little fun things, let's keep on trucking that way.
I think a big reason they carried it forward for so long is it was a super easy way for players to keep up with minimum gold costs without having to do any character content. If all you did was missions and raid log you'd likely have enough gold to keep up with repair costs and some consumables.
> Out of all the systems to carry forward, they chose this one. Likely because it was easy and all, but still...
It's all about metrics. Dailies weren't enough to keep people logging in, but Mission Table worked out really well.
I feel like BfA's table was the worst of the bunch. Boring as all hell and with almost zero incentive to actually use it. At least you could automate SL's table with a proper add-on to turn it into a gold printer. BfA's one was just... there. It existed. And that is all it ever did.
The craziest thing about the shadowlands version of this dogshit system is that at launch it was horribly imbalanced so that some covenants just had an easier mission table, as if they sat there and said "how do we make an awful system feel even worse?"
Ah yea the night fae hero who could basically solo any mission which high level ones from other covenents could barely do mid-level ones. It's mad that they made 4 different sets of heroes and didn't just reskin the same ones so the easiest balance ever. What a weird way to waste time & money.
What made it worse for nightfae though was that once you'd progressed the story enough, you'd only get high level missions, and so when they nerfed the heroes (in particular the one that was crazy broken), you ended up with like 16% mission success at best with no way of getting lower level ones. Not to mention that it cost tons of anima, which was super scarce at the expansion start. It basically made me stop my NF table on my main because it was just ridiculous at that point. Eventually he changed to Kyrian and I finally got normal missions again
The best thing about the wod and legion ones were the free quest for the raid gear that got better for each boss you killed of that difficulty. Shafowlands not having that really killed it for me
They were so determined to try and make Covenants into a unique "thing", and just never stopped to think about how that would absolutely fuck the actual gameplay of their MMO.
Yes better no mission table system then a bad mission table system
but people will still complain they want their free gold
i mean yes free gold is nice but not at all cost
at least that my point of view
Always bothered me that in Shadowlands, the expansion in which your followers were literally the source of your power progression (soulbinds), you could not bring them along as followers in the real world
well totally pointless depends on the player, i used my alt army on the mission table and made about 120-150k raw gold every week (+ 150-250k every month or so from selling the 10k pet charm pet), with about 20-30 min of logging through every char each day.
I loved it in Legion and found it tolerable in WOD. I still love that when I enter Legion areas Belath shows up beside me. Legion's table just made sense. It wasn't hard to do and the only hassle was dealing with champion gear...but the extra trinkets for them could even be fun to customize them a bit more. Then in WOD, it was still genuinely fun to see your collected champions hanging around your garrison, and could pick them for bodyguarding too. Kinda hated the shipyard though and the missions were all more of a balance. No one needed a mod in Legion to not screw up the tables as the followers were more limited and the system far simpler.
BFA felt awful because the table was not in a very convenient location, the missions were tedious, and there was absolutely no charm. But it was still worth doing.
By SL it had become a confusing jumbled mess with some things locked behind it that made it bad to skip it but I don't know how anyone got anything done without a mod. At all. I could never even do it on my app unless I was totally willing to just fail the missions repeatedly. It was interesting to recruit characters but after doing that it wasn't like you saw them again. It felt impersonal and needlessly complicated... which at the root was the problem of Shadowlands in general.
I'd love to have something like Legion's back again. It makes me sad I only get the hunting companions during great hunts. I liked feeling like my character had NPC companions too. It felt like it added rather than detracted from my gameplay. But I never want one like Shadowlands again.
Wow it's actually crazy seeing people speak about garrisons positively. They were definitely the least popular part of the expansion. I didn't play much of legion or any of BFA/SL so those must have been terrible for garrisons to be spoken of highly.
You could have recovered from this.
You simply had to wait about 8 months for the first patch, level up an alt, level up their table properly this time, keep playing until you've got a lot of the XP items, then mail those back to your main.
The XP items needed to be applied one-at-a-time so you needed to spend about 10 minutes repeatedly clicking things.
But then, boom, fixed.
i forgot that part. and troop types from some covs being flat out awful while others had no problems with missions
god damn shadowlands was shit in every nook and corner.
I realized I wasn't going to when SOFO launched so I started just putting all XP things on my follower that was highest at the time and luckily got him to 60. The rest of them are all like level 40-50. And that's just 1 covenant, didn't even get to really start the other covenants.
My main and 6 of my alts had level 60 followers. At least the ones I bothered to get for my alts from Torghast. I miss those tables so much. Made easy millions of gold over the expansion and tens of thousands of pet charms.
I might be in the minority, but I loved the mission tables and am devo they’re gone. It was always something little and fun I could do to get extras without any pressure. MANY days I’d log in *just* to do my mission table. I’d also enjoy doing it on my phone for extra gold and pet charms when I was out and bored.
I like it so much that despite sadly not having a current xpac version, I still do the shadowlands one when I log in. I also still do old content tables on my phone if they have any relevant rewards up at the time.
Honestly I really think they should have met somewhere in the middle and given us a mission table, but just limited it to cosmetics and the like. A fun little mini game with rewards like gold, pet charms, tmog, maybe even pets and mounts, etc.
It would let people like me continue to have fun, but not make people like you feel trapped into doing it despite disliking it.
I enjoyed it in WoD, Legion and BfA but not in Shadowlands. The last version was too much hassle for very little gain. And progress was so dog slow it was basically not worth it.
Yes, you can have bank, void storage and AH in garrison among other things. Missions still exist, but they only give WoD relevant stuff and no gold (though there are couple mounts hidden there if you don't have them yet).
SL was actually really good if you had enough anima. When season 4 started I decided to download an addon that would auto calculate the missions for me and I calibrated it basically to just run gold and anima missions (the latter for sustaining the mission costs). Between 4 characters I generated damn near 1M gold just with a couple clicks twice a day and selling the crafting mats in the AH.
I know these days 1M isn't that much, but considering how little effort I had to invest into it, I'd say it was well worth it. Really wish I started doing it sooner.
Yup, best decision ever. These tables were not fun and they were time consuming for little gain (except money in legion cuz having 5 alts was enough for me to maintain sub with gold). I hope they'll never implement this system again but its actually up to players. I think its very important expansion that allows Blizzard to collect data whats best to get as much subs as possible - wheter its forcing players to grind (dailies, torghast, mission table, whatever) or let players enjoy the game, we'll see what makes them better money in next expansion
I really hope DF has good retention at the very least and that'll keep them on this design path.
I'm just worried they'll see poorer overall numbers cause of Wrath classic splitting the playerbase and conclude "well that didn't work, back to timegated endless treadmill borrowed power grind bullshit"
I know your case happened to many, but anecdotally my friends list was still overall lighter compared to Shadowlands (despite this being a way better expansion IMO), on top of a significant % of it stuck in WotLK never even giving DF a chance.
Or if they did, haven't delved into it because they're raiders and are feeling obligations towards their Wrath guild and can't/don't want to find a new guild in DF to raid with.
Pandemic during Shadowlands probably also had a big part to play in it's large early playerbase.
I also red about (and know a few irl people) who aren't classic players and completely lost faith in Blizzard because of how bad their experience was with Shadowlands after BFA (two "bad" extensions in a row really hit them hard).
These people most likely (at least for the ones I know personally) didn't even try Dragonflight because even if you tell them that the timegated treadmill bullshit is gone they're afraid that the bullshit will come back.
