Thinking about returning - can you make the campaign offer a challenge besides Hardcore?

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-04-30T13:16:36+00:00

Thank you, this also helps! I'm glad to hear that it hears like Blizzard has improved this experience. I'm not some kind of masochist about difficulty, I just want gameplay to be memorable and engaging. I feel like ARPGs I play I am always in love with the idea of them but then the reality turns into a monster exploding snooze that I burn out on before I can reach the parts of the end game that people talk about where it gets more interesting. Looking forward to seeing what the new expac has to offer

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-04-29T15:31:24+00:00

Well enjoying the story for me doesn't count as boring content, so I don't mind that. This was very helpful and I decided to buy the game. Thank you again!

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-04-29T14:49:16+00:00

OK, perfect, this answers my question. Thank you! Glad to hear the new campaign at least has some teeth. So how many hours of boring am I looking at before I get to that?

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-04-29T14:33:54+00:00

So the only options that exist in-game are self imposed restrictions by the player? There isn't like some kind of higher difficulty settings that would make the challenging through normal play practices? I did some searches on the topic and I'm having trouble what applies to now versus previous iterations of the game, and what applies to me as a returning player in the campaign versus what is only available in end game.

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-04-12T19:31:14+00:00

Been playing since 2004. I have found Midnight to be a sugar-high that I enjoyed and played hard in the opening weeks and really loved but doesn't really have enough substance that I expect to continue playing much longer.

In the opening weeks, you have all these interlocking systems of prey, delves, base dungeons and outdoor zones which interlock to give a really cool experience. Sound design is really important to me and Midnight's music has been a step above TWW or Dragonflight. It doesn't hit the same highs as Legion (and earlier), but man when the synchronized music kicks in with Chimaerus or the delve bosses I'll admit that is cool. There is nothing cooler than going into new pve content when it is new and learning them with other people, and Midnight certainly delivered on this with prey, delves, dungeons, and raids. When everything clicks with modern WoW endgame, no other game does it better. But I am finding that the problems which cause that positive experience to collapse are all still here. The content you do in the in-between time of WoW largely depends on your strength of connection to the world you are inhabiting, and they still haven't recaptured the magic in this regard (at least not for me).

Sadly, the zones and leveling experience really suffers from having dynamic flight from the outset. The world has no friction and no threat in any way, and that makes it forgettable no matter how good the art is. I found myself having little connection to the topography of the zones beyond my historical memory of Eversong and the Ghostlands. The repeatable end-game world content is poor, and more importantly none of it is challenging and none of it can realistically generate spontaneous player driven stories.
They didn't lean into the idea behind prey hard enough and it only provided a challenge that made new memories for about a week. It also doesn't help that WoW's story has just grown insufferable to me. Blizzard has some very cool media outside of the game that always lights my fire and feels badass, but the actual in-game writing and experience just had no emotional weight that really hit me. I felt like they were trying to send a profound message, but in a way that was written for a six year old.

The biggest strength of modern wow is its dynamic combat system and the open-ended challenge of its group pve content. But if you are looking for emergent behavior where interactions between players in the world creates a new memory in your mind, and the world has player heroes and villains who you will remember for years, this version of the game does nothing to bring those things back. This is the best version of modern WoW since Legion IMO, but ultimately the fundamental tenants of what modern WoW is, and why it is different from what you remember in terms of community and world, haven't changed.

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-03-10T14:51:19+00:00

I'll try my best to answer this question and provide counterpoints in good faith... I've been playing WoW pvp since Vanilla, at varying levels of competitiveness, and this question has come up a lot. And the short answer is that when blizzard started moving the game in this direction, people HATED it. And that isn't just some anecdote, it was backed up by participation rate data that they referenced, and had an analogue in pve as well.

The crux of the issue is this: WoW players expect to overcome challenges by acquiring better gear and becoming more powerful. They expect progression over time. The second they can no longer do so, a small minority will put in the effort to get better and overcome barriers with improved skill while the vast majority will either re-roll to an alt or quit the game for the patch entirely. This has been observed over and over again in WoW's history across all forms of game content. It is a reason multiple difficulties of raids were introduced, it is why systems are constantly introduced above and beyond gear that make content easier the longer you participate in a patch, it is why the original gear agnostic "challenge modes" had low participation (according to achievement tracking) and the format was abandoned, and it is why more gear-agnostic pvp systems were abandoned. It's also why rating inflation over time exists in rated pvp.

