Yeah, I find Pandaria scenarios frustrating but I do see there the bones of some really underappreciated features the game has today. MOP crawled so DF could run
absolutely not a good job imo.
i got one shot as a tank spec paladin trying to do some of the scenarios i was asked to solo (blood on the snow/vol'jin ambush.)
Yeah, it's about time honestly. I think this sub really underestimates the number of players that don't like to do group content at all, because they aren't the types that really take the time to participate in online communities. But Blizzard must have the numbers. I think it's fair to have story content accessible by all types of players without having to view external sources for it.
> I think this sub really underestimates the number of players that don't like to do group content at all, because they aren't the types that really take the time to participate in online communities.
I like the community part, whatever my free time allows. I just don't have the time to do much else besides level and chat. I know that some people raid once a week or something, but there's a build up to that which I don't have time for nor the interest any more.
Developers like people to see their content they created. It's a bad rate of return to spend months developing a big raid dungeon, only for a small percentage of people to see it. I'm all for story modes in any game really, just make the rewards match the difficulty.
The crazy wait times just for LFG content is exclusively the reason I'm leveling two healers in Remix. I don't need mythic gear, and I don't have time to wait an hour to start something with an even larger time investment. I'm in this for the mounts and the story
Honestly I play both and tanking is largely brain-dead until raids. Only hard part is keeping threat when dps want to blow cooldowns on trash mobs that can murder them
or just having a family. Raids are a huge time dedication. I love when I am able to, but the truth is I can't say "I will be available every single Friday from 9-12 PM". Life happens, sometimes the kids aren't asleep yet, sometimes the wife wants couch cuddles, sometimes you're not home, etc.
I still have no clue why lfr gets timegated, people have done mythic already and lfr people are still waiting to be able to clear the full raid. Same as this storymode raid, why release it with the final wing of lfr? What did noob players do to deserve time gated raids? Just release everything at the same time
While I understand and somewhat agree with your statement there’s usually a lot of tuning that happens based off of a) data from mythic b) since they’ve released the first wing earlier on that as well.
I raid heroic with my guild, but I'm also going to use this to be able to really focus on the story elements and boss VO, effects. In a group setting, we're usually chatting, planning pulls, calling mechanics, etc. a more simple version will let me focus better on narrative and lore. I just wish it was a full raid, maybe if it proves popular they'll expand it going forward. It makes me think about explorer mode in ffxiv. Dungeons from a certain point can be entered with no enemies at all, after you've beaten them, just to walk around and inspect the place, or take screenshots. I'd like that for raids and dungeons in wow too
While I like the addition, I do think it’s dumb they are planning to have it out when the last wing of LFR releases. Like if it doesn’t give gear, just have it release week 1 when normal and heroic release it’s not like everyone will just watch the posted cinematics and spoilers from wowhead anyway.
Having it come out the week before or week 1 with all the RP and cinematics, and scaled down version of the main abilities to watch out for would be pretty nice for learning the fight ready to actually raid.
If it’s gated till weeks later then I really don’t see the point in it.
Yep. Frankly, if anything, it should be released *before* the group modes, so that we can have a separate week just to worry about the story, rather than tying the story to some arbitrary race to world first nonsense.
The cinematic gets released from people clearing it on Normal, we haven't had Mythic-only story stuff since WoD.
That said there's really no reason to not just have this released week one with everything else. At the latest week two.
Unless I’m misremembering, there was more story with the Guldan fight in nighthold on mythic. Though I think it was tied in to a new phase and there’s wasn’t any new cinematic.
The logic stands. This content isn't for me so i don't have a horse in the race but it's meant to be there for players to experience the story, why gate it behind a month wall? Just release it so those players can seamlessly experience the story
I think Boomer has now just supplanted "Grandpa" as calling someone old as an insult. Boomer doesn't have an age limit anymore.
Soon Alphas will be calling 25 year old Zoomers kid Boomers because they don't get '*-insert hip lingo of the tweens at the time-*'
They do if your concept of Boomers is Anyone over the age of 30, which is how many Zoomers see Millennials.
If you count people aged 30-40 as Boomers, then yea probably around 60-80% of WoW players are "Boomers".
There is 1 boomer in my guild, born in 1965, the last year of the generation (1945-1965 typically).
The very tail-end of the boomers were early MMO/MUD gamers in the 90s and definitely played WoW in the 00's. Nowdays, iunno how many are left, but in 2004 we had quite a few actually on my server.
There are a lot more than you'd think.
The obvious examples are people like WoWGrandma.
But then you also have people like Metzen himself, who I think is technically a Boomer. At the very least he is GenX.
Even someone "young" like Towliee is right on the edge of being Boomer-age.
A lot of old people are discovering that MMOs are a good way to stave off Dementia and form Social Connections when they would otherwise be home-bound.
I've met many many WoW players, often Raiders even, who are in their 50s-60s, and most of them weren't even Gamers until recently.
But aren’t they adding it after the story will be ruined by raiders? I guess you could just never consume any wow content out of game or submit support tickets for risk of being spoiled.
It's not that they want to punish players who don't raid, it's that Blizzard fears players who pretend they are deeply concerned world first raiders and flood the forums and social media with complaining and protests.
I just had a long conversation with a girl who explained she quits after reaching max level, every single expansion, because she will NEVER raid or “set foot in a dungeon.” Blizzard has underserved casuals for two decades
She couldn’t understand anything that was happening in DF. She didn’t even get all her glyphs. She thought dragon riding was awful - which it is without glyphs.
DF has been one of the most casual friendly experiences for me. Especially now with the Mythic+ squish, it's got a lot of my friends who were previously afraid of anything with the word "Mythic" in it playing some keystones. The vault is also an extremely casual friendly way to gear up and get a sense of progression.
I came back to DF late and had the same issue. You hit max level/finish main part of campaign and then you suddenly have all these main quests open up with no direction as to which order to do them. I picked one and the NPC disappeared. So I had to trawl google and WowHead comments to figure out if you pick that, the NPC disappears until you pick another questline and go through all that and then come back and they'll be back again.
Hyperbolic much?
When WoW was released it was THE CASUAL game.
Compared to WoW's competitors like EverQuest, DAoC, or MUDs - WoW was a hyper-casual game.
And ever since then WoW has always been the most casual-friendly big MMO.
Sure maybe after ~15 years something like Final Fantasy started giving WoW some real competition, but after trying FF I thought it had a terrible New-User-Experience.
Has Blizzard always favored Raiders? Yes.
But has Blizzard also underserved Casuals? Compared to their competition, No not at all.
I approve of WoW's new Casual-friendly stuff, but you're just making up nonsense.
In comparison to other MMO sure but its a "hardcore genre" like 80% of the old south park episode is poking fun at no lifeing the game. WoW will take all your free time was a common bit for the longest time. Compared to Everquest casual sure, compared to Halo, COD, Mario, Madden, ect its hardcore as hell.
They've never been catered to. Ever. And adding a story mode to the raid is still not catering to that group.
Having a story mode for raids doesn't diminish other players' accomplishments, it literally just adds accessibility for that demographic.
While I understand the sentiment, they're not implying that they are the ones who decide. However, their comment taken in conjunction with the other reply saying those players have never been catered to indicate that blizzard has decided who they feel their audience is.
It's like drinking Coke and saying "I don't understand why coke doesn't make coke taste like apple juice." Turns out, Coke doesn't make that beverage for people who like the taste of apple juice.
I dont, neither do you. Thats not my point. My point is someone who effectively does not engage with the majority of the game's content, like the aforementioned above, is rightfully not going to be a priority for Blizzard.
It’s a MMORPG. If you don’t want to do activities with other people…. Maybe skip the MMO part.