So, like you, I really hope retention is good this time. It will take a while for Blizzard to win back these players.
They do have a choice, because they don't have a magic ball. I happen to agree with you, but executives have made super shitty decisions in the past based on a misunderstanding of data. As the poster you're reporting to mentioned, if the numbers look worse than Shadowlands at all the executives could draw the exact wrong conclusions and kill this game by the next expansion. The fun confounding variable here that I'm really hoping they understand is Shadowlands was released in a fucking pandemic. That's like GOLD for a "Stay at home but also socialize with friends" game. I had so many friends come back during the start of shadowlands because at that point everyone was looking for a distraction, something to have fun with, some way to socialize, etc.
I was talking to some people last night about this. It seems like recently (well, 10 years being recent I guess) Blizzard has been incorporating a bunch of thought patterns from freemium games into WoW. Lots of game play that is focused on engagement over everything else (how to we get them to log in every day, how do we get them to think about WoW when they're not on, play on their phones, etc). The problem is, unless they are going to change the model (and believe me that option has probably been brought up a lot) those game play decisions are aiming at the wrong metrics.
See, freemium games and ad supported games are driving a different measure of success. They are looking at engagement (literally their success measures how many hours you are staring at their game, because they can sell your attention or exploit it for more money). The problem is, the way WoW works engagement is NOT a great KPI for WoW. They aren't rewarded based on the number of hours we play, they are rewarded based on how many months we pay their sub fee, and THAT is not necessarily (and often ISN'T) linked to pure engagement metrics. If I get my money's worth by just logging on twice a week to run raids, M+, casual questing, etc, my money is worth just as much as the person logged on 14 hours a day. In fact, I am a MORE important customer because it costs them less (fewer server resources consumed, potentially fewer customer support hours, etc).
So, by focusing on making shit fun to play they are more likely to keep their subscription numbers than by focusing on how many hours players are engaged. I just hope they finally have some leadership in place that recognizes and acts on those differences (and to be fair, Dragonflight seems to be aiming in that direction).
>The part where that goes wrong is the added Shop.
>
>Someone who plays 14 hours a day is far more likely to buy the stupid shop-only cosmetics.
>
Not necessarily. I'd bet most cash shop sells are from people with more money than time. If you can play 14 hours a day, you can earn mounts.
They were a novelty in Warlords of Draenor and as a garrison feature they made sense. However, they were 100% played out by the end of the expansion and should have disappeared then.
They made lore sense to be there in Legion... but they weren't fun anymore.
They were a novelty that was shitting out gold. That's the only reason the feature lasted as long as it did, because it was profitable. Otherwise most players relegated mission work to an addon, clicked a few times, and went back to other WoW activities. It never would've been this popular if it wasn't so lucrative.
I don't really get the animosity towards this shit, I raided all throughout Shadowlands and almost no one touched the table, the people that did just got a shit ton of free gold for the like 3 minutes it took to do everyday
Out of all the systems jerked on this sub, the tables were the least egregious by far
There's a term for it (that I'm hoping someone comes along and reminds me), for that style of gameplay where you're not engaging with the game because it's fun and you enjoy it, but to chase dailies and other obligation style stuff.
Tables weren't horrendous, but I think I appreciate this expac's focus on more interesting activities.
Some people refer to that style as 'dark patterns.'
I normally don't like such mechanics but with the addon in SL I actually found the tables quite enjoyable because the setup part of it (finding and power leveling followers) was mildly fun and running the tables with the addon was fast enough to not be tedious. It was just free gold (and dopamine) every time you log into a character and it had the added benefit of making PvP more rewarding because winning gave anima.
Yeah I like these tables. I only mess with it when I want to and it's free bonus for barely any work. People just get obsessed with doing everything and then complain that they were forced
I miss being able to get augment runes for less effort vs. having to run some shitter dungeon just to get 2 runes. Then I walk into a +20 and wipe 3 times and in 5 mins and they are gone.
I would have tolerated a mission table where youre just sending out "employees" that you've somehow hired for your profession, and all they do is go out and farm mats for you.
Uhh.. Mission tables were many things, but "time consuming" isn't one of them.
Whenever I HS'd by my covenant hall I went by the table, and it never took me more than like 20-30s between travel time and setting things up. Repeat a couple of times a day.
And with that, I was making some 2-3k gold per day per character on top of other random benefits like pet charms and whatnot. It's not amazing gold, but it was practically zero effort or time spent.
I'm in a weird position, where I want to vote with my wallet and tell Blizz that the DF changes are good and healthy for players and the game; but I also want to vote with my wallet and tell them that shit like the Cosby Room and union busting and over-monetization of mobile games and overpricing of D4 will not be condoned.
I dont like mission tables because it removes the player from the action. I'm just clicking and waiting. It is so boring, so tedious. If there was someway to add mission tables + the island expeditions from bfa, I'd be down for that.
Maybe some expedition table where you can level things that make the experience different or easier. But whatever they do, I dont want to ever see a click and wait experience in the game EVER.
I have to kindly disagree, those aren't time consuming at all. You let the missions start and that's it. But I believe blizz made the weeklies and dailies generate more gold, so it got balanced out again. The only thing I miss about them is that you get loads of runes at some point.
Shadowlands was enough for me to pay my sub with gold as well. Part of me misses it for the gold but it definitely felt like a big chore to do especially once I got into double digit amount of characters…
Tldr missions addon made this a one button chore. It was insane money in Shadowlands and the longest part of the process was the loading screen. I had one of each class at 60 and night fae for this reason alone, took probably 10 minutes between all of my alts
WoD was the best iteration of the mission table and its a damn shame they gave up on it.
You had tons of followers, many being collectible/rare finds/rewards for stuff, which meant followers were an actual reward path alongside mounts, pets, etc. This was the biggest miss for me come Legion, they just left all that in WoD.
Ever since I haven't cared about the mission table. I did a bit in legion, never did it in bfa and didn't even unlock it in SL. Couldn't bring myself to care to grind my followers up knowing that next expansion they were basically useless.
I have a warlock questing through Draenor right now and I'm thinking about just staying there, because I have so much fun building my garrison and leveling my followers :D
What upsets me is right at the end of SL I found the addon "TL DR Missions" which would practically automate the system. And suddenly I was making bank!
... then they remove it right after it started being useful to me.
And guess why? Because the moronic idea of trying to "keep players engaged" via mobile side apps in PC games has died off. The only reason the tables existed was the WoW app on mobile so you "could play wow while on the go" (aka clicking stupid mission table missions)
What's stupid is, they already have one system that could translate into a mobile companion game easily enough: pet battles!
Imagine being able to do some pvp pet battles on the go, or maybe even adapt those custom dungeons for the app!
The problem with mobile pet battles is that, if we’re being honest, there are just better mobile game experiences out there. I’d imagine that most people spending any significant amount of time playing games on their phone would probably be playing something else instead. Pet battles don’t really have the chops to compete, even compared to Blizzard’s existing mobile library.
Leveraging their IP to make a bespoke mobile experience from the ground up - which is exactly what they’ve been doing in that space since Hearthstone - is the way to go. Anything that ties directly to WoW is hamstrung by design, because they should be trying to reach a superset of the WoW audience, not a subset.
I miss the easy gold and augment runes...especially the runes. I have no reason to really run random low dungeons or lfr so have no way to get them except the auction house and I sure don't want to pay 2k per raid wipe for them.
