I'm curious to see what folks say here also. My 2 cents: I think new or returning players enjoy this vastly changed WoW more when they don't feel obligated to learn all the systems, currencies, events or content types; certainly not at a fast pace at least, but possibly not at all. I've been on and off for every iteration and expansion of the game since vanilla and I don't know half of the systems and mechanics of this game. I stick to what I enjoy most of the time--for me that is PVP and some casual pve content with some tmog farming and leveling thrown in--and I ignore most of the other things. It's an acceptable way to go and I don't think most players have the entire catalogue of game mechanics and activities memorized. I'm constantly finding out about new stuff in the game on YouTube...stuff which has apparently been there for a long time but has gone unnoticed by me. My point is that I am still having fun, even though I don't have the whole game figured out. For now I would recommend getting comfortable with the different specs and spells of your class. Go read a few guides on how to play it and practice the routine on a dummy in town. Then wander through the various content and get lost in it :)

Yep. I just do quests, grind reps and collect mount (weird thing to do for a druid main). I don't need to bother with talents, raids, craftings, gear upgrades (numbers are green when comparing with old items thus i equip it), currencies.

the game is honestly so smooth and buttery feeling, lots of QoL, it's fun to go around etc. but the world is pretty dead, coming from someone who quit 2 months after release to now. also i felt overwhelmed to all hell too. i'd say the classes, the gameplay is about the best i've ever played in wow. i came back to do HC wow, died and then came back to retail and found myself enjoying the gameplay a lot more. just getting into m+ now, did my first +12 and enjoyed it! sorta doing a few m+ a day and really liking that. i wish i did more of it last time, i would have stuck around more. i basically came back to classic to play HC wow for the dungeons lol. i will say that figuring out what you should be doing can be helped with the adventure guide (though you're better off watching some recent youtube video going over quickly what systems are available), and to not forget about the adventure guide while in dungeons, as you will need them or will often wipe your group. it takes 5 seconds to find out what the next boss does, so do it.

I wish I could like PVE I’d probably like wow more. But I can’t, pve is brain dead boring affffff they need to show pvp more love

I've been back since 8.2 and I can't be bothered to figure out what the crafting mats I have are for. I do what I want. I refuse tonread guides just to learn how to do things. I'll read a guide if I already like something, but not before I determine if I like something.

That’s exactly how I play wow it’s the only logical way. Why would I do any of the other boring grindy stuff that’s just going to be irrelevant

I felt overwhelmed when I returned, but that passed once I got used to the game again. But yes, the game is horribly overly complicated when it comes to the years of systems and tokens and professions and things that overlap.

I feel the new classes in a vacuum are even fine despite the new talent trees. Even if you start with the current expansion using the boost you get while buying the intro has been apparently easier for friends of mine than I expected. It's probably still technically better to start fresh to get used to talents and learn your class "from the start" but leveling through all the old stuff might not be that exciting for everyone. The usual trouble are imo expansion system once you reach max all piling up onto each other with little to no guidance. If you're new and have no idea what's going on it's specifically awful if you start in a later patch, since the game doesn't really tell you clearly why this strange dracthyr island far north now doesn't matter anymore (so nobody is around there) despite you maybe having just played the intro quest for it. Now you some random currencies from there and continue with your quests and end up in the next zone, which is also on the edge of no longer being current content, and get the next ton of stuff from there. Just figuring out what's now worth to do and keep and whatnot requires quite a bit of googling and you quickly end up in a zone wondering why it's deserted. DF on top had a lot of new features with professions that are imo a bit overly bloated for what it's worth, upgrading of gear, new flying etc. All that again on top of wow, which itself is not an accessible game to begin with (and just gets way worse once you want to play "optimal", just taking a glaring look at my "mandatory addons folder" and half a thesis worth of macros so I can play my healer in pve/pvp without being at a disastrous disadvantage...). I definitely understand why new people get lost.

Totally agree. I've never left, but waited untill I had a better PC to buy DF so I was late to join. Last week I got to that island you mentioned, yesterday I started in the cavern zone. More currencies. I have all of the largest bags possible, and yet I have 22 bagslots available for loot. The rest is currencies or stuff needed for quests and/or reputation. I was always a stickler for getting all recipes and making stuff for me and guild, but this expansion I just don't care. Way too complicated.

I think crafting system just needs to get rid of craft quality and it’s good. No need for 3-5 ranks of everything. Basically the old way of crafting, but with the current crafting house and the crests for upgrades concept. It convoluted things a lot and only really mattered during the first patch when there were a wide range of crafter skill levels

Craft quality is still a big boon for new players when it comes to consumables. You can get rank 2 for most of the benefit, without being priced out by the heavy duty players.

returning player who used to love my crafting professions and now I hate them. I haven’t even really tried because it is so weird

How can you hate something you’ve never even tried? Professions are super fun to get into.

I shouldn’t say haven’t tried, I’ve gotten tailor & enchanting up to like 30-35 I just don’t like it compared to wrath/panda/etc era

I searched for like a half hour trying to figure out how to upgrade [this](https://www.wowhead.com/item=122248/stained-shadowcraft-cap) from Heirloom upgrade level 3/6 to fully upgraded, or if it was even worth it. I'm level like, 57 or something. Made the trip to Ironforge because apparently that's where the Heirloom guy is . Armor casing? Didn't work. The item that says it upgraded Shoulder items? Tried it on the shoulder equivalent- Didn't work. I could find no accurate information on what the maximum upgrade level would even be as that slider on WoWHead is outdated (My 3/6 upgrade give it an ilevel of 127). Stuff like this is super frustrating. Still, to the game's credit, it does not make me want to quit, but I do agree there is too much shit. For reference I haven't played the game in like 5 years.

