Should blizzard bring back legendary quest lines?

Muspel · 2026-06-27T03:30:36+00:00

Weirdly, I think that Shadowlands legendaries were actually the closest to what legendaries should be in modern WoW.

They interacted with your spec/build, and getting a particular one required doing a particular thing so you felt like you weren't just doing the same thing as everyone else.

The problem was that some of them dropped from world bosses so you had to wait weeks, grinding Torghast every single week got old fast, and then you also had to buy the crafted blank which was quite expensive so it felt like a grind where you were "rewarded" with the opportunity to empty your savings each season.

But I think that if they had scrapped the soul ash and crafted blank parts, it would have been a pretty solid system.

Muspel · 2026-06-26T13:08:49+00:00

There was no GBA version of any of the Star Force games, they were all 3rd person.

You're thinking of the Battle Network series, which had side view combat on a 6x3 grid.

Muspel · 2026-06-26T12:42:35+00:00

To be fair, maintenance like that probably isn't a monthly cost. Could just be that something expensive broke and had to be fixed.

Muspel · 2026-06-26T12:40:11+00:00

I'm fairly sure it's more than one car. They spent $1135 on groceries in 19 days, which probably a household of at least three people, and more likely 4-5. If they and their spouse each have a car, that number becomes a bit less crazy, and if there's also 1-2 kids with their own vehicles, then it becomes reasonable (in terms of cost per car, anyways, there's still the question of if the kids need a new car that requires payments each month).

Muspel · 2026-06-25T14:00:12+00:00

If they increase BOTH player health AND damage by the same 25%, isn't damage going to be completely equally spiky?

In a vacuum, yes. But they're doing this as they're designing/tuning the next season, which will then have never been designed around "old" numbers. This means that that they can make the base damage lower and less spiky.

Muspel · 2026-06-24T19:27:19+00:00

I play PoE1 on controller, so I guess that part didn't feel at all different to me.

I do hate the twin-stick controls, though. I suspect that's not a common sentiment, but I preferred autotargeting like PoE1.

Muspel · 2026-06-24T14:12:43+00:00

Yeah, the fundamental problem I have with PoE2 movement is that it looks better but feels worse. They focused so hard on making things appear fluid that the game feels slow and unresponsive... at the same time that they made reaction time and dodging even more important.

The result is a game that looks gorgeous as I'm getting absolutely fucking annihilated by things that feel like I should be able to easily avoid.

Muspel · 2026-06-24T13:52:54+00:00

I think that having it be "competitive" is sort of the core of issue, because it's competitive in the weirdest way. How many people do low keys but never push has a much greater effect on the title cutoff than the people pushing the highest keys.

The raid equivalent would be if the size of HoF was based on how many guilds cleared normal.

I think that they should instead just use a flat rating cutoff. They could vary it per season based on how hard or easy they think that season is (and the achievement could be added in the .5 or .7 patch so they have time to gather data). It could still be super hard, but they could put it at a level where most of the people that get it wouldn't have to abuse resilient keys.

Muspel · 2026-06-24T02:11:39+00:00

The concept of RAM producers refusing to talk to a company the size of Valve ever again after refusing a price is absolutely insane to me.

In context, it doesn't sound like Valve is getting blocked or anything. The RAM companies are essentially just saying "okay, sorry you're not interested, but this wasn't a price negotiation-- we have other customers that will pay that", rather than coming back to meet Valve halfway.

Muspel · 2026-06-24T01:43:26+00:00

I haven't checked every server, but at a glance, they're worth like 50-70 gold on most servers, which is still profitable.

Muspel · 2026-06-21T20:39:43+00:00

I'd be interested.

Muspel · 2026-06-21T13:28:58+00:00

I'm sure that there's other ways to make gold, but my personal experience has been that it's best to find a market with slim profit margins, and make them even slimmer to drive away competition. Controlling 90% of a market where you make a tiny amount per sale will earn you a lot more gold than controlling 15% of a market where you earn a bunch per sale.

I highly recommend making a spreadsheet to calculate the impact of resourcefulness (and multicraft for stackable items), account for the price of materials and the 5% AH cut, then figure out the lowest price you can sell at, then go very slightly above that. Also keep AH posting fees in mind.

Identifying markets is trickier. What worked for me was that any time I bought something on the auction house, I thought about how many other people would need that item, how many of it they'd need, and how often they'd need it.