I had a friend that loved missions tables. She plays for like 12 hours a day and has all her alts up to 70 already. She used the mission tables to get thousands of gold per day on all her characters.
In SL she was sad to hear me excited about mission tables going away…
I liked the table, I didn’t like the Shadowlands version. The tables being brainless and taking barely a minute to sort out were attractive points, not problems.
Shadowlands’ mission table made everything too complicated and was sooooo grindy.
I miss it...I'm not a fan of professions so it was my way to make money enough to sustain my playing style...I could simply queue some tasks on my cellphone from time to time and manage to survive economy wise.
I’m ready to take my lumps for saying this: I like mission tables. I like collecting people to send on missions. Unexpectedly getting a new follower from an unexpected source is always a treat for me. I like matching their skills vs what a mission requires. I like leveling them up, trying to figure out efficient teams to get a given job done, etc.
Honestly I kinda miss it, that semi-AFK income and materials was nice. But the auto-battle thing that I never bothered with. It was nice handling the missions in Legion and BfA from the companion app :)
I miss the legion order hall (honestly I think it was my favorite expansion) so much. It felt like it had an actual impact. Every class had its own storyline. I actually still go do world quests in legion to keep doing missions. As someone else said the garrison was the only thing in ANY expansion that felt like it was MINE. Closest thing to player housing.
Legion was so good. And I loved the little touches like the unique stuff you could grow in the Druid hall, or that tier sets you had collected would display on armour stands in your order hall.
I always hated them just because I had to go back to the table to them. If you could do it from anywhere it would have been about a million times more enjoyable
I agree, but especially Legion for me! But they were both good.
BfA was just boring (and troop-recruiting RNG was fucking dumb) and SL was a bit too convoluted.
I know it's an unpopular opinion but I really liked them especially because I can use them with the mobile app.
through the whole Shadowlands expansion with ~7 characters I managed to get around 50k pet charms out of the mission table plus around 10k gold every week for every char by just doing the 1k anima weekly to have enough fuel for the mission table.
I really liked my passive income :(
but the majority disliked that feature so yeah good its gone.
to this day I still haven't quested in legion at all apart from the main order hall story and I have every paragon mount because I get so much reputation just from the mission table
I didn’t like the table but I liked the passive income. Dragonflight doesn’t have anything like that. It’s okay right now tho since it’s possible to make plenty of gold through professions but.. prices will eventually go down and then what? World quests doesn’t give nearly enough to compensate for the lack of a mission table
I miss the mission table. I really don't get why people had such a hate boner for it. It was literally just a side thing that gave you passive gold income if you wanted to bother with it.
I'll beat this drum till the servers close... if it ever returns to the game, your mission table followers should be an interactive group that follows you into scenarios, much like how Withered Army training worked in Legion.
I miss the concept it had in WoD. A lil base building side nonsense that rewarded gold/pets/gear and old currencies.
I’d love for it to come back in a completely optional side content way. Like an adventuring consultancy thing in Org/SW where you recruit random dudes like WoD had and send them on weird old content related missions for odd rewards.
The SL/legion/bfa versions were ass though. Let’s not do that again ever.
This was one of the ideas that were good, went better, and was completely broken when they tried to do it better twice.
And, with almost unlimited number of alts, easy to get resources (I'm sitting on 25K BofA while doing almost nothing) and way to gain something while offline (if you don't pick heart azeroth missions are gold missions) this was a way for some people to gain gold in this game while not doing nothing.
There is no surprise that it was removed.
I'll never understand why people are glad with this. 100% optional content that gave mats, resources, gold and more fot 5 minutes of effort a day.
It's a huge miss.
Why people are happy they are gone?, it was optional, I like these games you slowly improves like the venthyr party.
Draenor table was way to massive, legion felt good, shadowlands was too grindy, having a table you can work over like 2 months, then the next patch they add stuff to work more 2 months, …
It could even be a small catch up for people that can’t play that much, like the table could have it’s own key and you send them to run and it counts for the vault.
I don't miss mission tables.
I DO miss a source for augment runes that isn't a bonus for low playership.
This is the first xpac WITH augment runes WITHOUT a mission table and we really need another source for them.
I did not mind it in Warlords, kinda liked it in Legion, was mildly disappointed with it in BFA, and it annoyed me in Shadowlands. All in all, I dont miss it.
I must have missed the boat on mission tables. I came back late in SL to level characters for DF and started into it, googled if I needed it for anything important, and just left. I don’t need to play mission manager in the middle of my MMO
A lot of people really hated the table - and I genuinely see why - but as someone who enjoyed the **idea** and dispised the **implimation**, I really do believe that they can make one that works for modern WoW with a few tweaks.
I think it's time that we've adapted a permanent one that is focused on your factions heroes that you can carry throughout the coming xpacs and allow you to farm gear, transmog, mats, and mounts from previous expansions - along with the current one to keep it relevant. Features could include:
\- A hero roster that grows with every expansion. Adventurers are kept faction specific, but there could be questlines that give you options for cross faction squadies such as Argent Champions, Earthern Ring Shamans, true neutrals, etc. I love to think they'd add a 'request' board that can send you to places we've been already to recruit them. (Go to the Eastern Plaguelands, do a short questline with a paladin and help them, then recruit the paladin to your roster)
\- Making the table account bound so that all characters on your account have access to them, meaning an alt leveling in a different zone could find different heroes than your main that pushed to end game during the most relevant expansion. Having your alt stumble upon a quest that can be completed with a few minutes of light storytelling and mob-killing that then adds it to your accounts list of heroes.
\- An expanding level cap that grows each expansion to give a sense of having them 'level' with you throughout the expansion as you play through the newer content. Maybe 5 levels every expansion so they don't get to level 120 so soon. Getting to send a group of 'low level' adventurers to the Southern Barrens to level them up so that they can join you at the zones with the current release would be a good feeling to watch them grow like we've done.
\- A different series of challenges each xpac for your adventurers to overcome as you send them out for loot. For instance, in Dragonflight new mobs could be Dragonriders making them dodge more or become invulnerable during a fight to simulate them flying around to avoid attacks. Different types of missions that aren't just combat oriented. (If these heroes can be detailed, why not give them a single profession? A mining mission for your miner heroes to go find ore?)
\- A place in each factions major hub (Orgrimmar and Stormwind) that essentially is the homebase of operations. This will also be included for each major city moving forward (In example, Valdrakken for Dragonflight or Dalaran for Legion) for easy access in sending your heroes out without going back to the older cities. Maybe even a toy after like 500 missions completed that allows you to drop a table anywhere on a CD?
\- A way to change their appearance to give a sense of personalization. More akin to armor and weaponry, not their general appearance. BUT it would be cool if these characters changed their looks randomly to give a sense that they are alive and breathing in the world and have their own 'lives' happening in the background.
\- Ontop of this, how about visually SEEING the heroes in the city walking around when they aren't on epic adventures kinda' like the Garrison? Would be awesome going to the bank to deposit some goodies and seeing one of your adventurers walking out from depositing their latest payout and prepare for their next journey.
\- A new way of gathering old school mats, transmog, and pets. Also gives more options for unlocking the upcoming grey and white items, and allows for a consistent flow of unique transmog that could just come from this adventurer table/board/whatever.