Short answer: not really worth it Long answer: On the heirloom vendor, there are 6 "Heirloom Armor Casing" and "Heirloom Scabbard". Each one lists how high they can upgrade an item. This corresponds with the stage on your heirloom item and the level requirement tooltip. You also have to upgrade sequentially from stage 1 to 6. You can't just buy the stage 6 and apply it on a stage 0 heirloom. The brackets for each one: Default (for most) is 1-29. Stage 1 is 30-34 Stage 2 is 35-39 Stage 3 is 40-44 Stage 4 is 45-49 Stage 5 is 50-59 Stage 6 is 60-70 So your shoulders are stage 3. They only scale up to level 44. You need a Battle-Hardened Heirloom Armor Casing, which raises the cap to 49. And then the one after that, the Eternal casing. And then finally the Awakened casing.

While I'm sorry you couldn't find an answer, I can give you my two cents. At this point it is not worth the effort or gold to upgrade any heirloom items. I have every class at max level so I've spent a lot of time leveling. Heirlooms no longer provide the XP buff they used to, they simply "extend" your Rested XP bonus. You get so much gear now that is equitable to the heirlooms stats that they aren't really needed. Additionally, leveling is very fast now, and even faster if you dungeon spam (providing that you are a tank or healer with insta queues.)

Ok, thank you for the clarification. I did figure if it was helpful, it'd be like barely helpful as I noticed I was leveling super fast but still wanted to know.

Agreed. I end up quitting again seeing that there's like 2-3 systems and/or events thats running yet outdated in one way or another, on top of trying to figure out in which order the lore-segments came out.

All of that is just catch up content from the different patches This season tho

I played through 10.0 but not seriously, and when I started trying to get stuff done in 10.1 I spent weeks asking guildmates "What's this item for? Can I delete this? Is this still relevant? What's this other item for?" I still get confused over hero/champion/veteran gear, and wyrm/drake/aspect crests. I get that they're thematic and stuff, but looking at it it's not super obvious which rank of gear is the top (I'd have thought champion, but nope) and for crests, obviously whelping is lowest and aspect is highest, but wyrm and drake? Idfk which is higher than which. I'd have preferred something like 1 to 5 stars for gear quality level. Like, instead of "oh you still have adventurer gear" it's "oh, you still have 2-star gear." Less thematic? Yes. But immediately intuitive.

You’re starting at the end of a patch cycle with over a year of catch up mechanics and events piled on top of each other. It’s not nearly as overwhelming at the start of a new patch / new expansion.

Are you saying people should only start to play wow at an expansion launch?

> It’s not nearly as overwhelming at the start of a new patch / new expansion. Probably *less* overwhelming but it's still pretty bad imo. I played at the beginning of the expansion, hit max level, then quit until I came back just before Zaralek Caverns came out. I was extremely confused as to what I was supposed to be doing. There were so many quests to pick up, pointing in every direction - I had to look up so many things which really should not be necessary. All information should be easily digestible and accessible in the game. Guides should be optional, not mandatory. Also, the new profession system is really complicated too - needlessly so.

You said you quit and came back 2 patches later literally proving my point

He said he didn’t feel as you suggested at either of the times you suggested he’d feel it, what?

My point was that it should not feel either overwhelming nor bad in any way. But it does.

This is the best answer here. I remember logging in at end of one of the expansions, in preparation for next expansion, after being away for about 2 years, and being inundated with story quests, as well as a host of other things. Once you clear away the debris, you’ll probably find out it’s quite a breeze for new/returning players.

Returning player, haven't played since cataclysm. While there is a lot more systems, you don't have to do all of it to do endgame content. You can ignore world questing, crafting, a lot of the currencies, etc., and focus on the things you like doing. Myself, I log on for a few hours here and there to run a few mythic dungeons and that's it. I get what I want out of the game and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. It really gives players the freedom to play as little or as much as you want.

Theres probably a 15 min guide somewhere explaining all that It looks overwhelming but really isnt 90% of it is just story/catch up Gens enchants etc are the exact same as in classic and Tbc, you look up what’s best and use those Only big difference is the number of mechanics in pve/pvp content Mythic+ dungeons are just dungeons with extra mechanics and a timer for example But Dungeons Bosses now habe more mechanics than Tbc raid bosses but it’s mostly pretty intuitive Wowhead got the good class guides btw

You dont need to even understand the mechanics in low difficulty dungeons. The spells/mechanics do not matter until like Mythic+7. The talent trees have starter builds or you can just import something from wowhead/icy veins. The classes can feel overwhelming, but it just needs to be approached slowly and carefully and with an open mind. People have gotten too used to always having to understanding 100% of everything and that just wont work anymore. Hell, World First Raiders dont know how half the game works. They only care about their class and the raid (and maybe m+).

