The Best Parts of WoW
Aside from the friendships I’ve made in WoW over the years, the main thing which has kept me coming back is raiding. I enjoy getting together with friends and working together to defeat bosses. Many people focus on Mythic raiding as if it is the only thing that matters, but I’m happy to concentrate on Heroic raiding. It offers plenty of challenges without being too much of a drag on my outside of gaming time. I know I could do Mythic raiding if I wanted to, but doing cutting edge content would require me to play in a very different way than what is fun for me.
One of the best aspects of Heroic raiding is the flex raid size system. We can raid as long as we have more than 10 people available. This gives our raiders more freedom to take care of real-life things without feeling like they are letting the guild down. It also doesn’t force us to sit people on the sidelines because we have too many people who want to raid. Of course, there are always breakpoints in raids where a certain number of raiders may make a fight easier or harder, so it isn’t a perfect system. We also have to make sure we have enough heals for the number of raiders we have in a given night, but overall, it’s a system that works well.
Additionally, WoW has moved away from Patchwork types of fights where players just need to kill one guy, with minimal mechanics. This has been a good transition because any trained monkey can just stand there and hit its buttons in a specified order when they don’t have to do anything else. In both Castle Nathria and Sanctum of Domination, they have moved towards boss with a mixture of different mechanics that provide their own challenges. For example, the Council of Blood fight in Nathria was a welcome change of pace where we would participate in a “dance” during the intermission. It wasn’t incredibly challenging or anything, but it was nice to do something different.
I also really enjoy how some fights like Guardian in Sanctum are tank-focused in mechanics while others like Soulrender are more mechanic checks in general. It allows my focus to be used in different ways, which is helpful when raiding for hours. I used to think the ideal difficulty curve for raiding was that each boss gets progressively harder until you get to the end, but I’m not sure that really is the best way. It’s nice when we have a demanding boss that takes a lot of focus followed by a bit of an easier boss. It helps everything flow a bit better and reduces the feeling of being caught in a meat grinder the further you push in. In recent raids, though, the difficulty curve between bosses has been a bit hit or miss.
Guild Wars 2
I’d also like to include the new leveling experience as one of the best things because I appreciate what they were going for on it. Giving players a way to enjoy an entire expansion’s worth of content while leveling and having everything level to you is an excellent concept. However, the fact this wasn’t balanced with the patch content factored in really hampers the whole idea of giving players a cohesive story while leveling. This is also compounded by the fact that a chunk of that story is told in raids, and doing old raids while leveling is just not an option for the most part. I hope they keep working at it, though, because the groundwork that was laid is great.
What WoW Could Learn from FFXIV & GW2
If there were one thing from FFXIV I could bring over to WoW, it would be the Daily Roulette system. All past dungeons, trials, and raids are available for anyone to queue into this system. Players get a once-daily bonus of experience, gil, and sometimes whatever the end game token is current for participating. It’s a great way to level up alt jobs and earn some extra FF14 Gil. It also helps out players looking to do these types of content for the first time because they can queue for the specific dungeon, trial, or raid they want to do and be matched with people doing their daily roulette. If you’re over-leveled for the content, your level is squashed down to whatever is appropriate for the duty which came up.
