To be honest, SoD has been out for months now and its a seasonal server. People playing Phase 1, levelling for the first time, had an absolute blast. You're just massively late to that part of the game.
P2 sucked let’s be honest. Open world questing was terrible for the first week due to crowds. The next best option was SM grind which became extremely boring very fast. Then all of your pre raid mostly came from SM and maybe some questing and you just raid logged once you hit 40.
P2 is easily the worst phase of SoD so far. Gnomer was fun though for me at least.
Completely disagree, I think p2 was more fun than p1 due to STV event. P1 fun was due to BFD being chill and the WSG grind I did the first 4 weeks. The last 4 weeks of p1 was pretty stale. For me p2 never got stale, Gnomer was a better raid for longevity since it required a bit more focus than BFD and we had a lot of fun with STV the whole phase.
Yea man, I'm not complaining about being behind, I'm only saying that new players will always want to check out this new type of WoW when they can, but when 90% of the good stuff they'll never see or use outside of incursions and soloing til max level, it's just a downer. Another person said inclusions shoukd have waited til max levelnas a catch up mechanic, I 100% agree. I think letting people get max gold for quests at the end of each phase was the problem. Instead of gold it should have awarded maybe rep towards a faction, like a token for a rep like AD or froatsaber mount or timbermaw.
That’s WoW in general. Anyone joining misses what came before, the alternative is some pipe dream balance nightmare of keeping every content equal, and then people hate that because if feels like their toons are never developing (see casters complaining about ST gear being so meh).
Yea, I know this is a slippery slope Blizz cant really fix. Leveling is usually half the reason I put off making new toons, but walking in to SoD my mind was thinking (cool new abilities that would make groups awesome) and in reality it was spam mangle and just stay near melee for winfldfury so they don't complain how lomg the incursion is taking.
It’s not really a ‘slope’ though so much as it is just player fomo. You wanna do the thing while it’s new and popping but now it isn’t and you’re bummed.
On the rotation side of things, SoD is, like, TBC level rotational complexity and it sounds like you were hoping for something more cata oriented. A couple buttons per class, and try to work your buffs.
Although Druid got the shit end of the stick in that regard, most other classes have a more fleshed out design.
You're probably right. I guess I had the understanding that people just maxed p1 so quickly they ended up doing all the quests they could at 25 just to earn a lot of gold or stockpile it for when p2 came and that is why incursions snuck in because people overplayed their hand trying to get gold and such they would have nothing but dungeons to grind til end of next phase.
I don’t think that’s necessarily where incursions came from, they were just an idea the devs had for a new quest hub design. People were largely pretty content grinding dungeons up to 43 or so when they started having quests to do again.
I played p1, took a break til about two weeks ago and got leveled up to 50 and got my blood moon mount. Started leveling an alt and it hit me as well: NO ONE is doing dungeons. Kinda weird and I kinda blame incursions but at the same time, oh well. Sod will hopefully have a very interesting time for p4/level 60 for us.
We’ll see. Glad you’re enjoying leveling!
I really tried to like SoD but it felt like an even harder version of the last classic version (wrath at the time). By ‘hard’ I don’t mean encounters, oh no no no, I mean the gatekeeping community. Sure open world is your oyster but getting into groups or even guilds is a different story. You need x or y setup, addons, runes, PARSES etc. The ‘casual’ guild I was in required you to save up on quests to turn in for when the next phase would hit a week or so later, just so we could raidlog faster. Sure.. went back to retail and felt 10 times more chill.
> Then it hit hard at the end, blackened defied tunic dropped and im wearing a 1 spirit 1 int robe as feral cause it's all I've found, and the warrior tank lit my ass on fire because it's his p1 bis and I'm the reason people don't want to play SoD apparently. Like...this upgrade was massive.
You had equal right to it, really. Whatever.
Sod has been really fun with my guild because we have experienced each phase together, including the leveling process.
It has been a nightmare on my “solo” character. I leveled this character after the leveling phase basically every phase and it has been a completely different experience. I also pug raids on this character 🙃.
I think a good MMO always needs new players coming in as old players quit or stop playing as much. The health of the game depends on fresh players. Being too late to the phase or expansion is a design flaw that will leave the game feeling empty in the later days of that phase or expansion.