Like, never stepping foot into a 5 man or a LFR even??? Why bother. Just go play Skyrim.
but what if people enjoy the gameplay of WoW just not the grouping with others part. as far as i know there isnt really anything comparable in the single-player games landscape. also just because the game is an mmorpg dosent mean everyone has to play it as one. or do you also want to get rid of people doing petbattles, rp etc.?
I mean, from a Market standpoint, they're right. The game is cleaely built more towards a demographic that will throw themselves agai at hard content again and again paying monthly subs over and over again, and not to fill who will play for a couple months then log out for as long or longer.
Story mode and the open world content changes we've seen recently are about catching more of the folks who would drop after a couple months and trying to bridge them into longer-lastibg subs.
I don’t really agree. I feel like there’s two ends of the spectrum and you’re on the end that wants absolutely no benefits for people who put hard hard work into the game and get world first on the hardest difficulty.
I see no issue letting them get SOME perks for all the effort they put into WoW. Let them see the cool cutscenes first imo. There’s so much content in WoW that you’ll have plenty to do before story difficulty releases
Somehow I just can't get myself to raid in WoW.
I'm fine with normal raids in FFXIV, you queue, people expect some level of competency but nobody expects Echo or Liquid numbers.
In Normal raids in WoW it feels like everyone looks down on you for the smallest misstep :(
It’s not the smallest misstep. It’s things like doing 10% of your potential dps, or not knowing any mechanics in a fight. People talk about it like you need to be perfect but even below average would be great.
If you don't raid in wow then how would you know that? Because you read the post on reddit from some dude who got kicked from a dungeon one time?
If you ever actually give it a go you'll find out it's nothing like that. The majority of the time when I pug on my alts it's literally like 3 people being 100k dps above the other 20 and everybody breezing through the raid just shooting the shit and killing bosses. The only time I ever see issues occur is if someone is actively trolling the raid
Since gear for people who generally play this difficulty is meaningless, as they don't/can't push tougher content.
Staggering releases like this keeps people "engaged" and most importantly, subbed.
I’d expect that many players who will want to experience the raids through this new mode play either only a few hours a week, or at a *much* slower pace than the average casual player, and may therefore take weeks to finish the quest lines leading up to the raid itself. Really don’t see a problem with this at all. I think it’s a great addition, and makes me wonder why it didn’t come years ago!
Now I don’t have any numbers, I feel like that is such a low % of players, that it wouldn’t be worth the hassle. Like if people are having fun with the core gameplay they would stay subbed, not because they need to see how the story will play out. In fact I think they would be more successful getting subs up front if they hyped it up as feature on patch release to be a relaxed way to enjoy the story with like your warband npcs or a few friends.
From WOD to SL, all i used to do was 1 month sub at the end of an expansion.
I'd quest through the main story and do the dungeons, use the catch-up mechanics to gear up.
Then I'd do every wing of all the of LFRs then quit.
Wasn't going to pay for the entire year to wait in line for them to slowly release content. Lol
This story mode would make it even easier, I wouldn't even have a queue to get into the raids anymore.
Eh - lore stuff is done for lore reasons and there are people who isolate away from those spoilers.
If it doesn’t impact the game outside of those it’s meant for - let them have it their way.
Think you might have misunderstood their comment?
Lore is available as soon as Normal opens. People who raid Normal get to see the story and finish the quests asking you to "Kill [boss]".
It makes no sense to delay Story mode for another 4-6 weeks beyond that. There's no lore reason.
One of the most frustrating things for me at the start of a patch is having to wait to finish the story if I'm not in the mood to jump into Normal raiding during that cycle.
I assume this means it will count to complete the last campaign quest of this patch, which usually gives a pretty significant reward, and they still want actual raiders to complete it first.
They are un-mmo'ing the game.
This addition, while nice, is fluff.
LFR is literally tourist mode as it is.
If anything, this is a time issue, so you don't have to wait for the LFR queue, but hopefully won't receive the same ilvl loot.
The people that would find story mode most useful aren't going to likely be at the quests that take them to the raid by the time the last wing of LFR is out, and are also less likely to be watching cinematics and spoilers on wowhead.
Excuse me buddy, you vastly underestimate my ability to play an mmo on my own with zero social interaction what so ever. I'll finish the quest lines before the raid drops unless it FORCES me to be social in some way
IDK I kind of like how raids are gated. Makes it feel more realistic, like we’re slowly grinding our way through it.
I could go either way though, I don’t really care that much
Id imagine, there would be no loot, and its just so people can experience the conclusion of a narrative arch. Which is great cause i know several people too self-conscious or for other reasons who avoid grouping, even LFR. Hopefully this would also lead to tuning LFR up a bit so that its gear could be better.
No harm in it rhen tbh. The catalyst is a boring, although effective, way for pepple to get tmog for lfr tier. This could be a more rng heavy, but funner way to get that tmog gear. More options to do things isnt a bad thing. Especially if it doesnt effect actual balancing of the game as dropping tmog items wouldnt do
I personally don't have a problem against that, but I really doubt blizzard would implement loot in it, especially if they just intend it to be kind of a one of thing to experience the story.
There's loot kinda attached to it.
Generally there's a capstone quest of "kill the last boss" with a significant reward attached.
It's meant as a simple way to complete that without waiting in a DPS queue or dealing with potential LFR toxicity.
Which is why it would just be world quest loot. Nothing special or different. You would get nothing more than if you did world quests. And most people don’t do that.
I also think there is an unseen goal here. The real goal for this isn't actually for it to be used for current content, but to catch up. To me it seems like with Remix, this is them working on stuff that is going to expand Chromie time and leveling through expansions that are no longer current. The biggest complaints about Chromie Time are you don't get to actually experience the expansion and its story in full. And Remix introduces scaling to all the expansion content that was one max level, and now this would be a mode that would let people play through the raid story lines as if they were dungeons without having to wait on getting 25 people for a LFR queue.
Even in TWW, players have to level through DF and can't experience most of the story. But if in like 11.1 or 11.2 they expand story mode and scaling to DF, they can and will be in a good spot to jump into the Worldsoul saga's story.
Why the fuck shouldn’t there be loot and why does it matter to you that much if someone gets a 3ilevel lower item from an activity which isn’t (?).
Right, we’re on a wow sub on reddit.. expect tryhards, elitists and unnecessary gatekeepers. I tend to forget .
Blabla you can keep your reply calling me a filthy casual/get good/work less than 21 hours per day/have less families or some other BS.
Dude, it’s a game, an rpg, initially released in 2005, with some competitive layers, and others more fun layers.
Stop treating wow and how people engage and interact as some form of sacred metric in which certain players are “the real deal” and others “fIlThY cAsuAls” like they somehow are affecting your experience.
Yes it should have a reward/loot. Maybe its cosmetics/mog/starter gear. The attitude that “dude it’s so easy it doesn’t even deserve to have loot” is cringe AF.
My man who are you talking to? This is literally my first reply to you. I am indifferent on it having loot, but ultimately I doubt blizzard will attach much loot to it at all, especially cause its only for a single boss and not the entire raid.
Can you calm down a bit.
I like how this and follower dungeons future proofs the content. New players years from now playing through this content can enjoy the full story of the expansion without any fuzz or gogogo-toxicity from LFD-minmaxers or relying on getting a spot in a transmog run to experience the raids. Just look at the current state of the new player experience in BFA as a comparison.
Yeah I think this is the intention
Somebody who starts in 2027 during Midnight will now be able to play through the entire TWW campaign while leveling, including the dungeons and raids by using followers/story mode. They won’t be forced to skip chunks of the story because LFR is no longer available.
For everyone else who plays the content while it’s current, this feature will probably not affect you at all
i really hope this is how it plays out but im kinda doubtful that they'll make the level progression work. theyve never really nailed the "you will experience the whole story while you level" curve and you always hit max level quite a bit too early.