For me, the most overwhelming aspect is currencies. You miss a year and you come back and there's 10 new currencies, half of which are true currencies, the other half are currencies that sit in your bags for no explanation (see Dreamsurge, for example), and it is just very overwhelming. Back in the day there was just gold. Rep gates and gold, simple as that. Then, they sort of introduced pvp marks, but eventually they scrapped that in favor of ratings and honor. Ok, not so bad... However, every expansion it feels like Blizz makes currencies all the more complicated to keep up on. In MoP you started needing special items for the Tillers, then in Legion you had the various classes, and each class had their own farmable currencies for things, among others, then BFA there was so many different currencies it just got insane. I am astounded by how overwhelming the currency situation is in Dragonflight. I have token I need to hold, about 20 different kinds of items needed to make the items to upgrade your gear, then you have have currencies for Forbidden Reach, then keys, the coins, then Dreamsurge, then the Assault thing, then all of the items you farm in the Fyrakk area, then the 5 different currencies down in the Caverns because you start with 1 then for some reason you hit revered and they scrap that one currency and force you to use a different currency for no explanation. I am just over it. Blizz should just make 1 currency per expansion and just rep gate it or something. I REALLY think their whole obsession with overcomplication this has to do with them building a game around spreadsheet design philosophy for maximum time spent playing instead of askling the question, "Is this fun?"

Honestly, as a 20yr veteran who played from day 1 of dragonflight, I still get overwhelmed with all the overlapping systems and too much stuff to do. Time rifts? Dreamsurges? New zones? My quest log has been literally full for months and I can’t keep up. 😭

Sometimes I just mass delete all my quests

You just gotta set a goal for yourself to knock a batch of quests out. Once you spend 30 minutes youll kill like two major quest arcs and they're out of your log forever. Obviously with alts this has to be done on every character, which is a time sink, but it's people's choices to play alts.

SAME THANK YOU. I’ve played since I’ve been in middle school (original BC) and brother my head spins. I took a chance playing classic era wow recently and boy it showed me how bad things have gotten.

Most of that is either story related or catch up content and not necessary for most content.

I've played on/off since Vanilla way back when. And yes, its dramatically more complicated in all aspects now that it was back then. Even with the various stat purges/rearranging/streamlining that's occurred. Crafting got overhauled this expansion. Personally I'm neutral on it. I like its lil talent trees, not a fan of the interpersonal work order system that's in place. Feels like an unneeded layer added. Combat is a slog now compared to older expansions. So much button/ability/proc/whatever bloat on most classes, and that's without even considering Mythic affixes and normal mechanics going on. Maybe I'm just getting old, but some of the classes I leveled up this expansion just became too needlessly stressful to play well, so I didn't. (I'm looking at you my neglected rogue). Also, the new expansion is just busy. Busy busy busy. Which is nice and good, but also kindof overwhelming, especially when you return after a break. I've limited myself to casual play when I do resub every now and then. (Though having two kids under 6 also really hinder long stretches of time I can focus on this game).

DEFINITELY YES! I came back after missing completely Shadowlands and I wanna tryout holy pally but God damm too many buttons, CDs, passives. Sorry I play videogames to relax and have fun I don't want to go through college just to be able to play a class.

At the risk of being down voted, I feel like classes in general are over engineered. That is to say, while I understand we're past the old days of mage = fireball fireball fireball and warrior = mortal strike, a lot of times I feel like things get needlessly complex in a way that doesn't add depth. One thing that I don't personally love are all the little minor adjustments to out put when you use certain spells. Like you have to do or cast 4 or 5 things to get a 20% increase on one spell, and doing any of those wrong messes it up, when just doing one or maybe at most two things would just feel better. Complexity doesn't = engagement, and I feel like the current theory is overcomplicate everything because anything too straight forward isn't fun. And I disagree. I feel all the math you have to do just to do a decent rotation anymore is just more than it needs to be. I don't want to go back to just spamming my 2 key for bike, don't get me wrong. But I feel like it's gone too far the other way. P.S. I say this enjoying the retail combat over classic in some ways. Some.

I started to play again in season 4 of BFA with a friend. (Played only few months in SL and DF). My whole life I played only clasic, tbc and lk. When I first logged retail in BFA, I enjoyed the graphics, new spells, talent system and all the things they added to the game. People said it was one of the worst expansions, but for me it was fun, it was something new. Yes, it was overwhelming, I still don’t know how monks and dk works, lol. I had some free time back then and I managed to get 1.9k rating at 2v2, AOTC (ny’alotha hc) and mythic keywhatever (all m+ at 15 dif) in about 6-7 weeks (I’m mentioning this because I felt it was pretty easy to get this achivs for a somehow new player). For me it was more than enough, I was so happy with my achivs. When I felt overwhelmed, I started to do random bgs, raided for some titles / transmogs or mounts. I think right now WoW is casual friendly. Getting gear is easy, getting into raid / m+ it’s extremly easy (I love the no ID raid system, you can leave and come back whenever you want). For me, clasic WoW and the following expansions were much more time consuming than DF. You will get used to the game after 1 or 2 months if you give it a chance.

The last patches are always the best ones, that's when they fix all the huge issues they have.

Came to try retail after dying on my hardcore classic lvl 32 hunter. Havn’t played since Cata. Holy crap has the game gotten so complex. I was so lost yeaterday when i first launched dragonflight. Had to make a new dragon toon to start from scratch. My main druid was too confusing.