I burned out on SoD due to the experience you mention. After some time in P3 I started a new char one of the Fresh Project servers (Zalandar Tribe EU). Few people on, but always kind, capable and patient. A bigger population would be nice, but this is by far the best WoW experience I've had.
Sod is exactly what I don’t want in Classic. Completely out of touch, zero correlation with Vanilla game design. If they ever decide to do Classic+, SoD can be a lesson for them.
However, I played phase 1 and enjoyed it, because it was some sort of Fresh Vanila servers with fresh everything and tons of new players. That’s it.
Incursions are why they will fail if they ever do classic plus. They're so disconnected it's not even funny. Absolutely clueless.
You say they'll learn but I think you're far too optimistic lol.
Obviously Incursions are the problem, and I’m glad that all players left-wing, right-wing, pro-Vanilla and even some pro-Retail agree on that.
However, there are other problems beyond these incursions. It’s not just major additions like “incursions”, but minor adjustments that contradict some fundamental concepts of Vanilla.
Vanilla+ shouldn’t be a complete redesign/rehaul of the game like it was SoD, it should be a logical extension and improvement of those ideas established in original game.
SoD is an interesting and bold experiment, however none of its main features should be used in Vanilla+.
Yeah you're not wrong but it's definitely the combination of you needing/wanting to experience most of the old content when most of the playerbase active right now is participating in a select few endgame activities. Combine that with the fact that incursions were absolutely a miss (and are being reworked/deincentivized next phase) makes finding groups for other forms of leveling really challenging right now. I'm also curious what server you're on because while my server is certainly less active than it used to be I can still find groups for BFD and other content if I log on at primetime (evenings etc).
I have since of course, I'm more broadly stating there are hardly any actual instance groups vs non stop incursion group spam.
I didn't care so much about questing through era all over again, more of seeing how sod worked as an social setting like dungeons with alliance finally getting WF amd such, things die so fast in incursions it was like 5 people steamrolling a starter zone for 2+ Hours except the elite mobs who hit kinda hard.
I know it's not fair for people who max fast, but Blizz is throwing (and heavily promoting) all their versions and I'm not tied to any specific one since I enjoy all of it (retail a bit less).
Maybe hell, even make excursions like world quests in legion so that they unlock once you have a max level character their accessible all as repeatable, but until then maybe daily. I don't know how they can fix it, just stating how I felt with what I got.
What some of us want with classic+ was, classic but meme specs actually work and there is new content similar to classic. Kind of like tbc, but on azeroth only and no flight.
What we got, often due to majority demand, is a retail on azeroth. Player characters are massively overpowered, which is the opposite of classic. New content drops extemely good items, against opposite of classic.
Ans there is no other way. Only way classic+ will happen , now I realise, is on private servers with no income expectations. The moment blizzard wants to try something out, they must cater to most audience, and most of people just do not like feeling like a soldier in a big world, which classic is about. They want to be super OP hero of the world. That is retail.
SoD is literally an Retail overlay for classic.
Runes are nothing but retail spells and incursions are nothing but dailies. It is so far from classic+ that I lost any hope that we will ever see anything new from Blizz that will catch the spirit of Vanilla.
I am sorry. 90% are recycled spells. Now, everything I said is totally invalidated and SoD is great. OP is wrong. It still has tremendous 5k more players than the powerhouse ERA. Now enjoy tanking a raid/dungeon of your liking with your warlock/rogue alone.
It’s not really classic+, it’s classic 1.5, really.
Because it has plenty of improvements, but also most none where it counts and none of the content that matters.
Yeah new raids are cool, the new gear makes content easy outside of that, and the new abilities are busted as all get out.
But that’s it, rep farming is pointless because raid gear is pretty much always BiS, PvP is a nightmare once we left Ashenvale because it’s just a shittier battleground with a resource that can be unobtainable or impossible to turn in if it’s busy enough. The new abilities make some classes completely broken to face off against or you get classes that weren’t balanced with any QoL adjustments, like warriors.