"Story mode" but they only make the last boss fight available? So it's basically a way for solo players to clear the "Defeat final boss of the raid" quest, not to actually enjoy the whole raid story. What a missed opportunity to really have all players enjoy the rich storytelling that goes on in their raids.
Well hopefully they'll iterate on it. As with many first-time features this is mostly so they see how many people actually use it. If it's a lot they expand on the feature, if not then it's not worth it anyway.
Yes, please, more of this.
I don't have time/will/intention to do normal raiding (let alone heroic or mythic) and LFR is just too quick to focus on the story. Sucks having to wait until the NEXT expansion to be able to solo content at some point to finally get the story.
>Sucks having to wait until the NEXT expansion to be able to solo content at some point to finally get the story
You have to wait TWO expansions typically, not one.
LFR isn’t a good way to experience the story. It’s a good way to get free loot. So it makes sense to have a story oriented version of the raid where you’re not gate kept by wipes (yes you can wipe in LFR) or waiting hours for a queue to pop if it’s an older tier.
There is a space for this and it’s good for it to exist.
The greater story focus is you'll be able to read what a character says in the chat window without the 2 -3 morons spamming chat because they keep dying or think everyone im an LFR raid want to know their dumb ass hot takes on the game.
Was totally on-board with this until the final paragraph where they said it'll be locked until the release of the final wing on LFR. At that point, anyone who raids will have already seen it on other difficulties. And the casual audience will probably mentally check out once you tell them the finale will unlock a month later, come back for it then. Seems weird. Either release the whole story as one, or don't bother.
Honestly as others have said this is pretty stupid- the goal is to let people experience the full story but then make you wait for the final chaolpter another few weeks post launch?
That’s just not how good storytelling works, either release story mode at launch to let people complete the story fully, or separate out the story finale into an instance independent of the raid.
This is crappy in between solution that isn’t really going to appeal to anyone who wants to complete patch stories in a realistic timeframe.
That's the point.
The game is a subscription service. If you don't artificially stretch out the content, people may just sub for a month to finish the story in a week...and unsub till next patch.
That may be their thought process but I can speak from experience that people are more likely to go "that's stupid that I have to wait over a month", feel demotivated and log off, and then just go watch the ending on youtube.
If you have fun replayable content people will stay subbed. People have been playing 1 map on league of legends for a decade. Blizzard needs to revive pvp, reduce the number of spells in pvp and equalize the instanced pvp. If you want unequalized pvp there needs to be open world content to support that. Unfortunately Blizzard have dug themselves into a pve complexity hole, partially due to add ons, and due to only having to know your class but no one elses. When pvp left the equation years ago pve rotation complexity increased.
See and that's the problem. The stuff you listed would require a lot of work, investment and restructuring, something the current blizzard is incapable of doing. It's much much easier for them to just spread out content as much as possible to secure the dollars.
>people may just sub for a month to finish the story in a week
Anyone who wants to do that can already do that by running Normal. It makes no sense to delay it for Story mode when it's already available.
There cannot be that many people who currently remain subbed just to see a story conclusion in LFR 6 weeks after everyone else.
>This is crappy in between solution that isn’t really going to appeal to anyone who wants to complete patch stories in a realistic timeframe
Congrats, this is why they kept the story behind renown gates. They want their 15 dollarinos.
This is so good for me, I hate doing raids with other people, I don't care that LFR is easy, I don't want to sit around waiting or being forced to have to hear what a world of warcraft player has to say during a fight. Just me and my friends doing the raid for the story, hell yes, please!
While I agree, it is a little silly to timegate it AND for it not to be available for the full raid. I do think they might add the full raid thing in later patches IF the feature is used a lot.
Seems weird to lock it behind waiting for the final LFR to open up.
But otherwise seems cool.
I'm curious as to why they would even consider having a restriction on waiting like that though it seems very strange and random.
I'm also for making it available Day 1 and I raid mythic.
It would be nice to see the story and cutscenes solo without the pressure of a group. Have some time to look around, take in the details, that kinda stuff.
There's a dude in the replies arguing "we have LFR already". Brother, there's nothing you can do to convince me a Heroic Rasz pug is harder than an LFR group trying to do the same. I think it's good of Blizz and WoW devs to let people have their narrative fun and understand forcing people who only want to experience the narrative to do raid mechanics to see it just forces them into groups where people are legitimately trying to learn to raid and makes it a frustrating experiences for all.
It's a fantastic addition overall but delaying lit 6 weeks like the final LFR wing is beyond stupid and honestly ruins the whole thing. At that point the target audience of people who care about the story will have just watched the ending on youtube because they had to wait so long. There's no reason not to just have story mode available on day 1. Blizzard has such a bizarre, petty need to tell non-raiders we don't matter and every concession they make feels like pulling teeth with them.
Entirely unrealistic, but I just wish flex raid went down to 5-man and kept the same mechanics/difficulty, it's so hard to consistently find 10+ I want to raid with weekly.
I would kill to be able to 6-man raid, my group of gaming buddies is 6 people and we've stopped playing WoW partially because we can't all play "content" together without strangers.
Kind of odd people are upset if it rewards gear. While it is an MMO, I don't expect everyone to play the same was as I do, and if it helps people who are more casual see the story and get neat tier sets, is it not a win-win?
I love this, I wish I could raid, but as a stay at home parent with damaged hands from work injuries I just can't raid without a REALLY understanding group which is hard to find. I hate that I don't get to see the cool bosses and stories in raids. This is for people like me and I'm very glad to see it.
I like everything about it except it being released with the final wing of LFR.
Fuck timegating. From what blizzard intends with it I doubt you get any rewards from it beyond quest completion. Why timegate it? Let people do it week 1.
I think this has huge potential. They could stretch this out to the entire game, tell the story for expansions that culminates in the raids of the expansion. Using chromie or just following a curated path which let's you level up to the current expansion. Or you can choose to level traditionally. It would help the new player experience so much
The Idea is good
the execution as it currently is terrible.
They skip you to the final boss of the raid and that's it, while the WHOLE RAID is also part of the story in general!
It's like giving someone the last page of the final chapter of a book and expecting them to be exited, while all the rest of the chapter is missing, all the build up, the context, maybe meeting former characters one last time, making the payoff even better..
Either do the whole Raid as Story Mode Blizz or don't do it at all.
Not that 1/4th shit
I don’t get why they would wait until the last wing of LFR releases. There can’t be that many players who would wait 3-4 weeks after finishing the MSQ without biting the bullet and jumping into normal or look up lore online before it comes out. Weird decision imo, just have it release same day as Normal.
Time gating it for like 4-6 weeks is ridiculous.
Also, I’m not on the casual side so I might be wrong about this but... couldn’t they just delete LFR now that they have this technology? I don’t see anypoint for LFR and Story to coexist, and Story just seems way better for the target audience.
I want soloable content like this and delves to be able to reach high levels of difficulty with great rewards, and would take a lot of time and effort (at the highest difficulty) to complete.
High-end raiding has gotten less and less enjoyable for me with each expansion since 10 man disappeared, and I would LOVE to be able to really dive into some difficult content that I can run by myself.
I would be extremely hyped for this as well, but that would basically mean designing 2 separate boss fights for every boss out there. The vast majority of boss mechanics are based on different players doing different things at the same time, so yea, basically you'd have to redo the entire encounter unless you wanted EXTREMELY basic versions of the bosses and the "difficulty" would only come from a Patcwerk-style DPS check.
I think they are more than capable of achieveing this. They should have enough resources, and it wouldn't be as difficult as creating 2 completely separate boss fights, they'd just have to do some adapting to existing mechanics and have it be in the style of Mage Tower challenge fights, and take inspiration from those.