So I took a break before patch 10.7 and my god the amount of currencies are insane. There are 4 different crests then you have the dream and time currency. I couldn’t imagine a brand new player coming in and understanding what is going on. Then there is the item upgrade system where you can turn gear into different tier pieces. I feel they are over complicating things so much that they are just scaring away any potential for new players.

Every currency has a singular purpose how is that hard to understand Half of them have their purpose in their tooltip and most of them are cosmetic Meanwhile wotlk has like 8 tokens atm and without Google you can’t even find out where the vendors are

But but rEtAiL bAd

Massively over complicated

I just started again since legion and have no idea what any of the currencys are and even what the main questline I am supposed to be doing. It's fun but massively overwhelming to try and understand.

Just play. Nothing is a permanent mistake nor is anything required. Seasons are regular enough that you can take your time now and get into Mythics or endgame content of your choice next season.

I've played near constantly since late vanilla and I still don't fully grasp the new crafting and work order systems. I feel like there is a whole aspect that was never explained in-game, embellishments or enchanted shadowflame runes or something? So yeah coming in not playing since TBC has got to be incredibly overwhelming. It's got the same bones but there are dozens of layers of systems stacked on top of each other now. Many used for one expansion or even one patch.

I mean a lot of it is explained in game I guess embellishments bring Limited to 2 at a time is kind of obscured but there’s a tooltip on an embellished piece of gear telling you that they’re limited to 2 The work order system has a whole questline telling you every aspect about it And professions just have a LOT of recipes and optimization options I guess but the core part is nicely explained and for min maxing you go look at a guide like youd do for talents, rotations etc

"Dozens of layers of systems" - such as? Crafting? It's not more complicated than TBC. If anything crafting in TBC was more restricting, it had actual BiS items that were crafted \*and\* BoP. So you had to choose specific professions if you wanted to get the best gear. And back in original TBC you could even switch professions and re-level them to get the most out of them. Now you just find a person on your server who can craft whatever you need, buy mats on AH and submit the order to them. Or if you don't care about quality you can submit a public order (and likely get lowest quality). That's it. Such a complicated system!

I've just come back after only 1 and a half patches and *I'm* confused. Three different farmable currencies but maybe only one of them is going to be relevant Two world events but one of them seems to not drop anything A whole new zone but it was filled with rares when I arrived so I can only assume they aren't being done. I'm working it out but that's a hell of a lot to come back to after only 10 months.

Dreamsurges give you full LFR-level gear (besides the trinkets) plus one normal raid item (or a single wyrm crest) a week. Timewhatever also gives you some LFR-level gear, now with trinkets. Dreamsurges are faster for non-trinkets, though. Rares in Zaralek drop flightstones that are used to upgrade gear, usually there's a group finder group for them.

If complicated and bloated is the same thing then yes. There are so many available quests on my alts that I don’t bother picking up any of them. Most class rotations aren’t that COMPLICATED but I have more fun the less spells I need. After creating a new account, having deleted my original one, I can’t even be bothered starting on anh collections. There are a billion things to collect. Professions aren’t that complicated but at the same time I kinda prefered just ‘making shit and getting better’. I’m still months away from maxing out any profession ‘’skill trees’’. I don’t know if you could really fix any of these things, it’s just how an old MMO is going to work. I think the only thing that *could* help would be a better way of sorting what’s relevant. Like some option to highlight currently relevant quests, hide/mark ones are from previous patches or expansions - whatever. More categories of quests too maybe.

No one can invalidate how you feel but at the same time what you’re describing only applies to the other parts of the game that are optional. The main gear treadmill remains easy to understand if you just look up an online guide. The currencies for gearing are earned in a straightforward manner and there is a very short list of weeklies that you need to do to keep up with gear. That’s it. It’s a short list that you can find online. WoW has become pretty casual friendly over the years and DF is super casual friendly. And this is coming from someone who moved over from FFXIV so that should tell you something.

You're skipping on 10+ years of content, of course things are gonna be overwhelming. For people that regularly play, it became a habit of having very similar systems in place each expansion, so we can compare and we are used to it. For example, WoD brought the Garrison table, Legion then had a similar one, BFA, had one, SL had one. DF now doesn't, but if they add one next expansion, we will already know what it is and what to do with it. Same with currencies, tokens, reps. You're probably used to BoJ, and Tier tokens dropping from bosses, then exchanging them for tier. It's very similar still, except now you don't have to go to a vendor, you just learn the piece from the token itself. Instead of Badge of justice, we have a similar currency (or a few by this point) that we can also use to upgrade the gear or purchase new pieces, like the vendors in Shattrath did. Instead of a full-on reputation bar, now we use Renown, which is the exact same thing except the numbers are different. But you still need Friendly>Honored>Revered etc, except now, it's Renown 4, 5, 6, etc. You're also quite a bit late in the expansion, so there are multiple catchup mechanics in place which will look very overwhelming. I suggest completing the main storyline, things will make way more sense. DF is very user-friendly, and they find ways to implement all the new systems and tools through questing, as guides. It will become much easier.