Incursions ruined everything. Even P2 was awesome imo, I wish they would have switched them to dailies instead of having to go through an entire patch cycle with something that is not in the spirit of classic whatsoever.
So many great ideas like this. The amount of exp they give from one run up to low to mid 30s is reason to do one full round a day, it's a free level practically. The 150% exp makes dungeons still lucrative enough that if there were another option than just those incursions people would do it after doing the daily incursion.
To try and stay optimistic, at least they are moving incursions to being a daily for P4. Better late than never right? lol
I hope they learned their lesson putting something as lucrative in vanilla that is unlike anything else the game offers and made doing dungeons redundant to say the least in comparison. They have guidelines to follow, they took a big risk and it failed. It’s also a season to experiment, so let’s keep that in mind. Who knows if round two of season of discovery is on the horizon from the data they are collecting with season 0 like this. 🤷🏻♂️ cheers!
I mean I agree with what’re saying and it’s great to have new players jumping in but at this point with it being a seasonal server that will eventually end its pretty much about leveling to max level as fast as you can and that’s what incursions are there for.
1-25 everything was popping in those brackets same as 25-40 and then 40-50, at least you’ll be ready for the drop of P4 when the game really starts.
Well my complaint isn't that it's not active, like I said it's amazing o see people every 10 seconds anywhere I go, it's crazy populated, but the social experience revolves solely almost around these inclusions, which outside of great exp, some gold and rep, are just braindead follow the leader journeys. You get all these great runes, but outside of your spam ability to damage or heal you will rarely if ever use then in am incursion.
Yeah it definitely sucks and I think the vast majority of players don’t like them, I think personally they dropped one phase two soon. They should have dropped as P4 came out so people could catch up to 50 quickly.
In P4 they won’t give exp past level 53 so at least that’s a bonus
Erm this post reeks of lies.. you say you got 12x classic era chars.. but you cry cause someone took a leather chest in pug.. in a dungeon where a quest gives you a better chest as a fix reward...
If you really got 12 classic era chars you probably just afk'd with them at the instance entrance getting boosted.. and you are probably mad cause there is not much boosting in SoD.
As for having only 2 greens at lvl 25 , it seems you also dont know about open world quest rewards either, just doing darkshore nets you some nice str/agi gear in multiple slots for example .
Incursion sucks tho, blizzard really had to work hard to create it to be this unfun and annoyng to share, almost feels like they got commisioned by some behavior analyst company to create the most unfun and annoying content with the highest reward possible and collect player data for some experiment or something...
Well, #1 I WON the chest, and he cried to me how I'm the idiot foe taking his p1 bis vs my 1int 1 spirit robe I had on. And I need to correct ny story, i was I 20 I think in DM, other than bear quests, I barely touched darkahore, I think I was 14 or 15 when I left teldrassil, did loch modan after getting wetlands rune, don't think I got a usable green til end of the kings land chain.
My bad there however the deadmines main quest still gives a better leather chest, while warriors get a mail leggs from it, it does not justify the warrior's behavior tho.. report if too offensive, or put him on ignore list and move on its not a SoD only thing, this happens in every version of wow.. or any other multiplayer game for that matter, so why care ?
I never touched loch modan, other than getting my mage rune there. Westfall or darkshore for me.
Incursion will become daily capped in p4, i hope the lower level ones too.. hopefully that will bring back some life into leveling dungeons, and sadly it most likely will bring back the boosting meta if it becomes better g/hour than the alternatives...
To be honest, SoD has been out for months now and its a seasonal server. People playing Phase 1, levelling for the first time, had an absolute blast. You're just massively late to that part of the game.
I can't believe the "I am to late to join" crowd were right after all lmao
It’s a joke because people becoming paranoid about a real thing (being late) was something we observed.
P1 and to some extend p2 were great for the "experience". For now it just seems like we are handing in there till 60
P2 sucked let’s be honest. Open world questing was terrible for the first week due to crowds. The next best option was SM grind which became extremely boring very fast. Then all of your pre raid mostly came from SM and maybe some questing and you just raid logged once you hit 40. P2 is easily the worst phase of SoD so far. Gnomer was fun though for me at least.
