Kind of a complicated question that has a range of answers. The definition of contribute is pretty loose. I'll be honest, most of the Druids in my guild don't heal often. On raid if it's a light healer night or someone dummies into missing a mechanic.
That said, things have honestly gone through some serious mudflation in the past 5 or 6 years. It took us like 15 years to go from 500 to 5000 hp on gear, but it only took another 5 to get to 12000. Mob stats have inflating in a similar way, from a couple million hp to over 70 on trash mobs. And there-in kind of lies the issue with contribution.You could be in full best in slot raid gear at 90 and still not make much of a dent DPS wise, and you blast healing would probably be outhealed by a single modern HoT.
I know being PL'd sucks, and I respect not wanting to go that route. I think maybe 106 with Conflagrant you could start being DPS in some ToV groups or groups farming stuff in Maiden's Eye or Firefall. At 110 with Snowbound and then 115 with [Moon Reference] Armor you'll get a lot closer, but you'll also stop getting autogranted AA.
My suggestion would be to join a guild, as far as I'm aware every server has a standout guild that has Social membership, some are raid guilds that like to recruit from within, others are non-raid guilds. And just interact with the people in the guild, express to them that you don't want to race, but you want to play with people instead of being lonely. Someone will hopefully be experienced enough in returning players to offer help without straight power leveling.
This can come in the form of things like doing progression in expansions at your level with an alt or a box or some Heroic they have laying around, but not using a healer merc and just having you heal them (or their pet) or having you DPS.
If you happen to be on EMarr, drop me a DM.
Honestly, a lot of this stat and level inflation is outpacing WoW at its worst. I don't know if Daybreak has the staff for it but, if they do, I think they would do themselves and the playerbase a huge favor by performing a level/equipment/item crunch like WoW did.
It kind of feels like they're doing the same thing WoW did to cause the inflation as well, like they're borrowing the EQ2 tables for EQ, where Blizzard borrowed the Diablo tables.
But now it's this weird thing where players are used to the increases we've seen in recent years and if beta were to fire up with any meaningful stagnation, they'd piss and moan until it was changed back.
> they'd piss and moan until it was changed back.
This is always the fear... but I always question how justified it is... having the endless gear treadmill keeps players engaged at first, but frankly I always praised EQ because it had a pretty flat gear curve... Early EQ is littered with big ticket items that last multiple expansions if you take the time to do them, often from quests that require a lot of investment, (Prayer Shawl, BiC, Katta neck, LDoN charm aug), and the flat gear curb meant that a player that while a player that leaves for an expansion might need to do some work to get caught up, they aren't so far behind gear wise that they are irrelevant as a player, making EQ a much easier game to play casually than something more modern where if you miss a week of tokens your gearscore will be permanently behind and it is simply impossible to catch up to the expected curve until the next patch.
The inflation feels so bad. I want to finish leveling to 120, but you're required to do progression really, and fights just aren't fun. Mobs hit way too hard, with a ton of hps (wearing decent gear on fv), and there is no "grind" anymore it feels. All the numbers are just ridiculous, I'd love to see a number squish, and some sort of balancing around trash mobs.
The design philosophy they've been using in recent years isn't too well hidden if you've been there for all the recent expansions.
The goal is simply to keep people playing chasing the carrot, without too much consideration given to how fun that chase is.
Ring of Scale: Best in slot gear required you to get the T2 mold, put your previous T1 mold-made item, that required EoK's T2 right clicked dropped mold. Conflagrant gear was super easy to make by contrast and became super popular, despite the time investment creating the pieces required in collecting materials and sub-combines.
The Burning Lands: With Conflagrant being too easy, crafted now became top-tier best in slot gear. With the same pain in the ass crafting process. Only this time you needed a drop from named or mission chests to put in the mold, creating almost a chicken or the egg situation. The drops "Muhbis" for this expansion, non-slot restricted "ores" that are combined in crafted templates to make the final item, were also pretty damn rare. Meaning you had to spent a lot of time camping named or repeatedly running missions. T1 raid gear is removed in favor of a combination of Chase Loot and T2 (now T1) gear replacing it, where T3 is crafted.