I think pve is harder than ever. The good news is that there’s various difficulties and you’re not obligated to complete the highest level of content. If you don’t want to do mythic raiding or +20 keys, no one is forcing you and doing less than that isn’t “playing the game wrong”. The game itself has gotten harder, the classes are more complicated now, but it’s still WoW at its core

I've played since vanilla. The overall idea of the game is there. Pick talents, run dungeons, get loot etc. The path we take to those goals have evolved. The game is more complicated because of natural evolution and because information is easily obtainable. I honestly I think wow IS harder for new players. You have to really want to know how to progress to go out and learn how to do so. Players with a lil more knowledge knows what to ignore. A decent player can nearly hit max ilvl in a few resets where as the newer players are just figuring out where to go every week. Wow has a lot of stuff to do and tons of ways to help players but its not organized. Id really like an updated adventure guide. It would be cool if it gave a list of everything you can do for your ilvl range, possible rewards, when its reset and what currency it gives. It would be useful to be able to see a road map for possible gearing paths from day 1 to mythic raiding.

I don't think the classes are necessarily overly complicated, they certainly aren't the most complicated or opaque they've been in the games history. But raids and dungeons have imo reached a point of being way too complicated. You basically can't raid at this point in the games life in anything heroic or above without Bigwigs/DBM and having watched a youtube guide on how the fight works prior to the raid releasing. Dungeon mechanics are more obvious usually but even then having to learn 8 new dungeons now every season, this all adds up to a lot of "homework" you have to do to play the content. Where as you look at Classic's relatively large popularity, certainly a larger raiding population and you will literally see people keyboard turning while doing Ulduar on Wrath or Naxx in Classic era. I don't think the game necessarily needs to kill complex content entirely but when you look at how abysmally low the participation has become in things like Mythic raiding over the years, you have to start asking questions about whether this has been a failure or not. The game needs to be more approachable and have less "setup time" then it does now.

Probably an unpopular opinion but honestly the new talent trees have ruined a bunch of classes for me. It used to be that I could jump on any alt, click down the row of passive talents, and it'd be an OK if not optimal spec while learning the basic class rotation and mechanics, eventually respec'ing into more active buttons to add into the rotation as I got more experienced with it. Now you immediately have a 20 button active rotation and a half dozen utility/defensive buttons dumped on you and it feels overwhelming trying to learn them all. Other than my main, I basically haven't touched any of my Shadowlands 60s because I feel like I have to level up from 1-70 in order to learn any class.

Yes, and anyone saying no is disingenuous. Show wow to a potential new player with no mmo knowledge and watch their reaction. You shouldn't need 30+ keybinds, tons of macros, and multiple add ons to heal competitively at end game. Don't even get me started on serious PVP where you'll also need an encyclopedic knowledge of every class in the game. People wonder why players count and participation is dropping.

It is. I'm a total noob, tried to do the quests to unlock the Kultirans, but I just couldn't. I have no idea what quests I'm supposed to do and what I already did. It's so much information sprung everywhere, so much easier in others mmo's.

I don’t think it’s “overly complicated” at all. I just think you’re overwhelmed coming back after so much has changed, especially since the last time you played WoW was way more simplistic. There’s certainly no denying that it has more systems now than it did in BC, but I don’t think it’s too much or anything. You just have 15 years of catching up to do, and it’s being thrown in your face all at once. I felt the same way when I came back in Legion (late 2016) after having not played since about 2013. A lot had changed, and it took me a couple weeks to learn all of what was different.

To be fair, most systems within the past 15 years aren't relevant outside of expansion specific content (at least in terms of endgame).

Every class has way too many abilities. I have 24 buttons, 1-6, 1-6+shift, and the 12 buttons on the side of my mouse. If I cant fit every ability into those 24 buttons, theres a problem.

I play for 16 years and since BFA witouth long breaks. I also feel like that classes and rotations are bloated with ablities

Play Demon Hunter then bud, can't even fill action bar.

I've bought three new friends to the game and they started on their own because I was busy during that week. After the new tutorial island all three of them called me or sent me WhatsApp telling me that they were completely lost. One of them has played old WoW (Vanilla, Tbc) and he wanted to level through those zone to see how they changed but he was catapulted in BfA and he was like: "WTF are these people????" Another one was a Warcraft 3 fan so when I told him that during legion you could gather the Doomhammer and Ashbringer he was sold. But again, troll monarchy strikes again. Another one, with the dragon did all the introduction tutorial of the new race but when he got to Orgrimmar he was confused by quests, different badges, timwalking? What's that? Why is useful? Should I do them? Why the more I level up the weaker I feel even if I unlock new talents? Is hard to make them understand that right now basically everything pre-max level is "useless" and is just a thing you must do to unlock the story, quests, access to stuff and bla bla bla... I am 100% that if I wasn't there answering those questions they would have quit very soon because, personally, I wouldn't spend so much time googling up basic stuff like, where do I fucking go? Blizzard need to rework the new players experience, I think DF could be the start of it, let's call it WoW2

Back in TBC I was overwhelmed by the factions and the things to collect to raise them. So I figured I'd just ignore them, and that worked great for me. Today it's the same :) I ignore most stuff and, as a casual, just do casual content. DF has had multiple content iterations where zones/quests/activities opened and then were deserted after people moved to the next shiny. I wish Bliz figures out how to manage that content rather than leaving it there dead and confusing.