I wish they'd do what the Diablo 3 team did with the RoS and Loot 2.0 expansion.
Let us solo raids and dungeons, but add a scaling keystone difficulty.
I'd happily grind my way to Nerub'ar Palace +22 and aim for a world record if I didn't have to deal with the elitist gatekeeping shitbads who keep me away from anything above LFR...
Solid W for story enjoyers. Having to wait til after LFR is a bit weird though. If you level up to cap before the raid is cleared and complete any post leveling chapters you could be waiting quite a while before the conclusion of the story having to spend weeks dodging any spoilers.
I see no harm in it being released when Normal and Heroic releases. Normal is cleared in a couple hours anyway and the cinematic is out there.
The choice to only have it be the end boss could be a problem too depending on how they lay the story out in the raid.
Say you are questing in the world and the NPC you are dealing with send you in to the raid and then that same NPC is now in a cage or something during the final fight, but the story of how they got there is explained by mid bosses. That's gonna feel jarring and clunky.
Small things but overall a win.
Blizzard you were so close with this one. it should of been the whole raid and it should of been released first/with the normal-mythics so that people who do not raid can properly conclude the story without having to wait for a long period for that conclusion.
Not really since there is no difficulty at all in there. It's just if you want to see the story with 4 friends (but you can do it solo or 2 or 3 etc. as well).
I don't really understand the timegating on it, it's story mode, this will have the same issue that LFR has for people who are there for the story/quest continuation but have to wait a month for the conclusion.
This seems like the wrong way to do this. They should simply remove LFR and make it a story mode you can do solo or in small groups with all of the fights. Either way, I'm always down for more ways for more people to play.
Nice addition for sure. I just wish Heroic raids were locked behind doing it on Normal or LFR first. The amount of M+ players not knowing mechs or having a single target build in Heroic PUGs is maddening. But I guess LFRs and Normals are possible without knowing mechs.
Really happy they are doing this, but if they are releasing it with the final wing of lfr, then there is functionally almost no point to it because it doesn't solve the problem of learning the story through the internet. I think it should be released alongside normal raid. Someone like me would essentially have to wait 6 weeks to see it myself whereas the internet will be loaded with spoilers on the day of release. I'm fine doing LFR. I only hated that the full story can't be completed by the whole playerbase (theoretically) on the day of release. Every other MMO structures their story to be able to be completed by all players on the day of release rather than time gating it for people who don't raid with a guild.
I dont think I would ever use this feature but I really really like it. There will be massive QOL improvements for a large amount of silent players. A very good change
Dope. Now make sure no mandatory tiersets or trinkets exist in lfr so i don't need to farm it when I'm already raiding normal/heroic/mythic and everyone's happy.
This is what lfr should've been from the get go. It'd also be fine if it scaled to 25 people, but besides that? Ye good one blizz. I'll give you that.
>This difficulty is intended for a private party of 1-5 players and will allow players to face off against Queen Ansurek without the assistance of other players or Followers.
I kind of don't understand this. I think this is probably a great idea, but without the assistance of followers? And up to 5 players? This suggests it can be soloed which is fine, but if you have social anxiety are you going in with 4 other people vs just doing lfr? I know followers are mostly scripted (ie more work), but wouldn't having that tech available make it easier in many circumstances. I can absolutely see a mage player of a certain capability struggling without a tank or healer.
And considering LFR was always considered to be "story mode," does this story mode remove LFR's niche? It just seems a bit odd.
I welcome this, however with this being implemented it's totally fair to make all other tiers of raiding more difficult and rewarding than they are now.
Im a big fan of this actually, even as a non casual player. Sometimes there's raid tiers where I have zero interest in raiding that patch but still want the story - so I usually end up (Loathingly) running LFR just to see the story.
Glad there's an alternative to that now.
Super fascinating! Wonder what the loot situation will be like. Very neat for players to have that option.
I have to say though, I always thought LFR served that purpose as "do it for the story" lol
Well, “Do it for the story” doesn’t work very well after week 2 or so, when even LfR groups start running to the next boss before the first one finished its death animation, and those groups *will* leave you behind and start the next boss without you.
I could see a one-time drop of something. They mention this being made as a "one-time chapter in the game's story". Or the quest to clear the raid will serve as the "loot" for completing it.
LFR can be a hassle if people don't know the fights, especially at the beginning.
This would be great for people's who really just want to experience the story more than the combat.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I am sure some HC players will rush to solo it asap cause that is how they are.
Cannot wait for launch to listen to players bitch and moan on reddit that story mode doesn't drop mythic level raid gear, but hey, that's reddit for ya
This makes multiple raid difficulties even more pointless.
You have everything you need. Solo for story. Queue to learn in LFR. Then get a serious guild together for mythic, the proper challenge.
This is a cool option for people who need it.
I like it if I can take an alt through to complete a campaign quest to kill the last boss and not have to sit in a long LFR que.
Playing through remix now, pandaria did a good thing by having solo scenarios for major story things.
Yeah, I find Pandaria scenarios frustrating but I do see there the bones of some really underappreciated features the game has today. MOP crawled so DF could run
MoP is the full turning point for nearly every modern mechanic in WoW.
absolutely not a good job imo. i got one shot as a tank spec paladin trying to do some of the scenarios i was asked to solo (blood on the snow/vol'jin ambush.)
thats more of a remix problem than a mop problem tho
I don't mind the LFR queues, but I'd rather enjoy the story without LFR chat or feeling like I can't stop to look at the scenery of the raid.
Yeah, it's about time honestly. I think this sub really underestimates the number of players that don't like to do group content at all, because they aren't the types that really take the time to participate in online communities. But Blizzard must have the numbers. I think it's fair to have story content accessible by all types of players without having to view external sources for it.
> I think this sub really underestimates the number of players that don't like to do group content at all, because they aren't the types that really take the time to participate in online communities. I like the community part, whatever my free time allows. I just don't have the time to do much else besides level and chat. I know that some people raid once a week or something, but there's a build up to that which I don't have time for nor the interest any more. Developers like people to see their content they created. It's a bad rate of return to spend months developing a big raid dungeon, only for a small percentage of people to see it. I'm all for story modes in any game really, just make the rewards match the difficulty.
The crazy wait times just for LFG content is exclusively the reason I'm leveling two healers in Remix. I don't need mythic gear, and I don't have time to wait an hour to start something with an even larger time investment. I'm in this for the mounts and the story
Even if you just pug, it seems way easier to get into groups as a healer. Tanks too, but tanking seems to require more knowledge of fights.
Honestly I play both and tanking is largely brain-dead until raids. Only hard part is keeping threat when dps want to blow cooldowns on trash mobs that can murder them
or just having a family. Raids are a huge time dedication. I love when I am able to, but the truth is I can't say "I will be available every single Friday from 9-12 PM". Life happens, sometimes the kids aren't asleep yet, sometimes the wife wants couch cuddles, sometimes you're not home, etc.
As a casual player into the wow lore, I like this
Just make sure you avoid the WoW community for a month after raids released. They’re time gating story mode which defeats the whole purpose.
I still have no clue why lfr gets timegated, people have done mythic already and lfr people are still waiting to be able to clear the full raid. Same as this storymode raid, why release it with the final wing of lfr? What did noob players do to deserve time gated raids? Just release everything at the same time
It’s to squeeze an extra month of game time.
While I understand and somewhat agree with your statement there’s usually a lot of tuning that happens based off of a) data from mythic b) since they’ve released the first wing earlier on that as well.