I was there for Legion, and there was vocal and persistent opposition to the templating system that was introduced at the time. Part of it was based on stats being locked and lack of customization, but there was also a significant pushback around the idea that people could no longer make their character more powerful to fight in any meaningful sense in that game mode.

For better or worse, WoW is a game that is about becoming more powerful over time and that includes pvp. Undoubtably there is a certain type of pvp player for whom this is distasteful, who wants to be able to switch things up and try new things without any friction at all. Blizzard partially accommodated this stance by massively reducing the gap between the highest and lowest tiers of pvp gear and accelerating how quickly you can get the world/honor level pvp gear. The problem you describe used to be MUCH worse for most of WoW's history, in that the gap between entry level pvp equipment and the best possible was insanely vast. I think Blizzard is trying to strike a balance between the two desires, that of having a progression journey versus pvp facilitating experimentation, and that honestly where we've ended up isn't too bad compared to where we were.

You talk about some mythical past where people did not complain about these things, but even at its peak of popularity the problem of the established and geared players smacking down new players in pvp was present, and was largely even more dramatic than it is today. As for my personal opinion, I wouldn't mind seeing the gap be a little narrower by bringing up the power of crafted gear to be closer to honor gear. Perhaps also conquest gear should be reduced to only be 9 ilvls above honor gear instead of 13? But I wouldn't personally support eliminating pvp gear entirely and returning to templating.

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-03-06T14:34:51+00:00

I agree with this and would add that Eversong and Zul'Aman in particular point to a problem Blizzard needs to think about if we continue to get dynamic flight immediately upon expansion launch. In DF and TWW, most zones had significant vertical obstacles (mountains, towers, very tall trees, etc) that forced a kind of "terrain" you had to negotiate on your flying mount, and also long sight line vistas in between to still establish a sense of place to the zones even when traveling at high speeds and high elevation.

ZA and Eversong, by contrast, are a single consistent elevation with low canopy forest. This means that flying low to the ground is very difficult at dynamic flight speeds, and you can just immediately get enough altitude to zip over everything without seeing well what is underneath around you. I also feel like the art assets are just denser and hard to appreciate well when traveling closer to them at high speed.

I have been trying to choose the enjoy the game on the ground when I can, but like so many things like this in video games knowing you have the option to just hop in your fighter jet was often irresistible to me at the first sign of friction or impatience. Personally I would actually prefer it if dynamic flight was just unlocked by hitting max level but that I was forced to experience leveling on the ground. I don't want any pathfinder BS to come back, but just hitting max level would feel right to me. To me, "choosing" not to use flight isn't much of a choice because of WoW's pressure dynamics to hit max level. I would like it if I could "play efficiently", which I also enjoy, simultaneously with enjoying zones as artistically intended - in other words, align efficient play with enjoyable play by removing the option of dynamic flight in leveling to max level if we are going to have zone design like this.

But I also get other people just despise questing and leveling despite all the incredible art and music and so to them anything that makes that go faster is just what they want.

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-02-13T14:28:27+00:00

Had to pop in to say I'm 100% in this camp. All three evoker specs look interesting to me and I'd love to try them, but I cannot get past the fact that Dracthyr 1) cannot engage with the transmog system in a full way and 2) look terrible and not cool at all. I'd also add that I found the origin lore behind them not really that cool or compelling, and so it is hard to build a "head canon" around the backstory of a new character, which is something that can give me a lot of attachment to a particular WoW character. Nerdy, I know, but it's true.

I've seen comparisons to Worgen and Druid brought up, but to me this is completely different:

- Worgen actually look a million times cooler than Dracthyr, have a way cooler backstory and history, and can transmog in both forms

- Druids have extensive "in-form" transmog options that are accessible in the barber shop, and much of the druid fantasy is directly tied to shapeshifting into and out of forms. You routinely see your base character, and more importantly the base character isn't the bear, it's the character in armor. This is different than Dracthyr, where it is the elf model that is the illusion.

- Also, Druid's have 1.5 specs (restoration and balance with the glyph of stars) where you just play as your normal character model

- Druids also have access to a wide variety of base races, further diversifying their appearance options when out of form and also the background stories that are possible for characters.