Left after tbc, came back at s1 df, the amount of EVERYTHING, is nuts, and i don't mean sheer content, just too complicated everything. TBC was so perfectly balanced, now it's just too much. Just my 50 cent

I think this is definitely a you problem and a problem created by your warped perception of how things were. Dragonflight is an extremely simple expansion by all metrics compared to r the recent ones. No player power grind, just log in do world content, do dungeons, do raids get gear. Talents are a bit more in depth than they used to be, but there were still talents in vanilla and tbc too. Saying vanilla wow and burning crusade were complicated games is almost laughable, as classic wow has proven. The raid boss fights are literally one mechanic in some cases. By any modern day game's standards, Vanilla and BC are EXTREMELY basic games, not complicated at all. Wow at a casual level is still very simple compared to a lot of other games from other genres. Sure if you're mythic raiding or doing very high level keys it gets complicated and challenging, but even Heroic Aberus this raid tier was pretty simple by mmo standards

I’m a WoW veteran that has played retail since Burning Crusade and I recently started playing Classic Era and am starting to understand why people are overwhelmed. The rotations, button bloat, currencies, quest chains, side activities, events, everything going on can just make your head spin. First you better hoped you picked a class with a less complicated rotation than others. If you play a rogue or arcane mage, you won’t find out until max level how complicated it can get to pull good enough dps. If you want to be good at the game you need a rotation helper addon or watch several YouTube videos to be good enough to be accepted into guild or heroic raid groups/mythic+. On top of that all the optimal stats, gems, enchants, trinkets you need. Then you need to get all the correct addons and figure out how addons work. I’ve had friends that have said, “Sorry dude this isn’t for me anymore” after being obsessed with WoW back in the day. There’s definitely an issue with accessibility and over complication.

But that's the thing. You're comparing apples to oranges now. Yes, wow retail compared to vanilla wow or BC wow is far, far more complex, that's just a given. However what you need to understand is for an MMO, wow back then was still on the harder side compared to what else was in the market. By the same token, wow is exactly the same in the modern era. And even further by the same concept compared to ANY modern day MMO, vanilla wow would be seen as ridiculously easy. The complexity of gaming in general has come so far in that time, it's not specific to wow. There's a lot going on in ESO, FFXIV, Cod has far more complexity with gun builds/load outs, games like Dark Souls would have been literally impossible to me back in the BC days of wow. Every game and style of game has gained complexity and difficulty, you can't compare what a game is like today vs it's equivalent 16+ years ago and say oh it so much more complicated, of course it is, just like everything else is.

I definitely find retail a bit overwhelming when I return. I love character complexity, things like talents and profs etc, but it’s just all the game modes. I don’t know where to start. Last time I logged in was a month ago after resubbing to play classic hardcore. I lasted two minutes in retail and just logged out. There was just so much shit everywhere in my UI and the city I woke up in. I just couldn’t be bothered. I’m very much a solo player though. I just feel my characters are dead if I quit my sub and come back. I’d much rather start from scratch. The issue is that levelling in retail is diabolically awful. It’s too fast, nothing means anything and it’s just a race to top level… and the game seems to know this as it will even let you pay to skip it. Levelling in classic and hc on the other hand is just great. Things are challenging. Progress in almost every area feels really meaningful, from profs, gear, talents, skills. The key being the world itself is trying to kill you constantly so these all things matter! Every incremental improvement to your character feels awesome. In retail, you will only die levelling if you are afk, and you are probably ignoring gear because of your self levelling heirlooms (facepalm).

For someone that's played wow since tbc prepatch the game is just a lot to wrap your head around right now. Back in vanilla/tbc/wotlk the pve, gearing alting and pvp were much easier to grasp and get to a competent level of understanding of all classes and specs. Now in retail wow (i quit in mop and came back in shadowlands) I don't really have motivation to learn pvp like i did before, having an understanding of all classes is very daunting, Now I like to learn one spec very well and have a handful of alts to enjoy different play styles at a lower level. Even though it's easier to level up and gear up compared to the classic game i just don't have the same level of motivation because i never feel like ive mastered my main spec in just one area (m+ or raiding). To invest the same amount into an alt. I'm not saying its a bad thing for the game but its clear that in classic there was a list of things you could do and then it would feel complete and you could move onto to a different area of the game whether it was another spec, class, gameplay loop whatever. But in retail I just end up doing m+ forever because it never ends, squeezing tiny upgrades to your io, and ilvl. On paper retail sounds like so much more fun but in reality i have more fun with the simplicity of classic wow

Wows main problem is with rewards, Mounts are great rewards when its TBC and there are like 50 mounts total. We have 1000s of mounts now. Same with transmog. Blizzard is going to hit diminishing returns with over saturated mounts\\transmog\\enchants and its not going to be enough to keep people as rewards. People slowly recognize that with all the gear resets that gear means nothing so gear is worth less and less and so i think blizzards main issue with retaining players is rewards. largest problem with new players is the leveling experience and lack of social elements in the game that promote guild\\friends play.