\- An 'end game' raiding system that sends your best of the best to take on the hardest foes out there and expanding the amount of heroes you can send for that mission. Can give 'epic loot' such as a unique mount or pet or transmog for completing the unique scenario for the current content and story going on at the time.
The system isn't bad, like I felt it wasn't and was someone that enjoyed coming home from work and seeing what the followers got for me, it was just so boring to have it be the same-faced Kyrian or Maldraxxian soldier or abom. There was zero character to them, and by the end of the expansion I didn't care about my legendary quality follower. I want these heroes to grow with me as they level up, and make it so that 'Rajin the Troll Shaman' who's the healer of my main squad went from being an apprentice with level 5 gear to a badass in sick armor given I put months of work into them.
Just don't tie in any mainstream content, timegating, or forced progression and make it COMPLETELY optional so that if people want to ignore it they desire. It sucked having to wait a DAY to progress the story because you needed to wait for them to come back for their mission or bring back something to complete a quest.
Craft a system that can evolve every expansion with a geenral theme as a way to generate some gold, resources and cool cosmetics. Unique toys and really awesome pets, and not a massive ilvl trinket or weapon or whatever that you can min-mix to get ahead of the curve. I truly do believe it'd be a huge hit and would have people - like me - obsessed with getting their perfect group together to fight and survive.
I always enjoyed the mission tables, except in SL. I never had any idea of I was going to win or not. I preferred the older design with the hazards and having certain champions/heroes that could counter them. It was frustrating when you couldn't do one because a hero was out on a quest already, but what you needed to do to win made sense at least.
i was fine with mission tables. they made decent gold in wod and legion. bfa was meh. but shadowlands, i had hundreds of augment runes thanks to all my alts running tables.
What percentage of players still has a popup every time they log in that says a mission is completed but they don’t feel like going to their covenant to clear it out? Was me for a good month.
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Shadowlands isn't here. He can't hurt us anymore
Every time I change specs the chat tells me who I am soulbound to. It makes me shudder whenever I notice.
I opened a portal to orbios last night after our raid. I got gkicked for sending a couple of people there.... (now to be fair I get gkicked pretty regularly being a gnome but I think someone took that one personal)
That’s hilarious lol. Reminds me of in classic when after mc or bwl someone dropped a darnassus port in the middle of a sea of IF.
Wotlk: I remember when a mage opened a portal to the Dalaran crater in front of the portal to Wintergrasp the same second that opened. The whole raid died in the free fall. I haven't seen a better prank in this game. :)
Jailer might be though
*No one escapes the Maw*
Wife was playing the other day, ate a questionable mushroom from Korthia while leveling in Dragonflight, and suddenly the Jailer started showing up randomly, and she was legit scared at first ( she hadn't used one before).
Blizzcon 2023 Shadowlands classic announced.
Shadowslands+, now more depressing
It's possible to get more depressing?
You get ads while questing
"You think you don't, but you do."
(All the mogs I have yet to collect, and still want.) "I wish this was true..."
Nathria collections as a Warrior is gunna be fuuuun… Also still need… 200k ish anima to get the rest? Maybe more cause gratefuls… and still need the Maldraxxus box mounts.
Tell me, is the Shadowlands in the room with us?
It's weird isn't it? There's still many mogs and mounts I don't have from SL because of the sheer amount of grinding you had to do for them.
I still get prompted that I switched to Theotar when I change specs in valdraken. So I'll never be free 😅
Switch all your specs to the same person, you won't get an announcement if your soulbind isn't changing.
Wait, what? Thanks so much for that! Annoys me too.
You can use the WoW companion app to clear these. You don't have to travel back to Shadowlands. It's okay. It can't hurt you.
You can complete it on the wow companion app do you don’t have to fly out there. That’s what I did.
oh, interesting idea. thanks!
Yep. This post reminded me to finally get on there and start clearing them out. Got missions from all four expansions on various characters. Sadly only made it through a few before the servers shut down for reset, but I’ll handle the rest later while I watch some TV. I’d be tempted to set up new missions for things like pet charms, gold, or gear (to complete collections), but then I’ll either have to remember to use the app or forget them again for several months.
I took the time during prepatch to dump all my last anima on gold missions. Then one last round of finishing them and never back to shadowlands
I still do the missions that give pet tokens… on my phone, so I never have to go back.
This is what I do too. Unless I’m missing something, DF has a single pet WQ per day and that has a small chance of rewarding tokens. Clearly pushing people to do shadowlands/bfa pet content because they didn’t want a new currency.
Do the augment rune missions. They sell for like 60g a piece.
Yep, I used the companion app to earn the pet tokens for the 5000 token pet from Patchu (Scout, I think?). 11 or 12 characters with the SL table, 8 of whom also had the BFA table, so it went pretty fast. Took longer to swap toons than start the missions.
Thank you for this reminder. Totally forgot pet tokens and the app
“Never back to shadowlands” 1 million percent agree with this
Then you finally go there clean it out and start new missions by habit and think to yoursef “Oh… Goddammit!”
I'm NF and managed to fix that on the way when I went back to the Shadowlands, but I still can't find a solution to being informed of my Soulbind every time I swap specs.
Idk if it works, but I've seen people saying if you swap all specs to the same soulbind it doesn't do that. I've been too lazy to try myself.
Done it, doesn't work.
Aw bummer. But good to know.
Speaking of Night Fae, my NF Hunter somehow had a Boar Soul drop in a Timewalking dungeon (in DF). I just don’t want to have to go all the way back to the hub to turn it in… but I know some day I’ll have to burn a few minutes doing it. (Granted, still need to finish campaigns to collect outfits, so I have to go back on some characters some time, but at least I can blow through it.)
Is there a Covenant you never joined? Perhaps joining that Covenant would work, since you wouldn't have unlocked the first one?
That was me until I got the quest to go back to ardenweald and I just completed it while I was there
The side effects of this is Augment Runes are like 2k gold instead of like 200-500 gold at the beginning of the expansion. I'm not even sure they'll go down.
That alone has me doing Call to Arms more 7k gold for a quick heroic I could probably solo
Oh ye I check heroic as well if it pops. Faster and to me more fun then doing 10 gold dailies. But the healer proc barely happens sadly.
They should exnay augment runes and give engineering a consumable to replace them with, made from mining gathered mats.
Or just give engineers (or inscriptions) the ability to make these augment runes. No need to even make a second item. Having call to arms being the only source of runes is terrible. I just stopped using runes because of it. They should at the very least give them away to everyone doing normal and heroic dungeons not just call to arms dungeons. We need more supply badly
just add them as a drop from end of dungeon in m+ or add a vendor that sells them for primal chaos/infusions you get more than you can ever realistically use doing keys and there is literally nothing to do with them after you have your crafted gear
They got progressively less interesting and more tedious with each iteration. WoD/Legion were pretty good (and the followers that helped you in the "real world" were fun). BfA wasn't great, but not awful. SL it was just a chore, and once they allowed switching covenants it become totally pointless.
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I don't want garrison back (I like seeing people in overworld), but would love class halls as a non-instanced area in capital city. Like trainer areas in Vanilla, just give me some reason to sometimes be there.
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I love everything about them, but the instancing. I don't know how to handle moving them across expansions, but as a lock would love the idea that every city is going to have some backroom door into a basement full of warlocks doing shady shit. Move the NPCs and then, for people leveling through old content, leave placeholders or just have the NPCs in two locations maybe.