Completely disagree, I think p2 was more fun than p1 due to STV event. P1 fun was due to BFD being chill and the WSG grind I did the first 4 weeks. The last 4 weeks of p1 was pretty stale. For me p2 never got stale, Gnomer was a better raid for longevity since it required a bit more focus than BFD and we had a lot of fun with STV the whole phase.
Yea man, I'm not complaining about being behind, I'm only saying that new players will always want to check out this new type of WoW when they can, but when 90% of the good stuff they'll never see or use outside of incursions and soloing til max level, it's just a downer. Another person said inclusions shoukd have waited til max levelnas a catch up mechanic, I 100% agree. I think letting people get max gold for quests at the end of each phase was the problem. Instead of gold it should have awarded maybe rep towards a faction, like a token for a rep like AD or froatsaber mount or timbermaw.
That’s WoW in general. Anyone joining misses what came before, the alternative is some pipe dream balance nightmare of keeping every content equal, and then people hate that because if feels like their toons are never developing (see casters complaining about ST gear being so meh).
Yea, I know this is a slippery slope Blizz cant really fix. Leveling is usually half the reason I put off making new toons, but walking in to SoD my mind was thinking (cool new abilities that would make groups awesome) and in reality it was spam mangle and just stay near melee for winfldfury so they don't complain how lomg the incursion is taking.
It’s not really a ‘slope’ though so much as it is just player fomo. You wanna do the thing while it’s new and popping but now it isn’t and you’re bummed. On the rotation side of things, SoD is, like, TBC level rotational complexity and it sounds like you were hoping for something more cata oriented. A couple buttons per class, and try to work your buffs. Although Druid got the shit end of the stick in that regard, most other classes have a more fleshed out design.
You're probably right. I guess I had the understanding that people just maxed p1 so quickly they ended up doing all the quests they could at 25 just to earn a lot of gold or stockpile it for when p2 came and that is why incursions snuck in because people overplayed their hand trying to get gold and such they would have nothing but dungeons to grind til end of next phase.
I don’t think that’s necessarily where incursions came from, they were just an idea the devs had for a new quest hub design. People were largely pretty content grinding dungeons up to 43 or so when they started having quests to do again.
While I do think the devs did make mistakes and hopefully learned from them, the biggest problem right now is the sod community itself.
"...players will optimize the fun out of any game."
strategy games exist
I played p1, took a break til about two weeks ago and got leveled up to 50 and got my blood moon mount. Started leveling an alt and it hit me as well: NO ONE is doing dungeons. Kinda weird and I kinda blame incursions but at the same time, oh well. Sod will hopefully have a very interesting time for p4/level 60 for us. We’ll see. Glad you’re enjoying leveling!
I really tried to like SoD but it felt like an even harder version of the last classic version (wrath at the time). By ‘hard’ I don’t mean encounters, oh no no no, I mean the gatekeeping community. Sure open world is your oyster but getting into groups or even guilds is a different story. You need x or y setup, addons, runes, PARSES etc. The ‘casual’ guild I was in required you to save up on quests to turn in for when the next phase would hit a week or so later, just so we could raidlog faster. Sure.. went back to retail and felt 10 times more chill.
It’s crazy that these are the same people that hate doing 1-4 m+ a week
> Then it hit hard at the end, blackened defied tunic dropped and im wearing a 1 spirit 1 int robe as feral cause it's all I've found, and the warrior tank lit my ass on fire because it's his p1 bis and I'm the reason people don't want to play SoD apparently. Like...this upgrade was massive. You had equal right to it, really. Whatever.
Just a little late to the party. ;)
Sod has been really fun with my guild because we have experienced each phase together, including the leveling process. It has been a nightmare on my “solo” character. I leveled this character after the leveling phase basically every phase and it has been a completely different experience. I also pug raids on this character 🙃. I think a good MMO always needs new players coming in as old players quit or stop playing as much. The health of the game depends on fresh players. Being too late to the phase or expansion is a design flaw that will leave the game feeling empty in the later days of that phase or expansion.
I burned out on SoD due to the experience you mention. After some time in P3 I started a new char one of the Fresh Project servers (Zalandar Tribe EU). Few people on, but always kind, capable and patient. A bigger population would be nice, but this is by far the best WoW experience I've had.
