Let's get straight to the point. We've been lavishing praise on the dragonflight for its winds, but we also need to give Blizzard good feedback and make sure they know what sorts of things we think should be fixed in later patches and the next expansion. Here are a few problems the dragonflight needs to solve ASAP. If you want to solve a problem for yourself, check out today's sponsor, Skillshare.
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Spec balance is hard to balance in a game like WoW. The differences across specs, gear, and player skill are insane. But the outliers are just too big to be acceptable. Looking at a few stats, we can see that people sometimes just cannot play the spec they want. For example, Mythic plus unique class population from Raider.io shows that only 8% of DPS are Mages, but only 1.2% play Fire. More Rogues are playing Outlaw than Assassination and Subtlety combined.
There are almost no Survival Hunters, almost four times more Fury Warriors than Arms, and more Demo Locks than the other two types of Warlock combined. Brewmasters and Mist Weavers are also valued a lot less than the other tanks and healers.
Now, obviously people gravitate towards the meta, so some things are kind of expected, but outliers like Fire Mage, Survival Hunter, and the other two Rogue specs should really be looked at because if the numbers are that low, then it's probably going to pose an issue for players trying to find pug groups, and that's a bad experience. On the raid side, there are also massive gaps in parses. The bottom half of the list is the same across normal and heroic, and even adjusting for people preferring other specs, I think people should still feel free to play whatever spec they want.
And yes, they technically can, but it's the quiet pressure of the matter that pushes players to do things they don't want to do, and Blizzard should be careful about that. Right now, I've been playing Disc and lucky that I enjoy playing Holy as well, but that's an example. If Disc was absolutely my favorite thing, the reason why I play the game, I may have issues.
We'd love to offer a solution to this, but honestly, it just rests on Blizzard to solve this with class and balance changes. In fairness though, they have been getting faster and The likes of Riot and various other game developers show that you can't just look at raw numbers, but you also need to consider how things are perceived. Mythic plus dungeon balance is a bit of an issue. Take a look at this comparison of key levels that were completed a few weeks ago, near the start of the season, so pretty much people's first impression of Mythic Plus dragonflight.
Sometimes they are easy like Shadow and Burial Grounds, others are ball busters like the Ruby Life Pools. Between the loot table differences, the need to clear all dungeons from ethic plus score, and the fact that Keys roll randomly, this discrepancy is a bad experience. Like a plus 15 should be a plus 15 roughly speaking. If you get a key that's for a harder dungeon, then you have to find a group to do another key first so you can then re-roll your key. If the Horn of Valor or the Skoval trinket are best for you, you're just going to have a harder time getting geared in WoW than other people.
Now, this is not a game breaker, but it's an element of friction that makes the game feel subtly worse. You know, as if the numbers are just made up because when is it 20 or 20 when is it not a 20. I mean, I don't know whenever Blizzard makes it so. Now, thankfully they are already working on this.
They have been nerfing the hell out of dungeons on a pretty snappy basis since they've returned from their Christmas holidays, so hopefully they've got some smart cookies figuring out why this continues to happen and like where the spec balance. They can figure out a plan to stop this dead in its tracks with the next season because that's gonna happen Valor Cap. All right, maybe gearing as a whole is a topic for another day, but for all the benefits of the M plus upgrade system and the return of the Valor cap itself is controversial.
Now, before you type your comments, don't worry, you are spot on. The Valor cap does actually have a lot of pretty good reasons to exist, such as ensuring people don't just SP spam all of the plus twos in the universe as quickly as they can to upgrade their gear in a boring farm and to stop people from finishing gearing in two weeks and then create a Schism between the sweat Lords and the normal players in terms of gear. So, here's our thinking, the experience in our Guild right now is that generally people are rating capped, not necessarily Valor capped, and Valor upgrades are far too expensive to bother with, and that means that the entire upgrade system doesn't really work as intended for us, kind of casual Raiders.
Now, if we were a guild of Mythic plus fiends, then yeah sure, maybe that'll be a different story, but I think Blizzard wants a situation where a casual, normal or heroic rating group can be dipping into do some dungeons.
All we feel though is the need to wait, so we don't end up spending like our Capital wrong or something like that and between that and the Vault constantly dangling the promise of replacement gear, I will put a lot of well, I put money on a lot of players being a bit frustrated with not feeling like they can spend their Valor properly. Season four of Shadowlands had uncapped Valor and it was well received, even though that season was a special case.
