The Ever-Expanding Worlds of Warcraft

[sei]

The expansion is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

The raiding meta this expansion fucking sucks. Artifact Power made things lame for people who want to screw with alts and be competitive, but there's another problem. Let's talk about for consumables.

The current goldsink is insane.

Consumables (potions and flasks) would have cost me around 34,500 gold last night.

"What? Did you mean 3,450?"

No. Look. Potions now cost 1500 gold each. Why? Inflation? No.

Consider the historic cost of a potion.

• Old expansions? Cost was about a daily's worth of gold. (Also, WoD had passive income and an herb garden.)
• Current cost? 3-25 dailies' worth of gold. (Yeah, they're called WQs now. Whatever. Fuck off.) Of the dailies that even give gold, the award is around 80g. A scarce few are 600+ and involve 20+ minutes finishing a dungeon. Also, you need 1-2 potions per attempt (depending on how early the wipe is called). Potions are running 1500+g. Maybe you could make the argument that the gold rewards are insultingly low, rather than that the potions cost a lot. Also, dailies aren't the real source of income, for anyone who really wants to go hard on making cash. But a shitload of people do them, so they seemed like a fair player-time-into-gold conversion metric.

Flasks cost about 2000, but one only needs 3 per night, depending on raid length. It's less egregious than potions, but still bad.

Potion cost: 28,500 gold for 11 attempts over 3 hours, with only single-potting on wipe attempts is 1500*((8*2)+3)
Flask cost: 6000 gold for a 3 hour raid.

Consumable costs can be high early into an expansion, but this is not sustainable. I'm wondering whether Blizzard pulled some kind of bullshit where they temporarily and completely intentionally made starlight rose or the other herb costs high to try to bleed some of the excess garrison gold out of the economy. Maybe the evemtia; Blood of Sargeras exchange will mitigate this. But it's insufferable right now.

Fuck this shit.

[pacobird]

Yeah, going into Heroic for the first time tonight and I'm not spending a token's worth of gold to get consumables for it. It's just not something I'm willing to do.

Unfortunately, WoD dead-enders apparently were able to save up nearly a billion gold on a single account because garrison was such a shitshow and since those people make up the soi disant hardcore raiding community it's unlikely blizzard will acknowledge the failure of market solutions here. Consumables probably won't right themselves until flying's in.

[sei]

Here's a more real comparison.

WoW tokens are $20. They sell for around 38k gold.

Raiding is functionally in the neighborhood of $20/night of mats.

[Rico]

It's really hard to say where it'll end up because, like you said, Garrison farming fucked up the entire economy for probably years to come. But apart from really intense Mythic progression from guilds who have mains and 6 alts a piece all with Garrison-fueled goldcaps, if Blizzard doesn't change mat requirements I wouldn't be surprised to see flasking stay required but potting be a "We've learned the fight but we need to do the burn phase a little faster for healer mana, or we've had two 3% wipes in a row" guildleader call.

Which, unfortunately, will probably still lead to the problem continuing and 40k a night in consumables because the WoW community is by-and-large a self-perpetuating garbage machine of 1% differences in performance being equivalent to mass child murder.

[pacobird]

7.1! Karazhan is a lot more difficult than I anticipated!

[sei]

Blizzard introduced a substantially cheaper potion in 7.1.

I imagine it's still inferior to the expensive ones, but it's still something. It's not a solution, but it's not a meaningless salve either, I suppose. Especially when running mythic+.

[sei]

Between materials, the server situation (my characters split across servers from various stages of when I was playing), not being in a mythic guild with a meaningful carrot to chase, and the artifact knowledge catchup being trash, I'm more angry with this game than I am enjoying it.

[beatbandito]

what the fuck is this nightblade bullshit?

[beatbandito]

okay it not breaking kidney shot or cheap shot is okay I guess

still subtlety having a DoT as one of the main rotation, especially in a time when the rotation has dropped from 6-8 moves to 4~, seems dumb.

[beatbandito]

So, I may have seen some 7.2.5 video that leads me to believe that Sub Rogue will be scrapped off the bottom of the barrel soon enough, and meaning I may not be dropping back off before my first monthly charge.

Is anyone actually still playing this? I see some activity from Paco and Box of Jox mentioned he started back up on a different server. There's no going forward at this point without some friends around. Need to do some light dungeoning for my class story and fuck these 10+ minute queues for random BGs.

In the interest of openness, other than maybe messing around with a monk I have no interest in anything but pvp as a sub rogue. I am willing to switch over to outlaw and can actually see glowing circles on the ground (and even react to them!) if there's need for another dps in a dungeon run, which automatically puts me well above average contribution. But really I'm more interested in hanging out with some people for random pvp, world pvp, maybe some weekly ranked arena and casual dungeoning.

[Newbie]

I'm still keeping one eye on WoW news as the expansion progresses, because I've spent far too much time and money on this game so far to stop altogether, even if I did let my subscription lapse earlier this year. Still don't really have the schedule to raid, and after a couple bad experiences with pre-Raid Finder Return to Karazhan, I'm pretty content with my dedicated casual approach to the game. I'll stick to the Brawler's Guild and pet battles; I can only really disappoint myself, there.

[Joxam]

William And I are picking it back up, unfortunately we transferred to Thunderlord because some local friends asked us to play with them. Sorry about that Jon but on the otherhand I would not have re-upped if a friend and my brother hadn't asked me to.

[Rico]

PVP doesn't really interest me, but I'll probably casually dungeon and unscheduled raidpug through Tomb like I did through Nighthold. Ricolas#1224

[pacobird]

I'm pretty much just raiding these days; otherwise just logging in to do emissary quests over lunch.

[pacobird]

Tomb feels easier than I remember Nighthold being on day one.

[beatbandito]

fuck nat pagle

[sei]

fuck nat pagle

[Büge]

[Newbie]

So in case anybody is interested but hasn't used the internet before, Blizzcon confirmed the new expansion as "Battle for Azeroth": two new three-zone continents (Kul'Tiras and Zandalar) for leveling 110-120, Azeroth-wide world quests and content at max level, and a renewed focus on Horde vs Alliance. World PvP is getting drastically updated; PvP/PvE server distinction is going away altogether, but being in "PvP mode" will provide various benefits to offset the risk of constant ganking--plus, if you're getting camped, you can just turn PvP off. Instead of brand new races we're getting six "allied races" that you have to unlock through questing to use: Highmountain tauren, Nightborne elves, and Zandalari (upright!) trolls for the Horde, while the Alliance get Dark Iron dwarves, Lightforged draenei, and Void elves (basically just pale belfs with shadow wings). These races start at level 20, are eligible for boosts and race-changes, and earn unique factional transmog armor if you actually level up with them.

Speaking of leveling up, level-scaling is being added to all pre-WoD zones and dungeons. Vanilla zones are interchangeable from 1 to 60, BC/Wrath zones 60-80, and Cata/MoP from 80 to 90. World quests will be scattered throughout for max-level players, particularly (I assume) around Ashenvale and Lordaeron, since the inciting events are an Alliance invasion of the latter and the Horde burn down Teldrassil. (Starting characters use a phased version of those areas.)

Also, "WoW Classic" will give official vanilla servers at some point.

[beatbandito]

PvP/PvE server distinction is going away altogether, ... plus, if you're getting camped, you can just turn PvP off.

Sounds like what you meant to say was "PvP servers are going away altogether".