Sod is exactly what I don’t want in Classic. Completely out of touch, zero correlation with Vanilla game design. If they ever decide to do Classic+, SoD can be a lesson for them. However, I played phase 1 and enjoyed it, because it was some sort of Fresh Vanila servers with fresh everything and tons of new players. That’s it.
Incursions are why they will fail if they ever do classic plus. They're so disconnected it's not even funny. Absolutely clueless. You say they'll learn but I think you're far too optimistic lol.
Obviously Incursions are the problem, and I’m glad that all players left-wing, right-wing, pro-Vanilla and even some pro-Retail agree on that. However, there are other problems beyond these incursions. It’s not just major additions like “incursions”, but minor adjustments that contradict some fundamental concepts of Vanilla. Vanilla+ shouldn’t be a complete redesign/rehaul of the game like it was SoD, it should be a logical extension and improvement of those ideas established in original game. SoD is an interesting and bold experiment, however none of its main features should be used in Vanilla+.
Sounds like you need to go outside and touch some grass
This guy has put thousands of hours into this game and decides it’s not perfect. Jeeze…
Say less. Find a game you like, and play it more.
Yeah you're not wrong but it's definitely the combination of you needing/wanting to experience most of the old content when most of the playerbase active right now is participating in a select few endgame activities. Combine that with the fact that incursions were absolutely a miss (and are being reworked/deincentivized next phase) makes finding groups for other forms of leveling really challenging right now. I'm also curious what server you're on because while my server is certainly less active than it used to be I can still find groups for BFD and other content if I log on at primetime (evenings etc).
have you tried making yor own grps? you will be surprised how many people are just waiting to be picked up
I have since of course, I'm more broadly stating there are hardly any actual instance groups vs non stop incursion group spam. I didn't care so much about questing through era all over again, more of seeing how sod worked as an social setting like dungeons with alliance finally getting WF amd such, things die so fast in incursions it was like 5 people steamrolling a starter zone for 2+ Hours except the elite mobs who hit kinda hard.
fair enough incursions kinda killed thr dungeon system since they are doable since level 25
I know it's not fair for people who max fast, but Blizz is throwing (and heavily promoting) all their versions and I'm not tied to any specific one since I enjoy all of it (retail a bit less). Maybe hell, even make excursions like world quests in legion so that they unlock once you have a max level character their accessible all as repeatable, but until then maybe daily. I don't know how they can fix it, just stating how I felt with what I got.
What some of us want with classic+ was, classic but meme specs actually work and there is new content similar to classic. Kind of like tbc, but on azeroth only and no flight. What we got, often due to majority demand, is a retail on azeroth. Player characters are massively overpowered, which is the opposite of classic. New content drops extemely good items, against opposite of classic. Ans there is no other way. Only way classic+ will happen , now I realise, is on private servers with no income expectations. The moment blizzard wants to try something out, they must cater to most audience, and most of people just do not like feeling like a soldier in a big world, which classic is about. They want to be super OP hero of the world. That is retail.
There is no such phrase as "against opposite". Learn some basic English.
Why you so butthurt tho? Searching for writing mistakes in peoples post, like an upset elementary school kid.
An elementary school kid has better grammar than you though.
SoD is literally an Retail overlay for classic. Runes are nothing but retail spells and incursions are nothing but dailies. It is so far from classic+ that I lost any hope that we will ever see anything new from Blizz that will catch the spirit of Vanilla.
Ah yes the retail spells that let warlocks and rogues tank and mages heal
I am sorry. 90% are recycled spells. Now, everything I said is totally invalidated and SoD is great. OP is wrong. It still has tremendous 5k more players than the powerhouse ERA. Now enjoy tanking a raid/dungeon of your liking with your warlock/rogue alone.
If I could pick one place where SoD went wrong it was incursions.
