Quote Originally Posted by KOUNTERPARTS View Post

Yeah I long for the days where it was hell just to quest in a leveling zone and get absolute mollywhopped by a bear 1 level or 2 levels above me. God forbid I aggro 2 bears!

Wait-- no I don't! I got to re-experience that in WoW Classic and TBC Classic!

I was going to make a comment about tanking five gorillas and post that old druid video joke... but I guess in my old age I can't find it. Youtube seems to be filled with actual informative videos about Moonkins instead.

Anyways, I think the general problem with WoW and difficulty comes in two parts: the difficulty gaps are too extreme, and the game doesn't foster an environment for learning/improving.

With respect to the difficulty curve, we're at the point where the content will be so brainless that you could literally AFK in some cases and win, to the other extreme where if one person out of twenty screws up one mechanic in a 10-15min fight it's a wipe. It wasn't always like that, and I'd surmise that part of WoW's success is that the game was more accessible and engaging to casual gameplay back in the day. It's like the old joke "purples are the new blues": Blizz has had a tendency over the years to succumb to scaling issues in various aspects of their game (difficulty included) that either ostracizes more players over time or cheapens everything before it. WoW's ideal difficulty spread likely lies somewhere in the middle of the difficulty curve we have right now, where you make the content so you have to at least engage in it to be successful... and the upper difficulty level needs to come down quite a bit so we aren't saying "last tier's mythic is the new heroic difficulty" every expansion.

This all ties in for a lack of a need to learn or lack of any environment/incentive to learn or get better at the game. Part of this has to do with a lack of fun and engaging activities, as many activities have a "fun" dial that just happens to be the "difficulty" dial. To rephrase what was said by someone earlier: higher difficulty can be fun, but fun doesn't mean it has to be difficult.

If your content is based off of two extreme in difficulty, good luck finding a learning curve as a casual or new player. It's a shock going from one extreme to the other. I think part of this is that Blizz focuses way too much time on mythic raiding, and that normal/heroic raiding are way too similar (perhaps LFR and normal are way too similar instead) because mythic exists and Blizz can't seem to nail a difficulty curve. While I was initially excited for mythic back at the end of MoP as a hardcore raider back in the day, in retrospect I realize how bad that was for the game as a whole. There's so many layers to this conversation that I can't really touch on them without making an insanely long post, so I'll move on for now.

Going back more towards the lack of environment to foster learning and improvement, this goes back into the game not designing content for the vast majority of players. The game currently starts you off at not needing to know anything, but the content in between your starting point and the end game doesn't not change in difficulty much if at all. The end-game mostly revolves around content that suddenly has a huge jump in difficulty from what you're used to. Furthermore, you are basically required to seek external sources (i.e. guides, videos, etc.) in order to 'get gud' as the game doesn't provide you with a feasible means to either learn directly or indirectly. The new starting zone does help a bit with learning directly with prompts to use certain abilities, but that's basically where it ends. The result is that the players are ill-equipped for the end-game, there's nothing in between or content in general to foster learning, and the only content is likely tuned either way too low or way too high in order to allow for learning.

Anyways, post is starting to get way too long, but I think the best direction for WoW would be to make the difficulty increase at a linear rate instead of exponential, raise the lower end difficulty a little, and bring down the upper end difficulty quite a bit. Blizz would have to make some adjustments to the game to facilitate this, but Blizz is probably reaching the point where they're going to have to make some massive changes in order to just maintain their current player base.