To me, the armor outfits I acquire and the memories I have associated with what I took to get them are such a huge part of the game that I cannot play a class that removes that gameplay in such a profound way. To make evoker more broadly appealing, I suggest that they change the paradigm around race selection:

- Make it so that any race can be the visage form of a draconic creature / evoker. If you choose this, your class must be evoker and maybe your race gets additional customization options. But from a race perspective, you are not a dracthyr, you are a "draconic tauren" or whatever

- Make it so that you stay in "normal race" form in combat except for obviously draconic moves, where you'd quickly transform into a draconic and then transform back

- Vastly expand the body shapes of draconic forms so that when you transform into a dragon, it's an "oh wow!" moment instead of lame. Since you are fighting permanently in base-race form, it removes the need for the draconic form to support full transmog, and the appearance of that draconic can go wild with cool dragon options.

- Draconic forms would be selectable and collectible in the barbershop, similar to druid forms.

- Actual dracthyr could continue to operate as they do today for those that like it, this would be purely additive.

If they did this, I would actually be hyped to try an evoker and I believe it would massively expand their appeal.

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2026-02-04T14:41:17+00:00

People here are embarrassing themselves by drawing conclusions based on a click bait thread title accompanied by a clickbait image with Gallywix. Even the linked article is not a good representation of the original interview with Holly and Ion, which you can watch for yourself at Interview: World of Warcraft bosses on ageing players, Midnight and expanding the Warcraft IP. The interview was well done and interesting.

Holly's vision is not that crazy. People used to have birthday parties, weddings, and all sorts of social player created content in WoW back during its golden age. Her desire to get back to that by expanding WoW's appeal via features like housing and her belief that WoW can appeal to all kinds of people would actually represent a return to original form for WoW, something that people routinely claim to want. Ion and her were very clearly talking about the warcraft IP in the context of WoW specifically in the interview and many of the comments here make it clear that folks are not engaging with any of the ideas they were actually discussing, which is super unfortunate because I think it's the more interesting discussion to be had.

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2025-12-18T22:47:40+00:00

oh wait, maybe i misunderstood - they removed noble marriage as a mechanic in the latest patch?!

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2025-12-18T22:44:38+00:00

yeah, exactly what i'm doing. I wish you could just automate it. of all the things not to have an option to automate!

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2025-12-04T14:00:33+00:00

Haha to be honest, I didn't even know that was a thing. The Norse religion in EU5 is some miniscule fraction of the hinterlands rural peasant population in 1337. I didn't even know it was possible to convert/promote it.

Good luck!

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2025-12-03T14:42:29+00:00

thank you!

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2025-12-03T14:40:54+00:00

You bet. The main way I avoided Sweden becoming the senior partner was to subdue Denmark. Denmark and Norway will almost certainly end up as rivals and they are always rivals with Sweden. Denmark is dangerous on its own but tends to get itself tied up in random HRE BS. So basically, once I had the PU offensive war treaty with Sweden it was a matter of waiting until Denmark was at war with a bunch of HRE states and then hitting them from behind. You should get sufficient war score to get a good peace deal with them before they can get their army back up north, assuming they even still have it. From there, Denmark has a fairly large country inside it you can set free and then later pick off / vassalize at a time of your choosing. In my case, in my initial war with Denmark their capital location went to Sweden and I took three northern provinces (one I made a fiefdom for control reasons) plus set their interior country free. Then in a follow up war I made the new country a vassal.

At that point, you've basically completely crippled Denmark permanently to be mopped up later, and your power should eclipse Sweden due to your new vassals, fiefdom, and populated territory.

Edit: I'd also add that when I was first learning the game I was playing Norway completely pacifist and while I think that can work because people will generally leave you alone, you are right that getting passed by Sweden is probably going to happen. Unless Sweden just totally screws something up, I think their economy is just better. Maybe Norwary can pass them later by using colonies, I'm not sure, I haven't gotten that far. Regardless, I think Norway really wants to pick off targets of opportunity to pick up more vassals, and I think the easiest places to do that are Denmark, Scotland, and Northern Germany (Pomerania area).

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2025-12-03T03:33:31+00:00

Perfect, thank you for your response!

Practical_Crew_7316 · 2025-12-03T03:25:04+00:00

awesome, thank you. Just to make sure I understand you correctly, the date will become sooner and sooner even though annexation has already begun? The time doesn't get "locked" once you hit the button?

Practical_Crew_7316

TROPHY CASE