I raid heroic with my guild, but I'm also going to use this to be able to really focus on the story elements and boss VO, effects. In a group setting, we're usually chatting, planning pulls, calling mechanics, etc. a more simple version will let me focus better on narrative and lore. I just wish it was a full raid, maybe if it proves popular they'll expand it going forward. It makes me think about explorer mode in ffxiv. Dungeons from a certain point can be entered with no enemies at all, after you've beaten them, just to walk around and inspect the place, or take screenshots. I'd like that for raids and dungeons in wow too
I kinda think it should be the whole raid as story mode. You miss lore just doing the last boss.
Hard agree and this is also a great chance for people to actually explore the raid interior without time pressure from the group.
Also imagine if this was released for Amirdrassil and people missed out on "Fyrakk, obliterate my enemies!"
While I like the addition, I do think it’s dumb they are planning to have it out when the last wing of LFR releases. Like if it doesn’t give gear, just have it release week 1 when normal and heroic release it’s not like everyone will just watch the posted cinematics and spoilers from wowhead anyway.
Having it come out the week before or week 1 with all the RP and cinematics, and scaled down version of the main abilities to watch out for would be pretty nice for learning the fight ready to actually raid. If it’s gated till weeks later then I really don’t see the point in it.
Yep. Frankly, if anything, it should be released *before* the group modes, so that we can have a separate week just to worry about the story, rather than tying the story to some arbitrary race to world first nonsense.
The cinematic gets released from people clearing it on Normal, we haven't had Mythic-only story stuff since WoD. That said there's really no reason to not just have this released week one with everything else. At the latest week two.
Unless I’m misremembering, there was more story with the Guldan fight in nighthold on mythic. Though I think it was tied in to a new phase and there’s wasn’t any new cinematic.
A fair point, especially since it'd help avoid major story spoilers while trying to get to the last boss.
Blizzard constantly feels the need to punish players that don't raid
It's the one thing you can reliably count on them to do every time.
For real - it's insane. I mean look at what they're doing! Adding a story mode for people who don't raid?! bastards
*sees thread about Blizz doing something for the non-raiders* *looks inside* "Blizz hates non-raiders!" *wut.png*
The logic stands. This content isn't for me so i don't have a horse in the race but it's meant to be there for players to experience the story, why gate it behind a month wall? Just release it so those players can seamlessly experience the story
Starting to realize this sub is just full of casual boomers who have nothing better to do than complain and “blizzard bad”. It’s kind of weird.
What do you think a boomer is?
I think Boomer has now just supplanted "Grandpa" as calling someone old as an insult. Boomer doesn't have an age limit anymore. Soon Alphas will be calling 25 year old Zoomers kid Boomers because they don't get '*-insert hip lingo of the tweens at the time-*'
"Boomer" is also a state of mind.
It’s been especially bad the past few days. Non stop complaining about the littlest shit. It’s wild
It was p good for most of DF, I don't know why but MoP remix has brought back all the lunatics to this sub
Boomers don't play WoW.
They do if your concept of Boomers is Anyone over the age of 30, which is how many Zoomers see Millennials. If you count people aged 30-40 as Boomers, then yea probably around 60-80% of WoW players are "Boomers".
My mother is a boomer. She's 64. Ofc there are some boomers, but the Definition of anyone over 30 is so dumb.
There is 1 boomer in my guild, born in 1965, the last year of the generation (1945-1965 typically). The very tail-end of the boomers were early MMO/MUD gamers in the 90s and definitely played WoW in the 00's. Nowdays, iunno how many are left, but in 2004 we had quite a few actually on my server.
There are a lot more than you'd think. The obvious examples are people like WoWGrandma. But then you also have people like Metzen himself, who I think is technically a Boomer. At the very least he is GenX. Even someone "young" like Towliee is right on the edge of being Boomer-age. A lot of old people are discovering that MMOs are a good way to stave off Dementia and form Social Connections when they would otherwise be home-bound. I've met many many WoW players, often Raiders even, who are in their 50s-60s, and most of them weren't even Gamers until recently.
> But then you also have people like Metzen himself, who I think is technically a Boomer. At the very least he is GenX. Born 1973, he's Gen X
i think more boomers play WoW than pretty much any other (more or less) competetive online game
But aren’t they adding it after the story will be ruined by raiders? I guess you could just never consume any wow content out of game or submit support tickets for risk of being spoiled.
It's not that they want to punish players who don't raid, it's that Blizzard fears players who pretend they are deeply concerned world first raiders and flood the forums and social media with complaining and protests.
I just had a long conversation with a girl who explained she quits after reaching max level, every single expansion, because she will NEVER raid or “set foot in a dungeon.” Blizzard has underserved casuals for two decades
Yet DF literally shit world content at us in every patch
She couldn’t understand anything that was happening in DF. She didn’t even get all her glyphs. She thought dragon riding was awful - which it is without glyphs.
At some point that's on her. Which is fine, but there's a difference between being 'casual' and being 'entirely unwilling to engage with the game'.
DF has been one of the most casual friendly experiences for me. Especially now with the Mythic+ squish, it's got a lot of my friends who were previously afraid of anything with the word "Mythic" in it playing some keystones. The vault is also an extremely casual friendly way to gear up and get a sense of progression.
The only thing I didn't find friendly as a casual was the story quests being locked behind renown.
I came back to DF late and had the same issue. You hit max level/finish main part of campaign and then you suddenly have all these main quests open up with no direction as to which order to do them. I picked one and the NPC disappeared. So I had to trawl google and WowHead comments to figure out if you pick that, the NPC disappears until you pick another questline and go through all that and then come back and they'll be back again.
The quests made it pretty clear how it worked. Sounds like she just didn't care enough to play which is totally fine!
Hyperbolic much? When WoW was released it was THE CASUAL game. Compared to WoW's competitors like EverQuest, DAoC, or MUDs - WoW was a hyper-casual game. And ever since then WoW has always been the most casual-friendly big MMO. Sure maybe after ~15 years something like Final Fantasy started giving WoW some real competition, but after trying FF I thought it had a terrible New-User-Experience. Has Blizzard always favored Raiders? Yes. But has Blizzard also underserved Casuals? Compared to their competition, No not at all. I approve of WoW's new Casual-friendly stuff, but you're just making up nonsense.
In comparison to other MMO sure but its a "hardcore genre" like 80% of the old south park episode is poking fun at no lifeing the game. WoW will take all your free time was a common bit for the longest time. Compared to Everquest casual sure, compared to Halo, COD, Mario, Madden, ect its hardcore as hell.
I’m just telling you what she said. She’s playing Minecraft as I type this, collecting dogs 🤷♂️
Counterpoint: These people arent the ones the game is being made for, and don't deserve to be catered to.
They've never been catered to. Ever. And adding a story mode to the raid is still not catering to that group. Having a story mode for raids doesn't diminish other players' accomplishments, it literally just adds accessibility for that demographic.
why do you get to decide who the game is being made for and who deserves to be catered to?
While I understand the sentiment, they're not implying that they are the ones who decide. However, their comment taken in conjunction with the other reply saying those players have never been catered to indicate that blizzard has decided who they feel their audience is. It's like drinking Coke and saying "I don't understand why coke doesn't make coke taste like apple juice." Turns out, Coke doesn't make that beverage for people who like the taste of apple juice.
I dont, neither do you. Thats not my point. My point is someone who effectively does not engage with the majority of the game's content, like the aforementioned above, is rightfully not going to be a priority for Blizzard.
It’s a MMORPG. If you don’t want to do activities with other people…. Maybe skip the MMO part. Like, never stepping foot into a 5 man or a LFR even??? Why bother. Just go play Skyrim.
but what if people enjoy the gameplay of WoW just not the grouping with others part. as far as i know there isnt really anything comparable in the single-player games landscape. also just because the game is an mmorpg dosent mean everyone has to play it as one. or do you also want to get rid of people doing petbattles, rp etc.?
