Having death knights in the pre-patch, cooldowns resetting after a boss encounter ends, changes to wintergrasp to make it more accessible and so on and I'm all for it. If you want a different game from retail it's got to start doing things differently.
This to me points towards blizzard wanting to take classic long term not just hey let's do wrath and then wrap it up, in fact i strongly believe they will do cata and beyond but today we have a topic which i already know has solidly divided the community something which is easy to remember as a core feature of wrath as an expansion when it didn't initially release until right near the end, the looking for dungeon tool.
Almost everything you see online has people arguing back and forth about its inclusion or lack thereof in this expansion, the forums, reddit, i even ran a poll a while ago and more people were in favor of having this feature make a return than leaving it out but blizzard thus far has remained adamant that the lfd we once knew will not be in wrath and it will instead be replaced with an lfm type feature not too dissimilar from what they have on retail.
in a previous video i've said let's see what they will do let's see what their vision is for this new system and then we can talk about it, well i've seen it and it's time to talk about it, let's cover everything known about the new lfm system the good and the bad of how it currently works and what i would have liked to see.
We should start with a quick reminder of what the true to last patch dungeon finder resembled from original wrath, it's really simple in fact there are bonuses in the form of badges for random or daily dungeons, you pick your role, pick whether you want any random or specific dungeon from normal or heroic, press q and that is it.
As a tank you wait roughly 2 seconds a dps about 20 minutes and healers somewhere in between, queue pops you press accept you get teleported to the dungeon and you begin, it would also search cross server to greatly improve queue times then at the end of the dungeon or upon leaving you're teleported back to where you were originally it really was, you push a button and you get teleported to a dungeon.
Here is our new version, let's start with the good stuff straight away, there's more to this than just being a dungeon finder, this tool covers all group based activities from dungeons, raids, open world pvp and um goldshire stuff, each tab gives good options on all available content including old world content such as open world pvp objectives or vanilla raids if you ever wanted to do those for some reason.
Now in order to post in the lfg channel players will have to be listed on the group finder somewhere which should significantly cut out the amount of spam that will be seen, the create listing part of the tool is fine to me it gives enough options and there's a text box where you can add extra bits on it does its job there's also good reporting options available on the ui so you can get rid of any want to sell spam fairly easily.
Side note, i'm assuming this tool becomes available at level 10 or 15 i forget exactly what it was originally but if it's for all content it will be available at a low level i'm quite sure about that on retail they had to add a bunch of restrictions as to who can post in the lfm to stop people selling services then again if you do need to be at least levels 10 or 15 that's an investment that has to be undertaken and it's not like we have trial accounts in classic.
Either way at the moment at least though it should be fine in terms of not having too much spam but it will be on the players at the end of the day to report stuff and actually make it usable.
So those i would say are the main benefits, onto the parts where i think there are problems this is related to the group browser part of the tool you can list your class as a role, you cannot do why is this a thing though i understand some groups may end up running dungeons where they do four dps one healer once they get enough gear or maybe even five dps as dks who knows and that's fine you just advertise in the extra text box that you're going to be doing there but if i'm a warlock why can i set myself as a healer what am i going
to be creating health stones and handing out bandages.
In fact if i list myself as a role my class cannot do it just says no roles have been filled on the ui , don't see why this exists when you request to join a group it doesn't show what specialization you're playing if you need a healer and a dps and a shaman joins they have to confirm that in text.
Same problem when combining groups just on a larger scale nothing's really known about who is joining your party groups, listings are auto updated on the ui but not changes to the size of the party i.e people joining or leaving means you have to press refresh a lot the group finder.
Ui isn't movable or resizable it looks the part but finding a group will be an ongoing effort of spamming refresh. I'd want to keep it somewhere where it's taking up a bit less of the real estate of my screen.
Those are the main issues for me and aside from that this tool really has to be better than the looking for group bulletin board add-on, if you don't consider the bulletin board add-on instantly obsolete when this tool officially releases it's just not good enough it should be immediately and clearly an upgrade which everybody will want to use.
The worst case scenario here is the player base split between using two separate sources for doing the same thing, even using both should be considered a loss here as the whole idea with the lfg tool is it takes spam out of the chat and into a tool where people can easily and quickly match with each other.
The lfg tool in its current state is not better than the bulletin board add-on, it's a competitor to it not strictly an upgrade in terms of the thing bulletin board does better it's resizable it auto updates when new posts come in the chat and the ui has more customization options for appearances.