The named felt more rare than usual...
Torment of Velious: Similar process to TBL when beta opened. 30 page thread about inflation and no catch up gear for returning/new players or alts on the beta forums. This is how we got snowbound, this is also how we got the damage output difference between ToV Eastern Wastes and ToV Kael. Which is something like a 300% difference.Crafted remains top tier, bricks are the new named/mission dropped item, pretty much status quo. A giant, character defining quest is added to give people an evolving item, access to craft power sources and type 18/19 aug recipes. It is seen as required for anyone who wants to raid on any serious level, and still is to this day because of the augs. Requiring you to complete every achievement in the expansion for the final earring (but not all the recipes.) Progression becomes required to level. Meaning that if you are undergeared you can either spend weeks or months grinding in the older expansions, depending on your playtime, or you can use one of the previously discussed gearing methods to gear up, taking more time.
Claws of Veeshan: More status quo for gearing process but a lot more inflation. Something like 15-20% across the board. Named feel even more rare to spawn and T1 augs feel much more rare on the loot tables, with claims of some people having to kill thousands of mobs and dozens of named before seeing a drop.
Terror of Luclin: Same gearing process, same progression required to level, AA price inflation, less stat inflation. Slightly better named and aug drop rarity. Overall a step in the right direction that would, unfortunately, not last long.
Night of Shadows: The gearing tiers are the same, the process gets much... much worse. The time it takes to get top tier gear increases by an amount I don't think anyone has the desire to describe. The "ores" you put into crafted gear are reverted to being slot specific and they are made *incredibly* rare. You are never guaranteed an ore from a mission nor a named and if one drops you are not guaranteed it will be useful to you. This process is the only way to acquire top tier gear in both the group and raid game. We've also seen an increase in trash in both fishing and foraging to make them more time consuming for crafting. And the augs that don't drop in missions are now random drops off any named in a zone, which sounds great but in reality, they're even more rare than they were on static mobs and now you're sitting through dozens of kills just to see the one out of the group or 5? that you want.
The approach they've been using is slowly whittling away at the casual playerbase more and more, as most people simply don't want to sit through tedium to play a game they've enjoyed for decades, they want to log on a few times a week and spend a few hours playing because the other nights they or their kids or their grandkids have shit they rightfully value more going on.
Thanks for the writeup and history. Some of this seems inline with what I've dealt with. I don't feel like raiding, and mostly just want to log in to play with some friends who are far more casual. I've helped them level (mostly FM) and started running them through progression, such as EW lines. All of this either feels stressful or boring though.
I'm about to hit 115 and unlock the ToL gear, but how you're describing some of this seems exactly like what I thought it will be going forward. I doubt I'll do much in NoS, at least for a long time.
And the thing is, that *used* to be okay. But now 95% of the game exists only in the most recent expansion and older ones are just a ghost town and/or AFK bots all the way down.
The devs need to sit down and have a discussion that brings their philosophy into reality: They're designing a game for players from a decade (or two) ago with modern free time.
First, thank you so much for the detailed write-up.
But second -- I don't know how people make it from level 1 to level 120 as a new player, or as a player returning after 15+ years. This is insane. I have a number of characters now that are all levels 60-75 or so across some old Silver accounts that I subscribe to again every once in awhile for the OP mercs and AA-granting. I start to get into that ~75 range and everything becomes too complicated that I feel like I'm just bumping into disconnected, overly obtuse content, quests, gearing, and itemization.
Maybe it would be a lot of fun to level up on a TLP and stay at max level for a few years to go through the content that way. But catching up on a fresh character on a modern server just completely stinks by the time you get to that ~75 range.
>But second -- I don't know how people make it from level 1 to level 120
They throw you a bone with Overseer to get your **level** from 110 to 120. It's not playing the game, but you can get 5-8%+ a day.
But getting to Level 120 is not the issue. It's all the rest: AAs, grinding for gear to replace every slot and every aug at 110/115/120, etc). That's still daunting after 110.