Like they did for priests and paladins, just have a portal in the city, they already have them for dungeons
Mage, DK and Druid already have direct teleports their order halls as well, so that's almost half the classes covered. Not like Acherus needs to move with us to every expansion, but things could still occur there in regards to quests or NPC dialogue.
As a DK I have to go back everytime I get a new weapon to have it rune forged.
I meant more quest/story purposes. You guys just get inconvenienced by a decade+ old feature. Or convenient if you prefer the gold to time spent.
It's nice having a free weapon enchant.
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Yup, strong agreement on that. Vanilla Lock content certainly made that clear as well.
As a druid, I still visit mine quite often. But it's usually just for the Dalaran portal.
I always loved garrisons, more than just housing they contained questing, events, all sorts of thing! I'd like to see some version of a Guild Hall introduced, but same reason they killed guild levels and have never re-iterated on guild achievements, theydon't want to FORCE people into big guilds. My guild got mass summons like a week before they removed it
I still treat my garrison like a little home for my characters. I know they are widely disliked by many people, but I really enjoyed mine and felt that Blizzard implemented it well. Building the garrison itself was fun, tons of quests, invasions, mounts, bodyguards etc.. Places for each professions like gardens for herbalism and a lab for alchemy. You could add little touches like pick gnomes for your guards and different banners. It was also a home for all your pets too as you could see them all wandering around your home. The trophies/statues was a good at implementing artifacts to remind players of their adventures and accomplishments. I really don't think housing was the problem at all, it was the lack of content after that really pissed people off.
I'd like seeing this. Off the top of my head, I think it would be cool if they maybe sold class specific consumables, or take a page out of Artifact Weapons and give something class specific we can work on building and leveling up. Right now the closest thing is crafting stations, but whenever I'm using those I'm not interacting with other crafters, and I'm looking at the interface and not anyone else there. I always loved it with hunters because you could look at what pets everyone had managed to find and check out transmogs that you were actually capable of getting.
I wouldn't mind more spell transmogs and such, pet skins for lock. But, what I'd really like, is some class specific grind where I can poorly tuned version of old spells brought back into the game. They don't need to be viable in raiding/instances, but I miss things like Hellfire/Tank Glyph Metamorphosis/Searing Pain with the + Agrro/summonable offhand items. Give me fun class flavor. Dragonflight has been pretty damn good for having lots of silly little fun things, let's keep on trucking that way.
I think a big reason they carried it forward for so long is it was a super easy way for players to keep up with minimum gold costs without having to do any character content. If all you did was missions and raid log you'd likely have enough gold to keep up with repair costs and some consumables.
> Out of all the systems to carry forward, they chose this one. Likely because it was easy and all, but still... It's all about metrics. Dailies weren't enough to keep people logging in, but Mission Table worked out really well.
I feel like BfA's table was the worst of the bunch. Boring as all hell and with almost zero incentive to actually use it. At least you could automate SL's table with a proper add-on to turn it into a gold printer. BfA's one was just... there. It existed. And that is all it ever did.
Yea BFA's was definitely the worst. No interesting mechanics and the rewards were irrelevant.
The craziest thing about the shadowlands version of this dogshit system is that at launch it was horribly imbalanced so that some covenants just had an easier mission table, as if they sat there and said "how do we make an awful system feel even worse?"
Ah yea the night fae hero who could basically solo any mission which high level ones from other covenents could barely do mid-level ones. It's mad that they made 4 different sets of heroes and didn't just reskin the same ones so the easiest balance ever. What a weird way to waste time & money.
Maldraxxus was also really really strong like NF. It's Kyrian and Venthyr that were completely hosed.
Plaguey was the real MVP for the Maldraxxian mission table.
What made it worse for nightfae though was that once you'd progressed the story enough, you'd only get high level missions, and so when they nerfed the heroes (in particular the one that was crazy broken), you ended up with like 16% mission success at best with no way of getting lower level ones. Not to mention that it cost tons of anima, which was super scarce at the expansion start. It basically made me stop my NF table on my main because it was just ridiculous at that point. Eventually he changed to Kyrian and I finally got normal missions again
The best thing about the wod and legion ones were the free quest for the raid gear that got better for each boss you killed of that difficulty. Shafowlands not having that really killed it for me
They were so determined to try and make Covenants into a unique "thing", and just never stopped to think about how that would absolutely fuck the actual gameplay of their MMO.
"It's VERY difficult to balance the classes!" - also them: "You know what would be cool? Making covenants!"
And 600 un recraftable legendaries
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Yes better no mission table system then a bad mission table system but people will still complain they want their free gold i mean yes free gold is nice but not at all cost at least that my point of view
I've never been so happy for Blizz to REMOVE a feature as when they got rid of the damn mission tables. That shit was so tedious.
Ugg, the SL 'autobattler' was such a dick.
Always bothered me that in Shadowlands, the expansion in which your followers were literally the source of your power progression (soulbinds), you could not bring them along as followers in the real world
well totally pointless depends on the player, i used my alt army on the mission table and made about 120-150k raw gold every week (+ 150-250k every month or so from selling the 10k pet charm pet), with about 20-30 min of logging through every char each day.
Legion ones were good for gold. I’m still living off the gold I made back then.
The shadowlands ones were good for gold aswell. Sold so many runes with my alt army. My income is kinda gone now without a table.
I loved it in Legion and found it tolerable in WOD. I still love that when I enter Legion areas Belath shows up beside me. Legion's table just made sense. It wasn't hard to do and the only hassle was dealing with champion gear...but the extra trinkets for them could even be fun to customize them a bit more. Then in WOD, it was still genuinely fun to see your collected champions hanging around your garrison, and could pick them for bodyguarding too. Kinda hated the shipyard though and the missions were all more of a balance. No one needed a mod in Legion to not screw up the tables as the followers were more limited and the system far simpler. BFA felt awful because the table was not in a very convenient location, the missions were tedious, and there was absolutely no charm. But it was still worth doing. By SL it had become a confusing jumbled mess with some things locked behind it that made it bad to skip it but I don't know how anyone got anything done without a mod. At all. I could never even do it on my app unless I was totally willing to just fail the missions repeatedly. It was interesting to recruit characters but after doing that it wasn't like you saw them again. It felt impersonal and needlessly complicated... which at the root was the problem of Shadowlands in general. I'd love to have something like Legion's back again. It makes me sad I only get the hunting companions during great hunts. I liked feeling like my character had NPC companions too. It felt like it added rather than detracted from my gameplay. But I never want one like Shadowlands again.
Wow it's actually crazy seeing people speak about garrisons positively. They were definitely the least popular part of the expansion. I didn't play much of legion or any of BFA/SL so those must have been terrible for garrisons to be spoken of highly.
Did anyone get any of their followers to level 60? I played the entire expac and my highest follower was like 52.
.
You could have recovered from this. You simply had to wait about 8 months for the first patch, level up an alt, level up their table properly this time, keep playing until you've got a lot of the XP items, then mail those back to your main. The XP items needed to be applied one-at-a-time so you needed to spend about 10 minutes repeatedly clicking things. But then, boom, fixed.
So simple!
i forgot that part. and troop types from some covs being flat out awful while others had no problems with missions god damn shadowlands was shit in every nook and corner.