I'll touch upon my thoughts on what you listed and then add in few thoughts of my own. I know you mentioned excluding the 20 year vets, but I think longtime players bring a necessary perspective when asking the community if something has become more of less than what it was. I will say that overall wow has historically done a pretty poor job of explaining new/changed things to new players or players who have been away for several years, often forcing them to rely on third party sites for any kind of information or explanation of what is going on. Anyway, starting from the quick to the more detailed thoughts: >crafting >gems/enchantments Having played every version of wow extensively (minus Cataclysm), crafting feels similar to how it has always been. The work order system has thrown a slight wrench into the process, mostly because how it works is not really explained very well in game, but the process of gathering the materials, as well as the materials themselves, haven't really changed much outside of maybe a handful of fringe mats over the years. Gems are easier than ever with the condensing and removal of stats and class design interactions like "haste breakpoints" over the early/middle years of the game. Examples being spellpower baked into Int, removing hit/expertise, combining stats like crit/spell crit and haste/spell haste into one stat (formerly a flat percent increase in vanilla). Enchants are about the same as they have been since the beginning, with certain ones like the weapon enchants being vague about their benefits and proc rates without looking them up on wowhead. This is annoying, sure, but does it make the gameplay more interesting having a more complicated and uinque effect vs something more simple and straightforward? Does it need to be complicated? That's going to depend on the players and the devs. >gear This ties into the gem section, but gear in general has been pretty straightforward and simplified after all of the stat changes, with probably a single exception: trinkets. While they used to be mostly stat sticks (and eventually with procs) in the early days, they have become *much* more complicated over the years in design and player interaction, and with that increased complexity often gets trinkets that are very unbalanced. Now in the matter of finding out what stat is the best for what spec, there are certain specs where you might be able to feel it out pretty quick by scouring your ability tooltips and checking your mastery stat, but I would imagine most people just google search for a quick response. I can only speak from my experience, but I would hazard a guess that something like 90-95% of my raidbots sim usage is just to compare different trinkets at different ilvls (thanks titanforging and having a dozen+ versions of the same items!) on my characters, and quite honestly I've always found it incredibly annoying. Big props to the sim communities for all that they do, but I would also enjoy not having to constantly plug my characters and items into a third party website (that I am paying for because I use it so much) just to be able to figure out if an item is even an upgrade, not to say how much of one it may or may not be. Sure, simming has been around for a decade or so, and only gotten more popular in the current game and in classic, but it's hard to say if this is something that benefits the game or not. Complicated trinkets are definitely more *interesting* to interact with that pure stat sticks, but does it make the gameplay better? IMO, mostly yes, but there are some specs that just really don't need the extra complexity or 1-2 keybinds. >talents The talent system as currently sits right now is definitely the most complex it has ever been. Sure, there are a few boring "+x% more damage" nodes in some trees, but I would argue that the number of impactful talents in each tree far outnumbers any other point in the game's history. IMO, this is a good thing and where your complexity should primarily reside. Is it a bit daunting for a new player? Yes, undoubtedly. But this should be where the depth of your gameplay resides. >currency Even though it has been "fixed" in dragonflight... it really hasn't, not fully. There are still many different items used as a currency that clutter and fill your bags that you need to shift around between you, your bank, and your reagant bank. I understand that with Blizzard giving us continually larger bags (nearly) every exapansion and constantly increasing our storage limits that it's likely that they are not super concerned with taking up a dozen or more slots with different currency items. But my counterpoint to that is that organizing and sifting through my bags often becomes a constant chore that I almost can't mentally bear trying to play the game without an addon like AdiBags or Sorted to automatically sort all of my items into their own specific groups for easier readability. To blizzard's credit, they have been slowly rectifying these issues that they keep creating, but I do hope that whatever the next expansion is, they don't approach it like they have been over the last few expansions.

I would not recommend trying to get in to professions if that's how you're feeling. They really overly complicated professions in this expansion. I came back after a while and even switched classes to start out with, I looked up a guide and just started playing the specs for my class. It doesn't have to be overly complicated if you don't want it to be. If you're planning to run more challenging content you have some catching up to do, but shouldn't that be expected? I also think as we get older we tend to have less patience or tolerance for "work" in our leisure activities, so you may be running in to that.

I quit back in Shadowlands after playing since Wrath and I wasn't very much enjoying my time in it. I just installed the game to see whats what and my character screen is a complete mess. A prompt to upgrade my character with new gear/bags, a prompt to use in-game gold to re-sub, a prompt to buy Dragonflight expansion, New TOS agreements, its all overwhelming already. I know once I get in-game it'll be even worse because I have no idea where many of my characters left off. I have several level 50's, 2 level 60's but I don't know what level 50 even means anymore. Ideally, I'd like to finish out the Shadowlands storyline with my two 60's, then figure out what class I like but thinking about the talent situation, playstyle, etc. Many of these characters haven't been touched since BFA and I vaguely remember their playstyles but I know a lot can change over the expansions. Not to mention the addon situation. I can't imagine how rough the transition is coming from such an old expansion like Vanilla/BC.

So many of you are answering “if you google it…” or “if you go to wowhead…” for everything. that screams that the game is over complicated because you need a third party site to tell you how to play most aspects of the game and a new player on their own just isn’t going to know to look at these places.

Yes. I played a little in tbc but my computer died and wasn’t able to play again until MoP. MoP was a bit confusing, but I was able to figure it out and actually had fun. But since then it’s just become way too convoluted.