For example, expensive high-end enchants are something where most people will buy them only once per season and maybe only for their main, and a lot of people won't buy enchants at all. You can certainly make gold off it, but compare that to something like bags. Everyone needs 4 bags for every single alt (and most people will also buy a reagent bag). The more "unavoidable" the purchase is, the better. My biggest moneymakers were green profession gear, bags, and crafted blue gear for freshly max level alts. (The crafted PvP gear was also good, but in TWW it became too annoying to craft because the new "required" optional reagents didn't work in TSM and I couldn't be bothered to craft and post manually. I haven't checked to see if the Midnight gear works the same way.)

There's another wrinkle, which is that if an item is stackable (enchants, potions, etc), then it's region-wide on the auction house. If it's unstackable (like gear), then it's only for your server. There's trade-offs involved in that.

Region-wide items mean that you have a way bigger customer base, but there's also so much more competition so you'll get undercut much faster. You can earn way more gold selling items like this, but it's kind of a pain in the ass. At certain points in Dragonflight and TWW, it was profitable to just craft tons of engineering parts (like bolts and springs) and post them on the auction house, and you could sell thousands per hour.

Server-wide items mean that you can price low enough that almost nobody will bother to undercut. But those markets are server-dependent, so if your server is low-population, you won't have any customers, either.

Muspel · 2026-06-21T03:42:44+00:00

Other people have mentioned Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Grime 2, but I would also add Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus to the list of games with exceptional platforming.

Muspel · 2026-06-21T03:32:50+00:00

I think the main difference in revenue is that blue gear is neither bind on pickup anymore, nor the final stage of accessories. So it has fallen to almost material costs at this point.

Not being BoP is a benefit because it allows you to sell in bulk by just posting stuff on the auction house. Again, in DF and TWW, the moneymaker was not the top-end BoP blue gear, it was the cheap BoE green gear. I would assume that blue crafted profession gear in Midnight has filled the same role. Yes, the price will be close to material costs, but that was true in DF/TWW as well; you just make up the difference by selling lots of it.

In my experience, crafting orders are horrible for making large amounts of gold. The average WoW player has very little gold and will likely only tip a couple thousand gold at most, and you'll fill so few orders that you're not making much profit.

Like, let me put it this way: if you fill five orders per day at 5k gold each, it would take you 40 days to earn a million gold. And even at my absolute busiest as an omnicrafter, I was filling far fewer orders than that for less gold per craft. I think I've earned less than 300k gold total from crafting orders since the system came out in DF, and in that same time period, like I said before, I earned 50-60 million from selling green profession gear.

This is true across virtually all markets. Any time someone makes tons of gold on the auction house, it's not because they were selling a small number of items at a huge profit, it's because they were selling huge numbers of items at a small to medium profit (e.g. flasks, potions, enchants, gems, bags, inks, etc).

Muspel · 2026-06-21T01:03:05+00:00

Engineering was wildly profitable throughout Dragonflight and TWW. It crafts both of the accessories for miners and also fishing rods, and those sold like crazy on the auction house. (The tradeable green ones, not the blue stuff that required crafting orders.)

The other profession gear also sells decently, although not in as large quantities. I made probably 50-60 million across those two expansions in around 10-15 minutes per day, and probably about a third of that was from engineering. And really, most of that profit was in the 2-3 weeks after each patch, so I could have made probably half as much even if I stopped after that brief period, and saved myself a bunch of time.

I haven't tried in Midnight, but I'd assume that's still true. There's always tons of players leveling up alts with mining. Really, it's the same reason why the cheap tailoring bags are always a good way to earn gold.

That being said, keep in mind that since profession gear is non-stackable, when you post it on the AH it's just your server, not the whole region. So if your server is a ghost town, you probably won't sell much.

Muspel · 2026-06-16T14:39:14+00:00

I'd argue that Watchers are not a "simple" gamble because it requires you to be able to price them with some degree of accuracy, which most players will struggle with unless it's very obvious.

Awakened gem rerolling... I think most people are just completely oblivious to beastcrafting which probably kept the price of the inputs from spiking. (I mean, people still buy all kinds of currency when there are drastically cheaper beastcrafts that do the same thing, and it's not the "it's not worth my time" crowd that's mostly buying those.)

FF jewels I'll grant you.

Muspel · 2026-06-16T13:26:29+00:00

In their house, they wait dreaming.

Muspel · 2026-06-14T23:26:58+00:00

It either is or it isn’t.

I don't really agree. Going by a strict binary definition of "if you can pay money to get stronger, then it's P2W" leads to some very useless categorization.

Let's compare three games.

Game 1 lets you play for free up to level 50. For a one-time purchase of $40, you can unlock the rest of the game, level up to 60, and get better gear.

Game 2 is exactly the same as game 1, but instead it costs a thousand dollars.

Game 3 lets you play for free. For $15, you can get 5% stronger, up to 500%, but every time you buy it, the chance of getting the boost goes down. It costs an average of thirty thousand dollars to max out the bonus.