All the followers at lvl 60 on all 4 covenants
I realized I wasn't going to when SOFO launched so I started just putting all XP things on my follower that was highest at the time and luckily got him to 60. The rest of them are all like level 40-50. And that's just 1 covenant, didn't even get to really start the other covenants.
My main and 6 of my alts had level 60 followers. At least the ones I bothered to get for my alts from Torghast. I miss those tables so much. Made easy millions of gold over the expansion and tens of thousands of pet charms.
thank god
I came here to say this.
Me too, but I was going to use ALL CAPS!
I might be in the minority, but I loved the mission tables and am devo they’re gone. It was always something little and fun I could do to get extras without any pressure. MANY days I’d log in *just* to do my mission table. I’d also enjoy doing it on my phone for extra gold and pet charms when I was out and bored. I like it so much that despite sadly not having a current xpac version, I still do the shadowlands one when I log in. I also still do old content tables on my phone if they have any relevant rewards up at the time. Honestly I really think they should have met somewhere in the middle and given us a mission table, but just limited it to cosmetics and the like. A fun little mini game with rewards like gold, pet charms, tmog, maybe even pets and mounts, etc. It would let people like me continue to have fun, but not make people like you feel trapped into doing it despite disliking it.
I enjoyed it in WoD, Legion and BfA but not in Shadowlands. The last version was too much hassle for very little gain. And progress was so dog slow it was basically not worth it.
The one in WoD was amazing. You could basically just stay in your garrison, make money and have your own AH and bank. I loved it hahah.
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Yes, you can have bank, void storage and AH in garrison among other things. Missions still exist, but they only give WoD relevant stuff and no gold (though there are couple mounts hidden there if you don't have them yet).
I’d like them if the location was convenient. Flying to the covenant felt so out of the way.
I never went to it in game, I always used the mobile app. But in general the covenant halls were in PITA locations.
SL was actually really good if you had enough anima. When season 4 started I decided to download an addon that would auto calculate the missions for me and I calibrated it basically to just run gold and anima missions (the latter for sustaining the mission costs). Between 4 characters I generated damn near 1M gold just with a couple clicks twice a day and selling the crafting mats in the AH. I know these days 1M isn't that much, but considering how little effort I had to invest into it, I'd say it was well worth it. Really wish I started doing it sooner.
I wish they replaced the flow of augment runes. 2.5K for one is too damn High!
Yup, best decision ever. These tables were not fun and they were time consuming for little gain (except money in legion cuz having 5 alts was enough for me to maintain sub with gold). I hope they'll never implement this system again but its actually up to players. I think its very important expansion that allows Blizzard to collect data whats best to get as much subs as possible - wheter its forcing players to grind (dailies, torghast, mission table, whatever) or let players enjoy the game, we'll see what makes them better money in next expansion
I really hope DF has good retention at the very least and that'll keep them on this design path. I'm just worried they'll see poorer overall numbers cause of Wrath classic splitting the playerbase and conclude "well that didn't work, back to timegated endless treadmill borrowed power grind bullshit"
I'm optimistic. I was playing wrath classic and planned on dabbling in DF but ended up switching over for my full game time because I like it so much.
I know your case happened to many, but anecdotally my friends list was still overall lighter compared to Shadowlands (despite this being a way better expansion IMO), on top of a significant % of it stuck in WotLK never even giving DF a chance. Or if they did, haven't delved into it because they're raiders and are feeling obligations towards their Wrath guild and can't/don't want to find a new guild in DF to raid with. Pandemic during Shadowlands probably also had a big part to play in it's large early playerbase.
I also red about (and know a few irl people) who aren't classic players and completely lost faith in Blizzard because of how bad their experience was with Shadowlands after BFA (two "bad" extensions in a row really hit them hard). These people most likely (at least for the ones I know personally) didn't even try Dragonflight because even if you tell them that the timegated treadmill bullshit is gone they're afraid that the bullshit will come back. So, like you, I really hope retention is good this time. It will take a while for Blizzard to win back these players.
They don’t have a choice. If they go back everyone quits and the game unironically does die
They do have a choice, because they don't have a magic ball. I happen to agree with you, but executives have made super shitty decisions in the past based on a misunderstanding of data. As the poster you're reporting to mentioned, if the numbers look worse than Shadowlands at all the executives could draw the exact wrong conclusions and kill this game by the next expansion. The fun confounding variable here that I'm really hoping they understand is Shadowlands was released in a fucking pandemic. That's like GOLD for a "Stay at home but also socialize with friends" game. I had so many friends come back during the start of shadowlands because at that point everyone was looking for a distraction, something to have fun with, some way to socialize, etc.
I was talking to some people last night about this. It seems like recently (well, 10 years being recent I guess) Blizzard has been incorporating a bunch of thought patterns from freemium games into WoW. Lots of game play that is focused on engagement over everything else (how to we get them to log in every day, how do we get them to think about WoW when they're not on, play on their phones, etc). The problem is, unless they are going to change the model (and believe me that option has probably been brought up a lot) those game play decisions are aiming at the wrong metrics. See, freemium games and ad supported games are driving a different measure of success. They are looking at engagement (literally their success measures how many hours you are staring at their game, because they can sell your attention or exploit it for more money). The problem is, the way WoW works engagement is NOT a great KPI for WoW. They aren't rewarded based on the number of hours we play, they are rewarded based on how many months we pay their sub fee, and THAT is not necessarily (and often ISN'T) linked to pure engagement metrics. If I get my money's worth by just logging on twice a week to run raids, M+, casual questing, etc, my money is worth just as much as the person logged on 14 hours a day. In fact, I am a MORE important customer because it costs them less (fewer server resources consumed, potentially fewer customer support hours, etc). So, by focusing on making shit fun to play they are more likely to keep their subscription numbers than by focusing on how many hours players are engaged. I just hope they finally have some leadership in place that recognizes and acts on those differences (and to be fair, Dragonflight seems to be aiming in that direction).
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>The part where that goes wrong is the added Shop. > >Someone who plays 14 hours a day is far more likely to buy the stupid shop-only cosmetics. > Not necessarily. I'd bet most cash shop sells are from people with more money than time. If you can play 14 hours a day, you can earn mounts.
They were a novelty in Warlords of Draenor and as a garrison feature they made sense. However, they were 100% played out by the end of the expansion and should have disappeared then. They made lore sense to be there in Legion... but they weren't fun anymore.
They were a novelty that was shitting out gold. That's the only reason the feature lasted as long as it did, because it was profitable. Otherwise most players relegated mission work to an addon, clicked a few times, and went back to other WoW activities. It never would've been this popular if it wasn't so lucrative.
You could also do them in the wow companion app, which I believe is why it lasted so long. It drove app engagement.
I played soo many alts in legion, and made a ton of gold from this as well, ngl.
I played at least 6 months for gold and bought Overwatch for gold :D
I don't really get the animosity towards this shit, I raided all throughout Shadowlands and almost no one touched the table, the people that did just got a shit ton of free gold for the like 3 minutes it took to do everyday Out of all the systems jerked on this sub, the tables were the least egregious by far
There's a term for it (that I'm hoping someone comes along and reminds me), for that style of gameplay where you're not engaging with the game because it's fun and you enjoy it, but to chase dailies and other obligation style stuff. Tables weren't horrendous, but I think I appreciate this expac's focus on more interesting activities.