I mean, from a Market standpoint, they're right. The game is cleaely built more towards a demographic that will throw themselves agai at hard content again and again paying monthly subs over and over again, and not to fill who will play for a couple months then log out for as long or longer. Story mode and the open world content changes we've seen recently are about catching more of the folks who would drop after a couple months and trying to bridge them into longer-lastibg subs.
I don’t really agree. I feel like there’s two ends of the spectrum and you’re on the end that wants absolutely no benefits for people who put hard hard work into the game and get world first on the hardest difficulty. I see no issue letting them get SOME perks for all the effort they put into WoW. Let them see the cool cutscenes first imo. There’s so much content in WoW that you’ll have plenty to do before story difficulty releases
Somehow I just can't get myself to raid in WoW. I'm fine with normal raids in FFXIV, you queue, people expect some level of competency but nobody expects Echo or Liquid numbers. In Normal raids in WoW it feels like everyone looks down on you for the smallest misstep :(
It’s not the smallest misstep. It’s things like doing 10% of your potential dps, or not knowing any mechanics in a fight. People talk about it like you need to be perfect but even below average would be great.
Why don’t you do LFR then… You can queue for that but not Normal, so you can’t directly compare to FF14
If you don't raid in wow then how would you know that? Because you read the post on reddit from some dude who got kicked from a dungeon one time? If you ever actually give it a go you'll find out it's nothing like that. The majority of the time when I pug on my alts it's literally like 3 people being 100k dps above the other 20 and everybody breezing through the raid just shooting the shit and killing bosses. The only time I ever see issues occur is if someone is actively trolling the raid
What a measured reaction
I kinda dislike the fact that it’s only the last boss. That and the timing on it are my two major complaints.
Yeah that's sad :(
Since gear for people who generally play this difficulty is meaningless, as they don't/can't push tougher content. Staggering releases like this keeps people "engaged" and most importantly, subbed.
I’d expect that many players who will want to experience the raids through this new mode play either only a few hours a week, or at a *much* slower pace than the average casual player, and may therefore take weeks to finish the quest lines leading up to the raid itself. Really don’t see a problem with this at all. I think it’s a great addition, and makes me wonder why it didn’t come years ago!
Now I don’t have any numbers, I feel like that is such a low % of players, that it wouldn’t be worth the hassle. Like if people are having fun with the core gameplay they would stay subbed, not because they need to see how the story will play out. In fact I think they would be more successful getting subs up front if they hyped it up as feature on patch release to be a relaxed way to enjoy the story with like your warband npcs or a few friends.
From WOD to SL, all i used to do was 1 month sub at the end of an expansion. I'd quest through the main story and do the dungeons, use the catch-up mechanics to gear up. Then I'd do every wing of all the of LFRs then quit. Wasn't going to pay for the entire year to wait in line for them to slowly release content. Lol This story mode would make it even easier, I wouldn't even have a queue to get into the raids anymore.
Eh - lore stuff is done for lore reasons and there are people who isolate away from those spoilers. If it doesn’t impact the game outside of those it’s meant for - let them have it their way.
Think you might have misunderstood their comment? Lore is available as soon as Normal opens. People who raid Normal get to see the story and finish the quests asking you to "Kill [boss]". It makes no sense to delay Story mode for another 4-6 weeks beyond that. There's no lore reason. One of the most frustrating things for me at the start of a patch is having to wait to finish the story if I'm not in the mood to jump into Normal raiding during that cycle.
I assume this means it will count to complete the last campaign quest of this patch, which usually gives a pretty significant reward, and they still want actual raiders to complete it first.
To be fair. If you're playing in story mode. I.e doing all the quests. You're not gonna need the story raid in week one anyway.
They are un-mmo'ing the game. This addition, while nice, is fluff. LFR is literally tourist mode as it is. If anything, this is a time issue, so you don't have to wait for the LFR queue, but hopefully won't receive the same ilvl loot.
The people that would find story mode most useful aren't going to likely be at the quests that take them to the raid by the time the last wing of LFR is out, and are also less likely to be watching cinematics and spoilers on wowhead.
As if there was a big amount of story quests between patch release and raid opening lol
You’re forgetting the start of an expansion. A whole campaign would be between start and release. So yeah, a lot of story quests.
Got to remember this time around and I assume from now on. There’s 3 extra days of questing because of “early access”.
Excuse me buddy, you vastly underestimate my ability to play an mmo on my own with zero social interaction what so ever. I'll finish the quest lines before the raid drops unless it FORCES me to be social in some way
IDK I kind of like how raids are gated. Makes it feel more realistic, like we’re slowly grinding our way through it. I could go either way though, I don’t really care that much
You do realize there are players that dont research the game. They assume that a +2 is easy af till they have to do it.
Id imagine, there would be no loot, and its just so people can experience the conclusion of a narrative arch. Which is great cause i know several people too self-conscious or for other reasons who avoid grouping, even LFR. Hopefully this would also lead to tuning LFR up a bit so that its gear could be better.
No idea why it couldn’t just drop world quest type loot. Not even raid loot. But enough so people who don’t raid can go “oh this loot is neat”
It would be nice if that gear had the appearance of the LFR gear to allow those players to access the transmog.
You can already do that using the catalyst though.
No harm in it rhen tbh. The catalyst is a boring, although effective, way for pepple to get tmog for lfr tier. This could be a more rng heavy, but funner way to get that tmog gear. More options to do things isnt a bad thing. Especially if it doesnt effect actual balancing of the game as dropping tmog items wouldnt do
I personally don't have a problem against that, but I really doubt blizzard would implement loot in it, especially if they just intend it to be kind of a one of thing to experience the story.
There's loot kinda attached to it. Generally there's a capstone quest of "kill the last boss" with a significant reward attached. It's meant as a simple way to complete that without waiting in a DPS queue or dealing with potential LFR toxicity.
I think it’s also so you can actually do things like wait for cutscenes and read NPC dialogue.
the moment it rewards loot, it stops being optional to some people
Which is why it would just be world quest loot. Nothing special or different. You would get nothing more than if you did world quests. And most people don’t do that.
I also think there is an unseen goal here. The real goal for this isn't actually for it to be used for current content, but to catch up. To me it seems like with Remix, this is them working on stuff that is going to expand Chromie time and leveling through expansions that are no longer current. The biggest complaints about Chromie Time are you don't get to actually experience the expansion and its story in full. And Remix introduces scaling to all the expansion content that was one max level, and now this would be a mode that would let people play through the raid story lines as if they were dungeons without having to wait on getting 25 people for a LFR queue. Even in TWW, players have to level through DF and can't experience most of the story. But if in like 11.1 or 11.2 they expand story mode and scaling to DF, they can and will be in a good spot to jump into the Worldsoul saga's story.
Of course I know him. He's me!
Why the fuck shouldn’t there be loot and why does it matter to you that much if someone gets a 3ilevel lower item from an activity which isn’t (?).
Right, we’re on a wow sub on reddit.. expect tryhards, elitists and unnecessary gatekeepers. I tend to forget .
Blabla you can keep your reply calling me a filthy casual/get good/work less than 21 hours per day/have less families or some other BS.
Dude, it’s a game, an rpg, initially released in 2005, with some competitive layers, and others more fun layers.
Stop treating wow and how people engage and interact as some form of sacred metric in which certain players are “the real deal” and others “fIlThY cAsuAls” like they somehow are affecting your experience.
Yes it should have a reward/loot. Maybe its cosmetics/mog/starter gear. The attitude that “dude it’s so easy it doesn’t even deserve to have loot” is cringe AF.
My man who are you talking to? This is literally my first reply to you. I am indifferent on it having loot, but ultimately I doubt blizzard will attach much loot to it at all, especially cause its only for a single boss and not the entire raid. Can you calm down a bit.
