Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Read my lips: Gradual power gain

I have said for awhile now that the WOW Shadowlands expansion has a problem with its raid.  The issue doesn't spring from the raid itself though, but rather the lack of gradual power scaling in the expansion as a whole.  Previous expansions had you gain power through both gear and other systems, and in Shadowlands people simply aren't gaining power through other systems, so midrange guilds like mine are struggling to kill later bosses.

Blizzard apparently agrees with me.  They have metrics about how many guilds are killing what bosses on what schedule, and they clearly are finding that people are getting brickwalled too much.  Every week they push out another big nerf to a raid encounter to continually make things easier so we can keep on progressing.  Sometimes they just flat out lower boss health, sometimes they tweak damage numbers, and sometimes they outright change mechanics.

I agree that they should do this, given that they put themselves into a bad situation.  There are two outcomes at this point - no changes, and guilds get stuck and quit, or keep on nerfing things so we can keep going.  Clearly the second way is better for subscription numbers, and also for fun.

However, Blizzard put themselves in this stupid situation and they need to stop it from happening in the next tier.

It sucks to constantly feel like your practice doesn't matter, and the best way to progress would simply be to wait for a month till the fights are easier.  It isn't a good feeling at all to know that killing bosses isn't a matter of slowly getting good enough to do it, but rather a waiting game until Blizzard decides it is time to nerf the boss.  All of that is ASS.

In the next tier they need to implement something to stop this nonsense of constant nerfs.  In previous xpacs they had awful grinds holding back this slow power gain, but that has its own problems.  People do not like feeling like they have to play trivial content 14 hours a day to get better in order to not let their guilds down.

The solution is simple.  Give us a weekly quest that takes 15 mins and gives us 1% more damage.  Make sure people who show up late or miss weeks can make those weeks up and catch up to the current cap.  The top tier guilds will be mostly unaffected, and midtier guilds like mine will slowly overpower content.  We will do it at our own pace, and we will know that practice matters a lot because 1% more isn't a huge deal each week.  By the end of the tier we will end up with 30% more damage though, and that will be plenty for us to kill everything.

We need slow power gain.  Blizzard's constant nerfing means they know that we need this.  All that remains is for them to listen to me and implement it.  

Hopefully they do it right.

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