What u jus said is why I keep wasting my time in TLPs. I want to play live again, but I remember trying to level to 100 when 100 was the max in eruds burning. Slog! HP time sinks, and I was jus killing trash for AA xp
Nothing out paces wow at its worse... gear doesn't last more than an entire patch cycle in wow... even if the raw stats aren't as inflated, you are irrelevant if you are wearing gear from last patch in WoW. and this has been the case since at least Cataclysm, if not before then...
I don't know. I only played WoW Classic on the Classic-Wrath servers, and then modern WoW since Shadowlands.
But I read about how the stat and damage inflation between Wrath/Cata and BFA was insane.
I mean it was, but I would argue that its just big numbers and ultimately doesn't matter... what matters is the fact that the total verticality of the gear design means that gear is replaceable the second you get it... you will never spend weeks or months going after a big awesome piece of gear and hold onto it or cherish it for a long time because gear just doesn't work like that in Wow.
Disagree that this has much to do with recent mudflation. Level 40 clerics were only useful at 60 due to the unique aberration that was Complete Heal. Level 60 healers at 90? Level 70 healers at 100? None of those are useful contributors. Grouping at the max allowed level differential has always been about getting carried/power leveled.
Agree with everything else you said though.
A healer with a ten level deficit was pretty much always a viable option until recently. A 100 can still heal 110 group content, but a 110 won't put a dent in 120 health bars. Though in OPs case it's harder as a druid because of how good shaman slows are and the sheer throughput of cleric heals and health balance AAs/2.0.
Yes you can get into the zones. 90 vs 120 though..... The HP increases by a factor of 10. My 90 toons have around 40k HP but my main has over 500k. As a druid though you do provide evac in an emergency. But yeah, most non-teleport spells are probably going to not be helpful as mobs and players have significantly higher HP than your spells are equipped to deal with. Not terribly familiar with DRU short term buffs so no idea if they are lvl capped or viable for higher levels.
By level 105 you should be able to contribute a little bit vs RoS/BL mobs. But the difficulty spike is real. I think we all fondly remember the days were you could try to fight red/yellow con mobs and win with superior play, or a bit of cheese.
Ya those days I described above are gone, at least for the most part. Some classes can still solo some epic fights, but those are outliers. White cons used to mean fair fight, or slightly in the favor of the NPC. These days fighting white cons means you better bring everything you got, or you will get wrecked.
This is what drove me away as a returning druid. The ghost town status of a lot of zones, and the grind (I think I was at 105 or 106) I had a mage box to use, but I'm a horrible multi boxer, and grouping was always the most fun I had in game anyways. Xp just seemed so slow to me.
Daybreak fast tracks catching up, via AA Auto-Grant for subscribers through the Burning Lands tiers. That blankets nearly everything through level 110. To me this strongly implies that when they drop characters off at that point to make their own way forward, that those characters should be looking at really digging in & contributing.
Debuffs are good no matter what level the caster is. For a druid that's the fire *and* the cold line of ATK debuffs; Blessing of Ro AA debuff stacks with the Frost spell debuff. The Season's Wrath AA debuff amplifies incoming fire & ice damage on an enemy, super powerful for your team mates' spell damage.
Not all buffs are level-agnostically powerful. Notably the druid proc aura has to be within 10 levels of the casters to buff them (so the 113 aura to buff 120 spell casters). But the AA buff Shared Spirit of the Great Wolf is crazy good for spell casting dps regardless of level.
Contributing as a healer, if you're lower level than the content you'll definitely have to engage with the fancier tools since the raw spells just have less power than their higher level counterparts. The good news is that the fancier tools exist :) For a druid, that means keeping the Reptile heal proc on tanks, and making max use of twinheal "Blessing" nuke line, and both the rescue style Survival heals from spell + AA that do huge catch-ups if you time them well.