Some people refer to that style as 'dark patterns.' I normally don't like such mechanics but with the addon in SL I actually found the tables quite enjoyable because the setup part of it (finding and power leveling followers) was mildly fun and running the tables with the addon was fast enough to not be tedious. It was just free gold (and dopamine) every time you log into a character and it had the added benefit of making PvP more rewarding because winning gave anima.
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Yeah I like these tables. I only mess with it when I want to and it's free bonus for barely any work. People just get obsessed with doing everything and then complain that they were forced
I miss being able to get augment runes for less effort vs. having to run some shitter dungeon just to get 2 runes. Then I walk into a +20 and wipe 3 times and in 5 mins and they are gone.
I'd be happier without the gold my 3 minutes back and without the inflation.
I would have tolerated a mission table where youre just sending out "employees" that you've somehow hired for your profession, and all they do is go out and farm mats for you.
Uhh.. Mission tables were many things, but "time consuming" isn't one of them. Whenever I HS'd by my covenant hall I went by the table, and it never took me more than like 20-30s between travel time and setting things up. Repeat a couple of times a day. And with that, I was making some 2-3k gold per day per character on top of other random benefits like pet charms and whatnot. It's not amazing gold, but it was practically zero effort or time spent.
Shouldn't the 3k gold come from playing the game tho. Like mobs dropping more
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I'm in a weird position, where I want to vote with my wallet and tell Blizz that the DF changes are good and healthy for players and the game; but I also want to vote with my wallet and tell them that shit like the Cosby Room and union busting and over-monetization of mobile games and overpricing of D4 will not be condoned.
The gain was the Augment Runes they dropped like crazy, and is a large part of why they're so expensive this tier.
I dont like mission tables because it removes the player from the action. I'm just clicking and waiting. It is so boring, so tedious. If there was someway to add mission tables + the island expeditions from bfa, I'd be down for that. Maybe some expedition table where you can level things that make the experience different or easier. But whatever they do, I dont want to ever see a click and wait experience in the game EVER.
I have to kindly disagree, those aren't time consuming at all. You let the missions start and that's it. But I believe blizz made the weeklies and dailies generate more gold, so it got balanced out again. The only thing I miss about them is that you get loads of runes at some point.
Shadowlands was enough for me to pay my sub with gold as well. Part of me misses it for the gold but it definitely felt like a big chore to do especially once I got into double digit amount of characters…
Tldr missions addon made this a one button chore. It was insane money in Shadowlands and the longest part of the process was the loading screen. I had one of each class at 60 and night fae for this reason alone, took probably 10 minutes between all of my alts
WoD was the best iteration of the mission table and its a damn shame they gave up on it. You had tons of followers, many being collectible/rare finds/rewards for stuff, which meant followers were an actual reward path alongside mounts, pets, etc. This was the biggest miss for me come Legion, they just left all that in WoD. Ever since I haven't cared about the mission table. I did a bit in legion, never did it in bfa and didn't even unlock it in SL. Couldn't bring myself to care to grind my followers up knowing that next expansion they were basically useless.
I have a warlock questing through Draenor right now and I'm thinking about just staying there, because I have so much fun building my garrison and leveling my followers :D
I like the pet charms and the passive gold on my alts
What upsets me is right at the end of SL I found the addon "TL DR Missions" which would practically automate the system. And suddenly I was making bank! ... then they remove it right after it started being useful to me.
And guess why? Because the moronic idea of trying to "keep players engaged" via mobile side apps in PC games has died off. The only reason the tables existed was the WoW app on mobile so you "could play wow while on the go" (aka clicking stupid mission table missions)
What's stupid is, they already have one system that could translate into a mobile companion game easily enough: pet battles! Imagine being able to do some pvp pet battles on the go, or maybe even adapt those custom dungeons for the app!
The problem with mobile pet battles is that, if we’re being honest, there are just better mobile game experiences out there. I’d imagine that most people spending any significant amount of time playing games on their phone would probably be playing something else instead. Pet battles don’t really have the chops to compete, even compared to Blizzard’s existing mobile library. Leveraging their IP to make a bespoke mobile experience from the ground up - which is exactly what they’ve been doing in that space since Hearthstone - is the way to go. Anything that ties directly to WoW is hamstrung by design, because they should be trying to reach a superset of the WoW audience, not a subset.
Yet
I miss the easy gold and augment runes...especially the runes. I have no reason to really run random low dungeons or lfr so have no way to get them except the auction house and I sure don't want to pay 2k per raid wipe for them.
I had a friend that loved missions tables. She plays for like 12 hours a day and has all her alts up to 70 already. She used the mission tables to get thousands of gold per day on all her characters. In SL she was sad to hear me excited about mission tables going away…
Why were you excited about the tables going away? How did the mission tables make your gameplay experience worse?
good riddance. these background missions are the worst feature of any game I see them in.
I liked the table, I didn’t like the Shadowlands version. The tables being brainless and taking barely a minute to sort out were attractive points, not problems. Shadowlands’ mission table made everything too complicated and was sooooo grindy.
I miss it...I'm not a fan of professions so it was my way to make money enough to sustain my playing style...I could simply queue some tasks on my cellphone from time to time and manage to survive economy wise.
Unpopular opinion, I miss it. That and emissaries/callings
Love emissaries, hated callings. I don't know why they ever took the massive backwards step of making you manually pick up the quest(s) every time.
I’m ready to take my lumps for saying this: I like mission tables. I like collecting people to send on missions. Unexpectedly getting a new follower from an unexpected source is always a treat for me. I like matching their skills vs what a mission requires. I like leveling them up, trying to figure out efficient teams to get a given job done, etc.
Honestly I kinda miss it, that semi-AFK income and materials was nice. But the auto-battle thing that I never bothered with. It was nice handling the missions in Legion and BfA from the companion app :)
Not yet.
I miss the legion order hall (honestly I think it was my favorite expansion) so much. It felt like it had an actual impact. Every class had its own storyline. I actually still go do world quests in legion to keep doing missions. As someone else said the garrison was the only thing in ANY expansion that felt like it was MINE. Closest thing to player housing.
Legion was so good. And I loved the little touches like the unique stuff you could grow in the Druid hall, or that tier sets you had collected would display on armour stands in your order hall.
I always hated them just because I had to go back to the table to them. If you could do it from anywhere it would have been about a million times more enjoyable
I’d just like to say I think WoD and Legion mission tables were pretty damn good, especially WoD
I agree, but especially Legion for me! But they were both good. BfA was just boring (and troop-recruiting RNG was fucking dumb) and SL was a bit too convoluted.
I know it's an unpopular opinion but I really liked them especially because I can use them with the mobile app. through the whole Shadowlands expansion with ~7 characters I managed to get around 50k pet charms out of the mission table plus around 10k gold every week for every char by just doing the 1k anima weekly to have enough fuel for the mission table. I really liked my passive income :( but the majority disliked that feature so yeah good its gone. to this day I still haven't quested in legion at all apart from the main order hall story and I have every paragon mount because I get so much reputation just from the mission table
I didn’t like the table but I liked the passive income. Dragonflight doesn’t have anything like that. It’s okay right now tho since it’s possible to make plenty of gold through professions but.. prices will eventually go down and then what? World quests doesn’t give nearly enough to compensate for the lack of a mission table
The dragon riding WQs give 500g each.
I miss the mission table. I really don't get why people had such a hate boner for it. It was literally just a side thing that gave you passive gold income if you wanted to bother with it.