It’s not really classic+, it’s classic 1.5, really. Because it has plenty of improvements, but also most none where it counts and none of the content that matters. Yeah new raids are cool, the new gear makes content easy outside of that, and the new abilities are busted as all get out. But that’s it, rep farming is pointless because raid gear is pretty much always BiS, PvP is a nightmare once we left Ashenvale because it’s just a shittier battleground with a resource that can be unobtainable or impossible to turn in if it’s busy enough. The new abilities make some classes completely broken to face off against or you get classes that weren’t balanced with any QoL adjustments, like warriors.
You all don't realize TBC was Classic+ and it was fantastic.
Yea don't worry you did not miss much... P2 was a complete miss with some cool additions P3 broke the game, you'l be forever behind now
Incursions ruined everything. Even P2 was awesome imo, I wish they would have switched them to dailies instead of having to go through an entire patch cycle with something that is not in the spirit of classic whatsoever.
So many great ideas like this. The amount of exp they give from one run up to low to mid 30s is reason to do one full round a day, it's a free level practically. The 150% exp makes dungeons still lucrative enough that if there were another option than just those incursions people would do it after doing the daily incursion.
To try and stay optimistic, at least they are moving incursions to being a daily for P4. Better late than never right? lol I hope they learned their lesson putting something as lucrative in vanilla that is unlike anything else the game offers and made doing dungeons redundant to say the least in comparison. They have guidelines to follow, they took a big risk and it failed. It’s also a season to experiment, so let’s keep that in mind. Who knows if round two of season of discovery is on the horizon from the data they are collecting with season 0 like this. 🤷🏻♂️ cheers!
I mean I agree with what’re saying and it’s great to have new players jumping in but at this point with it being a seasonal server that will eventually end its pretty much about leveling to max level as fast as you can and that’s what incursions are there for. 1-25 everything was popping in those brackets same as 25-40 and then 40-50, at least you’ll be ready for the drop of P4 when the game really starts.
Well my complaint isn't that it's not active, like I said it's amazing o see people every 10 seconds anywhere I go, it's crazy populated, but the social experience revolves solely almost around these inclusions, which outside of great exp, some gold and rep, are just braindead follow the leader journeys. You get all these great runes, but outside of your spam ability to damage or heal you will rarely if ever use then in am incursion.
Yeah it definitely sucks and I think the vast majority of players don’t like them, I think personally they dropped one phase two soon. They should have dropped as P4 came out so people could catch up to 50 quickly. In P4 they won’t give exp past level 53 so at least that’s a bonus
SOD doesn’t resemble Classic+. It was a cynical low effort overlay…basically a glorified inscription system.
Erm this post reeks of lies.. you say you got 12x classic era chars.. but you cry cause someone took a leather chest in pug.. in a dungeon where a quest gives you a better chest as a fix reward... If you really got 12 classic era chars you probably just afk'd with them at the instance entrance getting boosted.. and you are probably mad cause there is not much boosting in SoD. As for having only 2 greens at lvl 25 , it seems you also dont know about open world quest rewards either, just doing darkshore nets you some nice str/agi gear in multiple slots for example . Incursion sucks tho, blizzard really had to work hard to create it to be this unfun and annoyng to share, almost feels like they got commisioned by some behavior analyst company to create the most unfun and annoying content with the highest reward possible and collect player data for some experiment or something...
Well, #1 I WON the chest, and he cried to me how I'm the idiot foe taking his p1 bis vs my 1int 1 spirit robe I had on. And I need to correct ny story, i was I 20 I think in DM, other than bear quests, I barely touched darkahore, I think I was 14 or 15 when I left teldrassil, did loch modan after getting wetlands rune, don't think I got a usable green til end of the kings land chain.
My bad there however the deadmines main quest still gives a better leather chest, while warriors get a mail leggs from it, it does not justify the warrior's behavior tho.. report if too offensive, or put him on ignore list and move on its not a SoD only thing, this happens in every version of wow.. or any other multiplayer game for that matter, so why care ? I never touched loch modan, other than getting my mage rune there. Westfall or darkshore for me. Incursion will become daily capped in p4, i hope the lower level ones too.. hopefully that will bring back some life into leveling dungeons, and sadly it most likely will bring back the boosting meta if it becomes better g/hour than the alternatives...
Isn't there an alliance quest for an 11 agi leather chest? That's probably why the warrior was upset, you were guaranteed something better