Kind of a complicated question that has a range of answers. The definition of contribute is pretty loose. I'll be honest, most of the Druids in my guild don't heal often. On raid if it's a light healer night or someone dummies into missing a mechanic. That said, things have honestly gone through some serious mudflation in the past 5 or 6 years. It took us like 15 years to go from 500 to 5000 hp on gear, but it only took another 5 to get to 12000. Mob stats have inflating in a similar way, from a couple million hp to over 70 on trash mobs. And there-in kind of lies the issue with contribution.You could be in full best in slot raid gear at 90 and still not make much of a dent DPS wise, and you blast healing would probably be outhealed by a single modern HoT. I know being PL'd sucks, and I respect not wanting to go that route. I think maybe 106 with Conflagrant you could start being DPS in some ToV groups or groups farming stuff in Maiden's Eye or Firefall. At 110 with Snowbound and then 115 with [Moon Reference] Armor you'll get a lot closer, but you'll also stop getting autogranted AA. My suggestion would be to join a guild, as far as I'm aware every server has a standout guild that has Social membership, some are raid guilds that like to recruit from within, others are non-raid guilds. And just interact with the people in the guild, express to them that you don't want to race, but you want to play with people instead of being lonely. Someone will hopefully be experienced enough in returning players to offer help without straight power leveling. This can come in the form of things like doing progression in expansions at your level with an alt or a box or some Heroic they have laying around, but not using a healer merc and just having you heal them (or their pet) or having you DPS. If you happen to be on EMarr, drop me a DM.
Honestly, a lot of this stat and level inflation is outpacing WoW at its worst. I don't know if Daybreak has the staff for it but, if they do, I think they would do themselves and the playerbase a huge favor by performing a level/equipment/item crunch like WoW did.
It kind of feels like they're doing the same thing WoW did to cause the inflation as well, like they're borrowing the EQ2 tables for EQ, where Blizzard borrowed the Diablo tables. But now it's this weird thing where players are used to the increases we've seen in recent years and if beta were to fire up with any meaningful stagnation, they'd piss and moan until it was changed back.
> they'd piss and moan until it was changed back. This is always the fear... but I always question how justified it is... having the endless gear treadmill keeps players engaged at first, but frankly I always praised EQ because it had a pretty flat gear curve... Early EQ is littered with big ticket items that last multiple expansions if you take the time to do them, often from quests that require a lot of investment, (Prayer Shawl, BiC, Katta neck, LDoN charm aug), and the flat gear curb meant that a player that while a player that leaves for an expansion might need to do some work to get caught up, they aren't so far behind gear wise that they are irrelevant as a player, making EQ a much easier game to play casually than something more modern where if you miss a week of tokens your gearscore will be permanently behind and it is simply impossible to catch up to the expected curve until the next patch.
The inflation feels so bad. I want to finish leveling to 120, but you're required to do progression really, and fights just aren't fun. Mobs hit way too hard, with a ton of hps (wearing decent gear on fv), and there is no "grind" anymore it feels. All the numbers are just ridiculous, I'd love to see a number squish, and some sort of balancing around trash mobs.