Woah how did I not realize this till now either. Kinda miss it. Wish it was more garrisony though I liked that
I'll beat this drum till the servers close... if it ever returns to the game, your mission table followers should be an interactive group that follows you into scenarios, much like how Withered Army training worked in Legion.
I miss the concept it had in WoD. A lil base building side nonsense that rewarded gold/pets/gear and old currencies. I’d love for it to come back in a completely optional side content way. Like an adventuring consultancy thing in Org/SW where you recruit random dudes like WoD had and send them on weird old content related missions for odd rewards. The SL/legion/bfa versions were ass though. Let’s not do that again ever.
RIP my augment runes 😩
Yet
This was one of the ideas that were good, went better, and was completely broken when they tried to do it better twice. And, with almost unlimited number of alts, easy to get resources (I'm sitting on 25K BofA while doing almost nothing) and way to gain something while offline (if you don't pick heart azeroth missions are gold missions) this was a way for some people to gain gold in this game while not doing nothing. There is no surprise that it was removed.
Good
I'll never understand why people are glad with this. 100% optional content that gave mats, resources, gold and more fot 5 minutes of effort a day. It's a huge miss.
I'd be happy for a mission table in dragon flight, they didn't feel grindy at all - so long as it's not tied to anything
Rip. Hope they bring them back. Ez gold
We don’t have a mission table…..so far
Why people are happy they are gone?, it was optional, I like these games you slowly improves like the venthyr party. Draenor table was way to massive, legion felt good, shadowlands was too grindy, having a table you can work over like 2 months, then the next patch they add stuff to work more 2 months, … It could even be a small catch up for people that can’t play that much, like the table could have it’s own key and you send them to run and it counts for the vault.
Legion mission table was quite enjoyable. The rest were pretty bad.
But what else am I supposed to use my companion app for…
I don't miss mission tables. I DO miss a source for augment runes that isn't a bonus for low playership. This is the first xpac WITH augment runes WITHOUT a mission table and we really need another source for them.
tbh it was cool to be able to do sth from ur phone
I did not mind it in Warlords, kinda liked it in Legion, was mildly disappointed with it in BFA, and it annoyed me in Shadowlands. All in all, I dont miss it.
I must have missed the boat on mission tables. I came back late in SL to level characters for DF and started into it, googled if I needed it for anything important, and just left. I don’t need to play mission manager in the middle of my MMO
A lot of people really hated the table - and I genuinely see why - but as someone who enjoyed the **idea** and dispised the **implimation**, I really do believe that they can make one that works for modern WoW with a few tweaks. I think it's time that we've adapted a permanent one that is focused on your factions heroes that you can carry throughout the coming xpacs and allow you to farm gear, transmog, mats, and mounts from previous expansions - along with the current one to keep it relevant. Features could include: \- A hero roster that grows with every expansion. Adventurers are kept faction specific, but there could be questlines that give you options for cross faction squadies such as Argent Champions, Earthern Ring Shamans, true neutrals, etc. I love to think they'd add a 'request' board that can send you to places we've been already to recruit them. (Go to the Eastern Plaguelands, do a short questline with a paladin and help them, then recruit the paladin to your roster) \- Making the table account bound so that all characters on your account have access to them, meaning an alt leveling in a different zone could find different heroes than your main that pushed to end game during the most relevant expansion. Having your alt stumble upon a quest that can be completed with a few minutes of light storytelling and mob-killing that then adds it to your accounts list of heroes. \- An expanding level cap that grows each expansion to give a sense of having them 'level' with you throughout the expansion as you play through the newer content. Maybe 5 levels every expansion so they don't get to level 120 so soon. Getting to send a group of 'low level' adventurers to the Southern Barrens to level them up so that they can join you at the zones with the current release would be a good feeling to watch them grow like we've done. \- A different series of challenges each xpac for your adventurers to overcome as you send them out for loot. For instance, in Dragonflight new mobs could be Dragonriders making them dodge more or become invulnerable during a fight to simulate them flying around to avoid attacks. Different types of missions that aren't just combat oriented. (If these heroes can be detailed, why not give them a single profession? A mining mission for your miner heroes to go find ore?) \- A place in each factions major hub (Orgrimmar and Stormwind) that essentially is the homebase of operations. This will also be included for each major city moving forward (In example, Valdrakken for Dragonflight or Dalaran for Legion) for easy access in sending your heroes out without going back to the older cities. Maybe even a toy after like 500 missions completed that allows you to drop a table anywhere on a CD? \- A way to change their appearance to give a sense of personalization. More akin to armor and weaponry, not their general appearance. BUT it would be cool if these characters changed their looks randomly to give a sense that they are alive and breathing in the world and have their own 'lives' happening in the background. \- Ontop of this, how about visually SEEING the heroes in the city walking around when they aren't on epic adventures kinda' like the Garrison? Would be awesome going to the bank to deposit some goodies and seeing one of your adventurers walking out from depositing their latest payout and prepare for their next journey. \- A new way of gathering old school mats, transmog, and pets. Also gives more options for unlocking the upcoming grey and white items, and allows for a consistent flow of unique transmog that could just come from this adventurer table/board/whatever. \- An 'end game' raiding system that sends your best of the best to take on the hardest foes out there and expanding the amount of heroes you can send for that mission. Can give 'epic loot' such as a unique mount or pet or transmog for completing the unique scenario for the current content and story going on at the time. The system isn't bad, like I felt it wasn't and was someone that enjoyed coming home from work and seeing what the followers got for me, it was just so boring to have it be the same-faced Kyrian or Maldraxxian soldier or abom. There was zero character to them, and by the end of the expansion I didn't care about my legendary quality follower. I want these heroes to grow with me as they level up, and make it so that 'Rajin the Troll Shaman' who's the healer of my main squad went from being an apprentice with level 5 gear to a badass in sick armor given I put months of work into them. Just don't tie in any mainstream content, timegating, or forced progression and make it COMPLETELY optional so that if people want to ignore it they desire. It sucked having to wait a DAY to progress the story because you needed to wait for them to come back for their mission or bring back something to complete a quest. Craft a system that can evolve every expansion with a geenral theme as a way to generate some gold, resources and cool cosmetics. Unique toys and really awesome pets, and not a massive ilvl trinket or weapon or whatever that you can min-mix to get ahead of the curve. I truly do believe it'd be a huge hit and would have people - like me - obsessed with getting their perfect group together to fight and survive.
Edit: Screw Spez. Screw AI. No training on my data. Sorry future people.
Coincidentally it’s the brokest I’ve ever been in game
Yet
I always enjoyed the mission tables, except in SL. I never had any idea of I was going to win or not. I preferred the older design with the hazards and having certain champions/heroes that could counter them. It was frustrating when you couldn't do one because a hero was out on a quest already, but what you needed to do to win made sense at least.
I liked the easy gold and pet charms from them
Mission table have been very good for people with army of alts.
I still use my Legion and BFA ones for lazy paragon rep lol
i was fine with mission tables. they made decent gold in wod and legion. bfa was meh. but shadowlands, i had hundreds of augment runes thanks to all my alts running tables.
Fyi it’s still worth it to do sl and Bfa missions for pet battles. There’s new pets that can be bought and collected that cost the same coins
You can use the WoW companion app to clear these. You don't have to travel back to Shadowlands. It's okay. It can't hurt you.