So, ideally, Blizzard can find a way to satisfy everyone, like make it an exponential cap instead of linear, maybe increase Valor gained with key level to match or offer Valor refunds by scrapping upgraded gear or at least some sort of solution that gives people a bit more freedom to spend without the worry.
Let's do an experiment and drop the Catalyst into the game way earlier. I mean, those are so close to an awesome gearing experience. I think all you have to do to bring it home is just take it the last few feet because we're so close to being there. Primal storms kind of feel useless at least to a lot of us, so I want to hear what this has been like for you. Have you done Primal storms at all? If yes, leave a comment saying yes.
If no, say no, but I really want to hear from you. I mean, for my guild, basically no one's been doing them. This is less of a problem and more just a waste of resources because the timing of their drop and the sort of gated nature of them kind of wastes them a bit. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, maybe there is a quiet stack of people who are happily farming out that three five nine and three eight five gear, and Blizzard has Telemetry showing this is really popular.
But the simple matter of fact is that it's gear that's barely better than say the 382s that world quests and other world content offers, and it takes a whole 10 or so weeks to get a full set including weapons. That's a long ass time and it does feel kind of arbitrary compared to the rest of the expansion content that does offer ways to grind everything except the highest level gear quickly.
It kind of stands out to me as counter to what Dragonflight is trying to do for players. Maybe it's worth taking a different look.
I mean, hey at least the gear is pretty neat for transmog. This is one of the most unanimous L's they've taken and that is loot rules. Blizzard said that their loot rules would stop pretty much all the problems that people would have with group loot. But the worlds didn't work leaving out a few pretty damn vital clauses to stop people minging tear and items for disenchant and also generally destroying Jewel wielder's lives.
January pug rating in Tano has very quickly turned into a little bit of a hellscape as far as some of the loot is concerned, especially the likes of tear. I mean, how bad does it feel when you kill a boss and somebody manages to get both to your tokens? That's weird. So thankfully, this should not be an issue for that much longer though, because Blizzard has promised to adjust this in 10.0.5 and also hot fix in some of the ad dupe winning uh, you know changes as well.
But still shouldn't have launched like that. Professions, I mean maybe this is Blizzard's biggest oof in some ways. We're going to dig into this in much greater depth in the future, but basically, here's your run time. I think the overhaul is generally fantastic, you know, absolutely smashing idea with good execution.
Chat message to explain that in WoW, prices for high-quality enchants and crafting gear can be very high, especially for players who don't have much time to grind for gold. This can be a limiting factor and can lead to frustration for players. Blizzard has already hotfixed some issues and is addressing skill-ups and work order stuff in patch 10.0.5, but there are still long-term issues that need to be addressed before patch 10.1 comes out.
Some suggestions for Blizzard include implementing a weekly or monthly respec, increasing work order supply, and trying to lower prices. Alchemy and Engineering also need a proper look and there is a lack of varied world content. World content is easily repeatable and most of it is focused on earning reputation.
Players need intentionality and separation to feel satisfied. Story quests and holiday updates can help fix this issue. Community-wise, WoW is generally good if you have a good guild or group of friends, but playing with strangers can lead to bad experiences. Blizzard needs to improve customer support and GMs who can do their jobs quickly to fix the selfish and toxic elements of the game.
Dungeon or end of raid recommendations for good behavior in true raw fashion, maybe stick a mount or some transmog as a reward and you'll have a clean community for at least a few weeks. But in all seriousness, I hope the developers are having conversations about toxicity internally and how naturally a game design can produce toxicity because of incentives.
Every player who logs out because they've had a bad community experience is one that is pretty likely to not come back. These are the big problems of this expansion that Blizzard should really try to solve over the upcoming road map. Unlike Shadowlands, there are six patches within this calendar year that can address some of these problems and some of them are already being worked on for patch 10.0.5.
These are just the most common complaints that I've seen browsing the internet and trying to figure out what pain points players are having. I want to be useful and lift up player feedback combined with some of our own personal grievances. There are also a dozen other potential minor issues that players have. If we talk about these problems, then they can be solved.
I will read the comments of this video with great interest. Thank you for sticking around and I'll see you next time.
