I hear a LOT of shit about WoW's designed these days, particularly regarding class design, gear/growth, systems, etc. I don't have a good brain for this, and don't see how they should do things instead. Going back to just gear being the way to grow feels...boring? But it's what people seem to want? So my question is -- what would you propose for how gameplay, character growth and the overall loop of activities should be designed in Shadowlands and beyond?
The advent of WQs, M+, and post-level-cap-growth in Legion represented such a huge, positive shift for end-game growth and play, and I'm still kind of enjoying how that works out in BFA, but everyone else seems to hate it.
There's something to be said about just
how much gear there is in the game now. It used to be at endgame a piece could last you a few months and after applying whatever bonuses you could, that was the end of it. There's an intangible value to an end goal, where certain items can become highly recognizable. You knew to run away from the Warrior with an Unstoppable Force because it just became so iconic, and because stuns are scary.
Now that there's so much loot, there's nothing like that. A BIS list is nothing more than a wishlist of potential affixes to drop, akin to Diablo. This isn't
inherently a bad thing, since it gives you a reason to keep playing, but it also gives you no real end goals and can just make everything feel like a slog if you've got no other reasons to play. Part of what was great about raiding, even on lower difficulties, was tackling new challenges and getting exclusive rewards at every level, which could inspire some people to play with folks who were just more interested in tackling the content. Thanks to the inflating ilvls of World Quests and the general efficiency of M+ runs that's not true anymore.
While I think it's ultimately a good thing that the game has those options available now, it's a stark departure from how things worked for the first 10 years of its life. It's a hard genie to put back in the bottle too, since there's groups who probably play each bit of content exclusively. I think that's actually somewhere the artifact weapon worked really well, as a continuous alternate progression system. Each source of loot would help players along that alternate progression route, and they had the ability to keep adding to it and help specialize it a certain way. That did introduce another problem, where with so many sources of that progression required you to interact with way more content than you might've had to before, but there's probably sensible ways to cap it to allow players to do what they want rather than feel pressured into doing everything.