On to the second part of the video feature criticism, aside from how the tool works will it do its job, so i want to highlight a few things here with the retail tool 99% of the time is being used for a specific activity you list that you're doing a specific mythic plus dungeon or a specific raid.
It's tailored to finding a group for one activity, in wrath at least early game you want to do heroic dungeons literally any of them for badges how is being saved factored into this are you just going to join a group and find out oh no i'm saved for that dungeon that you want to do sorry guys bye bye.
Mind you early on in new retail expansions people do world tours of mythic zero for gear and that seems to work out okay in my experience so maybe being saved isn't a problem, what about before the end game though not having lfd for leveling is a real shame there's nothing else to be said about it imagine hitting up the hinterlands questing for a while thinking gee i
could sure go for a run in maradon for example let me just spend 30 minutes getting there specifically for vanilla content the world is huge and with xp being squished between levels 10 and 60 in tbc and 60 to 70 wrath there's just not really as much need to run dungeons.
In vanilla it made sense to prepare your quest log for dungeons because there was so much experience needed to level up, nowadays this just isn't the case anymore, it feels like people if they aren't already which i think they are will largely skip anything which is out of the way and we'll just do the dungeons which are really conveniently, let's be honest nobody's going to be running to the entrance of sunken temple again.
There is certainly an argument for teleporting two dungeons or at least to the meeting stone outside of dungeons maybe with a cooldown or tbc and wrath content i think the whole traveling to dungeons is actually completely fine everything is in the zone where you're currently leveling for the most part anyways when you want to do hellfire dungeons you're
a few minutes away and you're leveling in hellfire playing for zangarmarsh at low level 60s alkin doon at middle level 60s and so on.
In wrath there's 150 flying speed mounts which are really cheap that you can buy from level 60, so not too many excuses on getting there yourself, i don't think same goes for wrath the dungeons are in the zone that's already appropriate for your level and for level cap and end game stuff again flying mounts it's just not really too far.
Sure the queue system is better and more convenient but i just don't think it's a big deal i think the whole keeping stuff same server is also worth trying it may not pan out long term but let's try something different let's give it a go, honestly i don't think people play into community nearly as much as they used to like not even remotely close but repeat groups for people can happen and it less frequently leads to toxic behavior and if it does hey that person goes straight on the ignore list and you know you're never gonna see them again as for actually having to list yourself to find a dungeon this is the bit that i don't like and i think misses the mark across the entire system.
I'd be down for automatic grouping if it's same server for all areas of content as in you list
yourself for what you want to do when the game finds four other people with a similar interest you get a party assembled ready check everybody presses yes your group is assembled and then you will make your way to the dungeon, chances are you may even run multiple dungeons with these people or vanilla content.
I just don't believe dungeons will be run often due to how leveling is structured and spread out i would be fine in this instance being teleported to the dungeon or at least the meeting
stone but tbc and beyond i think the run wherever you are in the world is short enough to dungeons to be, okay there is the case where you're in stormwind or orgrimmar and you want to go to a dungeon in northrend then again hearthstones are only on a 30 minute cooldown now and if it's not up there should be two other people that can go to the meeting stone so my ideal lfg does still involve automation to assemble a group, you keep it same server you teleport to dungeon or meeting stone for vanilla content you run to the dungeon for tbc and wrath content.
It keeps the whole social same server thing that Blizzard wants to do going interactions through the lfg tool are very sparse; often it's just going to be the leader sorting through the 452 dps applications they've received to see which mage has the highest item level.
Auto grouping is really really beneficial for casual players who want to do some chill dungeons, wrath is by far the most casual friendly world of warcraft has been in the classic
timeline so far and it stops the inevitable, this will happen by the way xyz item is reserved no clothes because the leaders of warlock and so on and so forth meta and it also doesn't stop
people from being able to form groups within their own social circles or guilds if that's what they prefer.
I think this is a win-win not only is it better than what the lfg is currently in classic it's better than what we had in wrath as well this would overhaul a whole system though so i don't expect it to happen but at least i also included some feedback for how the current tool works as well hopefully that can be looked at before we launch late september.
That's about everything for today though it's quite a divisive topic so we'll see how this goes, i'm expecting a lot of comments on this one do let me know your thoughts though any feedback i think is a positive thing, as always guys thank you all so much for watching and
are listening in and i'll see you on the next one very soon!