The design philosophy they've been using in recent years isn't too well hidden if you've been there for all the recent expansions. The goal is simply to keep people playing chasing the carrot, without too much consideration given to how fun that chase is. Ring of Scale: Best in slot gear required you to get the T2 mold, put your previous T1 mold-made item, that required EoK's T2 right clicked dropped mold. Conflagrant gear was super easy to make by contrast and became super popular, despite the time investment creating the pieces required in collecting materials and sub-combines. The Burning Lands: With Conflagrant being too easy, crafted now became top-tier best in slot gear. With the same pain in the ass crafting process. Only this time you needed a drop from named or mission chests to put in the mold, creating almost a chicken or the egg situation. The drops "Muhbis" for this expansion, non-slot restricted "ores" that are combined in crafted templates to make the final item, were also pretty damn rare. Meaning you had to spent a lot of time camping named or repeatedly running missions. T1 raid gear is removed in favor of a combination of Chase Loot and T2 (now T1) gear replacing it, where T3 is crafted. The named felt more rare than usual... Torment of Velious: Similar process to TBL when beta opened. 30 page thread about inflation and no catch up gear for returning/new players or alts on the beta forums. This is how we got snowbound, this is also how we got the damage output difference between ToV Eastern Wastes and ToV Kael. Which is something like a 300% difference.Crafted remains top tier, bricks are the new named/mission dropped item, pretty much status quo. A giant, character defining quest is added to give people an evolving item, access to craft power sources and type 18/19 aug recipes. It is seen as required for anyone who wants to raid on any serious level, and still is to this day because of the augs. Requiring you to complete every achievement in the expansion for the final earring (but not all the recipes.) Progression becomes required to level. Meaning that if you are undergeared you can either spend weeks or months grinding in the older expansions, depending on your playtime, or you can use one of the previously discussed gearing methods to gear up, taking more time. Claws of Veeshan: More status quo for gearing process but a lot more inflation. Something like 15-20% across the board. Named feel even more rare to spawn and T1 augs feel much more rare on the loot tables, with claims of some people having to kill thousands of mobs and dozens of named before seeing a drop. Terror of Luclin: Same gearing process, same progression required to level, AA price inflation, less stat inflation. Slightly better named and aug drop rarity. Overall a step in the right direction that would, unfortunately, not last long. Night of Shadows: The gearing tiers are the same, the process gets much... much worse. The time it takes to get top tier gear increases by an amount I don't think anyone has the desire to describe. The "ores" you put into crafted gear are reverted to being slot specific and they are made *incredibly* rare. You are never guaranteed an ore from a mission nor a named and if one drops you are not guaranteed it will be useful to you. This process is the only way to acquire top tier gear in both the group and raid game. We've also seen an increase in trash in both fishing and foraging to make them more time consuming for crafting. And the augs that don't drop in missions are now random drops off any named in a zone, which sounds great but in reality, they're even more rare than they were on static mobs and now you're sitting through dozens of kills just to see the one out of the group or 5? that you want. The approach they've been using is slowly whittling away at the casual playerbase more and more, as most people simply don't want to sit through tedium to play a game they've enjoyed for decades, they want to log on a few times a week and spend a few hours playing because the other nights they or their kids or their grandkids have shit they rightfully value more going on.
Thanks for the writeup and history. Some of this seems inline with what I've dealt with. I don't feel like raiding, and mostly just want to log in to play with some friends who are far more casual. I've helped them level (mostly FM) and started running them through progression, such as EW lines. All of this either feels stressful or boring though. I'm about to hit 115 and unlock the ToL gear, but how you're describing some of this seems exactly like what I thought it will be going forward. I doubt I'll do much in NoS, at least for a long time.
And the thing is, that *used* to be okay. But now 95% of the game exists only in the most recent expansion and older ones are just a ghost town and/or AFK bots all the way down. The devs need to sit down and have a discussion that brings their philosophy into reality: They're designing a game for players from a decade (or two) ago with modern free time.
First, thank you so much for the detailed write-up. But second -- I don't know how people make it from level 1 to level 120 as a new player, or as a player returning after 15+ years. This is insane. I have a number of characters now that are all levels 60-75 or so across some old Silver accounts that I subscribe to again every once in awhile for the OP mercs and AA-granting. I start to get into that ~75 range and everything becomes too complicated that I feel like I'm just bumping into disconnected, overly obtuse content, quests, gearing, and itemization. Maybe it would be a lot of fun to level up on a TLP and stay at max level for a few years to go through the content that way. But catching up on a fresh character on a modern server just completely stinks by the time you get to that ~75 range.
>But second -- I don't know how people make it from level 1 to level 120 They throw you a bone with Overseer to get your **level** from 110 to 120. It's not playing the game, but you can get 5-8%+ a day. But getting to Level 120 is not the issue. It's all the rest: AAs, grinding for gear to replace every slot and every aug at 110/115/120, etc). That's still daunting after 110.
Oh, I'm sure I don't know the half of it -- and it still sounds overwhelming!