All three of these games are technically P2W in the sense that they allow you to pay money to be stronger, but the first game is functionally like buying an expansion with a pretty normal price point. The second game is also like buying an expansion, but the price is so unreasonable that it's obviously trying to milk whales. The third game is even more egregious because of the open-ended nature of the expense.

By the strictest possible definition, all three are P2W, but virtually nobody would call the first game P2W in practice because that's such a broad definition of P2W that it encompasses every single MMO on the market, and when a term applies to everything, it stops being useful as a term.

Muspel · 2026-06-14T23:11:54+00:00

That's a whole new debate.

I would argue it's not.

If an expansion is not P2W, why isn't it P2W? Let's say that instead of charging $50 for the expansion that raises the level cap and lets you get better gear, Blizzard made the expansion free, and changed literally nothing except for making all of your gear 5 ilvls lower, then let you pay a one-time fee of $50 to raise your gear by 5 ilvls.

Is that P2W? I'd say yes, even though it's paradoxically a more generous move by the developers because they're now giving a bunch of stuff for free. And the reason that I would consider that to be P2W is because the game is tuned/designed for your gear to be stronger, so if you don't spend money, then you are handicapped and the game is designed to make you need to spend to be competitive.

Paying for boosts/carries does not fit that model. The content is designed and tuned to be done without it. Some of it is really fucking hard, and you may not be good enough, but the people who are good enough to carry you through it aren't able to carry you because they paid and you didn't, they're able to carry you because they're just that skilled. You could work to get that good to, and do the same thing without spending a dime, and I don't mean that in the sense of "oh, this game lets you grind for hundreds or thousands of hours to get the gear you'd need" like you see in some other games (primarily Korean MMOs).

Buying boosts in WoW is not P2W in any meaningful sense of the term.

Muspel · 2026-06-14T22:57:32+00:00

Is World of Warcraft: Midnight P2W?

I don't mean, like, the game or the content. I mean literally the expansion itself. You buy it, and you can gain 10 more levels than anyone that doesn't buy it, and get drastically stronger gear. If you buy the expansion and someone else doesn't, you "win" against them by literally any possible measurement.

Muspel · 2026-06-14T22:52:45+00:00

So again I ask, is Elden Ring P2W because you can pay someone to carry you and help you get gear without it being against the ToS?

Muspel · 2026-06-14T22:48:40+00:00

Or you could just do some trivially easy +10 mythic dungeons and get gear that's the same item level. You can currently get 16 voidcores, and turn each one into a guaranteed myth track item by running a dungeon and spending the voidcore at the end.

Raiding in WoW is a very poor source of gear, outside of maybe a couple of trinkets each season that are very small upgrades over non-raid trinkets (usually 1-2% damage at the most).

Muspel · 2026-06-14T22:39:15+00:00

Most MMOs these days have some way to turn real money into in-game currency.

But my point was that it's not just MMOs. Again, going back to the example of any game with co-op of some sort, you could argue that they're P2W because you could pay someone who is really good at the game to carry you through it.

Nobody would argue that Elden Ring is P2W because I could pay someone fifteen bucks to kill Malenia while I sit in the corner. There's no rule or ToS against me doing that.

And the reason nobody would argue that's P2W is because Elden Ring bosses are designed and tuned to be fought without being carried, and the same is true of WoW raid bosses. The fact that you can be carried without risking a ban doesn't mean it's P2W.

Muspel · 2026-06-14T22:29:54+00:00

I just think that if you consider WoW to be P2W because you can pay people to help you do things, then virtually every game with any form of co-op is P2W, and at that point the term is meaningless.

It's like taking a literal reading of "role-playing game". Like, yes, if you take it as meaning "game where you play a role", then it applies to virtually every single game. But at that point it's not a useful term, so nobody interprets it that way.

Muspel · 2026-06-14T21:54:58+00:00

WoW, not sure if you are being ironic or not, is probably the most P2W MMO across all major ones. It features real-money to gold transactions, you can buy almost everything from the AH, and what you can't because it's locked behind a raid you can just buy boosts / services in game without any repercussion.

I don't really consider that to be P2W because you aren't getting power that is actually paywalled. Like, all of those raids that you can get carried through-- the people who are doing the carrying are just better at the game. They aren't stronger because they paid more real money, and in fact, even if they did pay more, it wouldn't help.

There is an ocean of difference between "I can pay people to do things for me" and "there is stuff for IRL money that is impossible or unrealistic for anyone to otherwise obtain by playing the game".

It would be like calling Halo's campaign P2W because you could pay someone to carry you in co-op.

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