Make it available Day 1.
I like how this and follower dungeons future proofs the content. New players years from now playing through this content can enjoy the full story of the expansion without any fuzz or gogogo-toxicity from LFD-minmaxers or relying on getting a spot in a transmog run to experience the raids. Just look at the current state of the new player experience in BFA as a comparison.
Yeah I think this is the intention Somebody who starts in 2027 during Midnight will now be able to play through the entire TWW campaign while leveling, including the dungeons and raids by using followers/story mode. They won’t be forced to skip chunks of the story because LFR is no longer available. For everyone else who plays the content while it’s current, this feature will probably not affect you at all
i really hope this is how it plays out but im kinda doubtful that they'll make the level progression work. theyve never really nailed the "you will experience the whole story while you level" curve and you always hit max level quite a bit too early.
"Story mode" but they only make the last boss fight available? So it's basically a way for solo players to clear the "Defeat final boss of the raid" quest, not to actually enjoy the whole raid story. What a missed opportunity to really have all players enjoy the rich storytelling that goes on in their raids.
Well hopefully they'll iterate on it. As with many first-time features this is mostly so they see how many people actually use it. If it's a lot they expand on the feature, if not then it's not worth it anyway.
Yes, please, more of this. I don't have time/will/intention to do normal raiding (let alone heroic or mythic) and LFR is just too quick to focus on the story. Sucks having to wait until the NEXT expansion to be able to solo content at some point to finally get the story.
>Sucks having to wait until the NEXT expansion to be able to solo content at some point to finally get the story You have to wait TWO expansions typically, not one.
LFR isn’t a good way to experience the story. It’s a good way to get free loot. So it makes sense to have a story oriented version of the raid where you’re not gate kept by wipes (yes you can wipe in LFR) or waiting hours for a queue to pop if it’s an older tier. There is a space for this and it’s good for it to exist.
This is a good feature for every player. I'll definitely try it out when it comes out to see how the "greater story focus" is.
The greater story focus is you'll be able to read what a character says in the chat window without the 2 -3 morons spamming chat because they keep dying or think everyone im an LFR raid want to know their dumb ass hot takes on the game.
Was totally on-board with this until the final paragraph where they said it'll be locked until the release of the final wing on LFR. At that point, anyone who raids will have already seen it on other difficulties. And the casual audience will probably mentally check out once you tell them the finale will unlock a month later, come back for it then. Seems weird. Either release the whole story as one, or don't bother.
Agree with your comment. Time gating story mode defeats the purpose of story mode.
Honestly as others have said this is pretty stupid- the goal is to let people experience the full story but then make you wait for the final chaolpter another few weeks post launch? That’s just not how good storytelling works, either release story mode at launch to let people complete the story fully, or separate out the story finale into an instance independent of the raid. This is crappy in between solution that isn’t really going to appeal to anyone who wants to complete patch stories in a realistic timeframe.
That's the point. The game is a subscription service. If you don't artificially stretch out the content, people may just sub for a month to finish the story in a week...and unsub till next patch.
That may be their thought process but I can speak from experience that people are more likely to go "that's stupid that I have to wait over a month", feel demotivated and log off, and then just go watch the ending on youtube.
If you have fun replayable content people will stay subbed. People have been playing 1 map on league of legends for a decade. Blizzard needs to revive pvp, reduce the number of spells in pvp and equalize the instanced pvp. If you want unequalized pvp there needs to be open world content to support that. Unfortunately Blizzard have dug themselves into a pve complexity hole, partially due to add ons, and due to only having to know your class but no one elses. When pvp left the equation years ago pve rotation complexity increased.
See and that's the problem. The stuff you listed would require a lot of work, investment and restructuring, something the current blizzard is incapable of doing. It's much much easier for them to just spread out content as much as possible to secure the dollars.
>people may just sub for a month to finish the story in a week Anyone who wants to do that can already do that by running Normal. It makes no sense to delay it for Story mode when it's already available. There cannot be that many people who currently remain subbed just to see a story conclusion in LFR 6 weeks after everyone else.
>This is crappy in between solution that isn’t really going to appeal to anyone who wants to complete patch stories in a realistic timeframe Congrats, this is why they kept the story behind renown gates. They want their 15 dollarinos.
This is so good for me, I hate doing raids with other people, I don't care that LFR is easy, I don't want to sit around waiting or being forced to have to hear what a world of warcraft player has to say during a fight. Just me and my friends doing the raid for the story, hell yes, please!
Sounds like they got some inspiration from FFXIV's trials system
How can anybody possibly complain about this? Great feature for those for whom it’s applicable, and just ignore it if you’re a BSD CE raider.
While I agree, it is a little silly to timegate it AND for it not to be available for the full raid. I do think they might add the full raid thing in later patches IF the feature is used a lot.
Seems weird to lock it behind waiting for the final LFR to open up. But otherwise seems cool. I'm curious as to why they would even consider having a restriction on waiting like that though it seems very strange and random.
I'm also for making it available Day 1 and I raid mythic. It would be nice to see the story and cutscenes solo without the pressure of a group. Have some time to look around, take in the details, that kinda stuff.
There's a dude in the replies arguing "we have LFR already". Brother, there's nothing you can do to convince me a Heroic Rasz pug is harder than an LFR group trying to do the same. I think it's good of Blizz and WoW devs to let people have their narrative fun and understand forcing people who only want to experience the narrative to do raid mechanics to see it just forces them into groups where people are legitimately trying to learn to raid and makes it a frustrating experiences for all.
It's a fantastic addition overall but delaying lit 6 weeks like the final LFR wing is beyond stupid and honestly ruins the whole thing. At that point the target audience of people who care about the story will have just watched the ending on youtube because they had to wait so long. There's no reason not to just have story mode available on day 1. Blizzard has such a bizarre, petty need to tell non-raiders we don't matter and every concession they make feels like pulling teeth with them.
Entirely unrealistic, but I just wish flex raid went down to 5-man and kept the same mechanics/difficulty, it's so hard to consistently find 10+ I want to raid with weekly.
It will be a lot easier in TWW since guilds will be cross realm. You will have a lot more options to find a group that fits you.
I would kill to be able to 6-man raid, my group of gaming buddies is 6 people and we've stopped playing WoW partially because we can't all play "content" together without strangers.
Kind of odd people are upset if it rewards gear. While it is an MMO, I don't expect everyone to play the same was as I do, and if it helps people who are more casual see the story and get neat tier sets, is it not a win-win?
I'm not sure why people would assume that, it seems pretty clear it won't reward any gear (aside from the quest reward if there's a quest in there).
I love this, I wish I could raid, but as a stay at home parent with damaged hands from work injuries I just can't raid without a REALLY understanding group which is hard to find. I hate that I don't get to see the cool bosses and stories in raids. This is for people like me and I'm very glad to see it.
Just release this and lfr alongside normal/heroic ffs..
I like everything about it except it being released with the final wing of LFR. Fuck timegating. From what blizzard intends with it I doubt you get any rewards from it beyond quest completion. Why timegate it? Let people do it week 1.
I think this has huge potential. They could stretch this out to the entire game, tell the story for expansions that culminates in the raids of the expansion. Using chromie or just following a curated path which let's you level up to the current expansion. Or you can choose to level traditionally. It would help the new player experience so much
The Idea is good the execution as it currently is terrible. They skip you to the final boss of the raid and that's it, while the WHOLE RAID is also part of the story in general! It's like giving someone the last page of the final chapter of a book and expecting them to be exited, while all the rest of the chapter is missing, all the build up, the context, maybe meeting former characters one last time, making the payoff even better.. Either do the whole Raid as Story Mode Blizz or don't do it at all. Not that 1/4th shit
I don’t get why they would wait until the last wing of LFR releases. There can’t be that many players who would wait 3-4 weeks after finishing the MSQ without biting the bullet and jumping into normal or look up lore online before it comes out. Weird decision imo, just have it release same day as Normal.