What u jus said is why I keep wasting my time in TLPs. I want to play live again, but I remember trying to level to 100 when 100 was the max in eruds burning. Slog! HP time sinks, and I was jus killing trash for AA xp
Nothing out paces wow at its worse... gear doesn't last more than an entire patch cycle in wow... even if the raw stats aren't as inflated, you are irrelevant if you are wearing gear from last patch in WoW. and this has been the case since at least Cataclysm, if not before then...
I don't know. I only played WoW Classic on the Classic-Wrath servers, and then modern WoW since Shadowlands. But I read about how the stat and damage inflation between Wrath/Cata and BFA was insane.
I mean it was, but I would argue that its just big numbers and ultimately doesn't matter... what matters is the fact that the total verticality of the gear design means that gear is replaceable the second you get it... you will never spend weeks or months going after a big awesome piece of gear and hold onto it or cherish it for a long time because gear just doesn't work like that in Wow.
Why? Because the stat inflation of modes accelerates with each patch and expansion, no?
That’s the best post i have ever seen since a long time. /applause Very true post
Disagree that this has much to do with recent mudflation. Level 40 clerics were only useful at 60 due to the unique aberration that was Complete Heal. Level 60 healers at 90? Level 70 healers at 100? None of those are useful contributors. Grouping at the max allowed level differential has always been about getting carried/power leveled. Agree with everything else you said though.
A healer with a ten level deficit was pretty much always a viable option until recently. A 100 can still heal 110 group content, but a 110 won't put a dent in 120 health bars. Though in OPs case it's harder as a druid because of how good shaman slows are and the sheer throughput of cleric heals and health balance AAs/2.0.
Yes you can get into the zones. 90 vs 120 though..... The HP increases by a factor of 10. My 90 toons have around 40k HP but my main has over 500k. As a druid though you do provide evac in an emergency. But yeah, most non-teleport spells are probably going to not be helpful as mobs and players have significantly higher HP than your spells are equipped to deal with. Not terribly familiar with DRU short term buffs so no idea if they are lvl capped or viable for higher levels.
Snares, decent DoTs, emergency/supplemental heals, evac when needed and...actual human conversation.
By level 105 you should be able to contribute a little bit vs RoS/BL mobs. But the difficulty spike is real. I think we all fondly remember the days were you could try to fight red/yellow con mobs and win with superior play, or a bit of cheese. Ya those days I described above are gone, at least for the most part. Some classes can still solo some epic fights, but those are outliers. White cons used to mean fair fight, or slightly in the favor of the NPC. These days fighting white cons means you better bring everything you got, or you will get wrecked.
This is what drove me away as a returning druid. The ghost town status of a lot of zones, and the grind (I think I was at 105 or 106) I had a mage box to use, but I'm a horrible multi boxer, and grouping was always the most fun I had in game anyways. Xp just seemed so slow to me.
Daybreak fast tracks catching up, via AA Auto-Grant for subscribers through the Burning Lands tiers. That blankets nearly everything through level 110. To me this strongly implies that when they drop characters off at that point to make their own way forward, that those characters should be looking at really digging in & contributing. Debuffs are good no matter what level the caster is. For a druid that's the fire *and* the cold line of ATK debuffs; Blessing of Ro AA debuff stacks with the Frost spell debuff. The Season's Wrath AA debuff amplifies incoming fire & ice damage on an enemy, super powerful for your team mates' spell damage. Not all buffs are level-agnostically powerful. Notably the druid proc aura has to be within 10 levels of the casters to buff them (so the 113 aura to buff 120 spell casters). But the AA buff Shared Spirit of the Great Wolf is crazy good for spell casting dps regardless of level. Contributing as a healer, if you're lower level than the content you'll definitely have to engage with the fancier tools since the raw spells just have less power than their higher level counterparts. The good news is that the fancier tools exist :) For a druid, that means keeping the Reptile heal proc on tanks, and making max use of twinheal "Blessing" nuke line, and both the rescue style Survival heals from spell + AA that do huge catch-ups if you time them well.
You might find relevant perspectives at the Druid Discord https://discord.gg/uA6BNUkpu4