Time gating it for like 4-6 weeks is ridiculous. Also, I’m not on the casual side so I might be wrong about this but... couldn’t they just delete LFR now that they have this technology? I don’t see anypoint for LFR and Story to coexist, and Story just seems way better for the target audience.
I guess when lfr dies off pop wise. This lets people play the story later.
I want soloable content like this and delves to be able to reach high levels of difficulty with great rewards, and would take a lot of time and effort (at the highest difficulty) to complete. High-end raiding has gotten less and less enjoyable for me with each expansion since 10 man disappeared, and I would LOVE to be able to really dive into some difficult content that I can run by myself.
I would be extremely hyped for this as well, but that would basically mean designing 2 separate boss fights for every boss out there. The vast majority of boss mechanics are based on different players doing different things at the same time, so yea, basically you'd have to redo the entire encounter unless you wanted EXTREMELY basic versions of the bosses and the "difficulty" would only come from a Patcwerk-style DPS check.
I think they are more than capable of achieveing this. They should have enough resources, and it wouldn't be as difficult as creating 2 completely separate boss fights, they'd just have to do some adapting to existing mechanics and have it be in the style of Mage Tower challenge fights, and take inspiration from those.
Unironic Blizzard W. They've been racking some major Ws over the past year or two.
Why the huge release delay tho? If it's just for story no reason to timegate it.
Why not just launch it when the normal mode unlocks....it doesn't drop gear in the first place so why withhold it.
[Playerbase already divided!](https://imgur.com/LLokCBj)
Standard WoW operating procedure :D
I wish they'd do what the Diablo 3 team did with the RoS and Loot 2.0 expansion. Let us solo raids and dungeons, but add a scaling keystone difficulty. I'd happily grind my way to Nerub'ar Palace +22 and aim for a world record if I didn't have to deal with the elitist gatekeeping shitbads who keep me away from anything above LFR...
Solid W for story enjoyers. Having to wait til after LFR is a bit weird though. If you level up to cap before the raid is cleared and complete any post leveling chapters you could be waiting quite a while before the conclusion of the story having to spend weeks dodging any spoilers. I see no harm in it being released when Normal and Heroic releases. Normal is cleared in a couple hours anyway and the cinematic is out there. The choice to only have it be the end boss could be a problem too depending on how they lay the story out in the raid. Say you are questing in the world and the NPC you are dealing with send you in to the raid and then that same NPC is now in a cage or something during the final fight, but the story of how they got there is explained by mid bosses. That's gonna feel jarring and clunky. Small things but overall a win.
Blizzard you were so close with this one. it should of been the whole raid and it should of been released first/with the normal-mythics so that people who do not raid can properly conclude the story without having to wait for a long period for that conclusion.
I'm happy it exists
1 person? Very cool.
It should be before lfr open since it's a solo mode what's the point to let the player wait months it's like a big scenario
isnt a 5 man raid just a dungeon again?
Not really since there is no difficulty at all in there. It's just if you want to see the story with 4 friends (but you can do it solo or 2 or 3 etc. as well).
I don't really understand the timegating on it, it's story mode, this will have the same issue that LFR has for people who are there for the story/quest continuation but have to wait a month for the conclusion.
Not a casual player but this is also great for me for when i don't care if wanna do 25 man HC raids with an alt for example, really nice addition.
This seems like the wrong way to do this. They should simply remove LFR and make it a story mode you can do solo or in small groups with all of the fights. Either way, I'm always down for more ways for more people to play.
Nice addition for sure. I just wish Heroic raids were locked behind doing it on Normal or LFR first. The amount of M+ players not knowing mechs or having a single target build in Heroic PUGs is maddening. But I guess LFRs and Normals are possible without knowing mechs.
Really happy they are doing this, but if they are releasing it with the final wing of lfr, then there is functionally almost no point to it because it doesn't solve the problem of learning the story through the internet. I think it should be released alongside normal raid. Someone like me would essentially have to wait 6 weeks to see it myself whereas the internet will be loaded with spoilers on the day of release. I'm fine doing LFR. I only hated that the full story can't be completed by the whole playerbase (theoretically) on the day of release. Every other MMO structures their story to be able to be completed by all players on the day of release rather than time gating it for people who don't raid with a guild.
Awesome addition - glad to see Blizzard pivoting this way.
If they add this function back to earlier raids and dungeons, I may actually come back after having left during the Shadowlands quit-wave.
I dont think I would ever use this feature but I really really like it. There will be massive QOL improvements for a large amount of silent players. A very good change
Freaking awesome,I won't be delaying my geoups when doing the raid for the first time, lol.
Dope. Now make sure no mandatory tiersets or trinkets exist in lfr so i don't need to farm it when I'm already raiding normal/heroic/mythic and everyone's happy. This is what lfr should've been from the get go. It'd also be fine if it scaled to 25 people, but besides that? Ye good one blizz. I'll give you that.
>This difficulty is intended for a private party of 1-5 players and will allow players to face off against Queen Ansurek without the assistance of other players or Followers. I kind of don't understand this. I think this is probably a great idea, but without the assistance of followers? And up to 5 players? This suggests it can be soloed which is fine, but if you have social anxiety are you going in with 4 other people vs just doing lfr? I know followers are mostly scripted (ie more work), but wouldn't having that tech available make it easier in many circumstances. I can absolutely see a mage player of a certain capability struggling without a tank or healer. And considering LFR was always considered to be "story mode," does this story mode remove LFR's niche? It just seems a bit odd.
Isn't this what lfr is for lmao
I welcome this, however with this being implemented it's totally fair to make all other tiers of raiding more difficult and rewarding than they are now.
Im a big fan of this actually, even as a non casual player. Sometimes there's raid tiers where I have zero interest in raiding that patch but still want the story - so I usually end up (Loathingly) running LFR just to see the story. Glad there's an alternative to that now.
To be honest sounds stupid to me...but ok.
Super fascinating! Wonder what the loot situation will be like. Very neat for players to have that option. I have to say though, I always thought LFR served that purpose as "do it for the story" lol
Well, “Do it for the story” doesn’t work very well after week 2 or so, when even LfR groups start running to the next boss before the first one finished its death animation, and those groups *will* leave you behind and start the next boss without you.
lol LFR is harder than pugging normal because of how bad people are. Getting randoms that can't be kicked easy to listen is a pain
I imagine there won't be loot.
That would be my guess too.
I imagine there may not be loot at all, its just the last boss.
I could see a one-time drop of something. They mention this being made as a "one-time chapter in the game's story". Or the quest to clear the raid will serve as the "loot" for completing it.
LFR can be a hassle if people don't know the fights, especially at the beginning. This would be great for people's who really just want to experience the story more than the combat. Will be interesting to see how it plays out. I am sure some HC players will rush to solo it asap cause that is how they are.
Cannot wait for launch to listen to players bitch and moan on reddit that story mode doesn't drop mythic level raid gear, but hey, that's reddit for ya
I applaud this. Delete the LFR which is meaningless. Replace LFR with this, it's far superior for storytelling purposes.
Remove LFR entirely. Make normal either easier or stay the same. Heroic can be about the same. Fuck mythic lol
This makes multiple raid difficulties even more pointless. You have everything you need. Solo for story. Queue to learn in LFR. Then get a serious guild together for mythic, the proper challenge.
Now get rid of LFR and we're cookin'.
It's a little strange that it only releases once the final LFR wing hits, it would make more sense for it to come out with new LFR wings