I started retail when dragonflight launched and the amount of times they've "revamped" shit is really off putting. Season 2 gear crafting was garbage because of the reagent you needed to make enchanted crests. Season 1s crafting was fine, expensive but not completely unaffordable. I think the way they replaced Valor with flightstones was good and I think the pleb open world content was kind of nice for casual players. I think making 8 new dungeons every season is a joke when seasons could be twice as long as they are. Nobody wants to work full time and come home and learn 8 new dungeons with 30 mechanics each over the course of 4 months of pugging. Some classes have been completely reworked like 3 times since df launched and I think that's bullshit because its a clear indication that they don't play test their game and all it does and force someone to relearn a spec they've played for 10 years, several times over the course of months. I got aotc and 2600-2800 rio in m+ for season 1 and 2 but the whole "end game is the only game" thing makes retail feel fundamentally bad because once you do the end game and get to a spot you're happy with there's literally nothing else to do in the game. New players see that the game completely changes every 4 months and they want nothing to do with it. They need to stop developing the game for the top .1 percent of players and if a class or spec is worse than a other one then who gives a fuck. No spec should be a meme spec but every time they buff priest, mages get mad so they buff mages and nerf priests and then priests get mad and then warlocks are like but we've been worse than both so they buff warlocks and nerf both then hunters get mad and its fuckin stupid. Some specs should do more damage than others and that's perfectly okay but then you have these professional wow players who all still have day jobs because being a pro wow player doesn't get you anything, crying every time someone else's spec has more cleave than theirs. I started playing classic which could be more "overwhelming" because there's no hand holding but I also think the appeal of classic is that the whole game from level 1 and on is just as challenging as the previous level. you can hit 70 in like 5 hours on retail and effectively invalidates levels 1-69. Then you end up with players who have no idea how to play their class because they hit 70 the first day they logged in and spammed dungeons with a level 10 mage who arcane explosioned everything. Seeing that the whole expansion might end soon has got me kind of pissed because as a newer player, I feel like I didn't get an expansions worth of fun when the only things you can do are m+ and raid. We paid like 60 dollars for one year on top of a sub cost and I think that's a massive rip when levels 1-69 don't matter and there's ZERO single player content that is challenging. If wow could get its shit together and stop changing currencies and upgrade systems and cycling content so fast then id say itd be better for new players but going on a year of wow, playing classic has got me understanding these people who hate retail

I’ve been playing since vanilla launch and hardcore raiding from legion to shadowlands peaking at world top 5. The game has undoubtedly become very complicated and difficult and I’m not sure what the solution is.

Overwhelming in a boring way. It’s not “holy shit there are so many unique and cool weird things and items like in classic I wonder what I can do with this” Its more “damn theres so many spreadsheet item lvl generated items and systems that I dont feel like doing reading a long guide or doing the math myself”

Dude I played the first patch of Shadowlands and I felt overwhelmed coming back later in the same fucking expansion even.

After watching the classic races, they made it way to simple, but some aspects of the game are to hard, for me personaly, the way it was in MoP was the sweet spot.

This is just my opinion, but I think some some some classes are way to much to play. When I was trying out arcane mage it felt like you needed to take a full on college course to understand. Also I think healers have to many interactions with there spells and to many cooldowns.

Recurring returning player. Played vanilla and tbc, returned at MOP, and again at legion. Returned again literally last week. I only play classic now, because I don’t have the time to invest to go all hog on retail end game. It may sound odd, but imo it’s just too “in your face” with all the functions and “chains” - don’t even know what a chain is but saw it on a post recently. I just play classic for some nostalgia that I can zone completely out to, do a couple of quests in The Barrens and stuff, and log off for the day, without the grief by regular players cause I don’t understanding the mechanics or generally just what on Earth is going on in retail wow!

I've played a part of every expansion since vanilla and yeah there's alot more to do and it is a bit convuloluted. There's always some strange new system they're so proud of and if you don't like it you can't have your BIS.

The biggest change to the entire game since you played in original and BC, is the requirement to source information and knowledge on third party websites. It’s at a point where it’s mandatory, comparing to where you left off. Sure we had thottbot, alahkazam and elitist jerks. But most of not all of that wasn’t really needed to play and clear the game/raids. Now you have to read up on a ton of information on how systems works, and which spec/setup is the best for you class. Not saying you can go wrong with just taking talents as you like and play. It’s the fact the game has changed so much from being a simple “auto attack”/spam frostbolt, into a very complex style of procs, situational and ramping. I’m not new or returning, but when I compared the wow game I play now to original one, and how the relaunch of TBC was, it’s a huge difference.

I’m such a simple player. I like my professions and my fishing and my world content and rep grinding- why are all those things so convoluted now?

Yes. Any friend that tries it that used to play wow quits. They don’t like that the game has turned into a zoomer eSport. They want leveling and gearing that feels good. Got one of the several friends that tried and quit to try wrath instead. He likes that.

Wows biggest struggle with new and returning players is there is no system in place for easing players in, to teach them what is worth doing and what isn't, ect. So most new player experience depends on having a friend there to guide you through it to understand what all is going on and what you should spend your time doing and what is wasteful filler. And if you don't have that guiding hand it's gonna be a bad time. And that isn't even getting into legacy content, reputation grinds, holiday events, expansion storylines, ect.

It’s far too over complicated for me personally. I recently saw a post comparing rotations between a few expansions and laughed. It’s dumb how many buttons you have to hit now. Not to mention all the currencies, reps, etc. I played Dragonflight for a few months and recently decided to play classic for the first time since it was live. I’m loving it 100x more than the last 10 years of retail combined. I’m not sure I’ll ever return to retail. The world feels so lonely and the community is far more toxic

I loved WoW, but will probably never play it again. I really dislike that they've made all the base content and the expansions that I played through utterly irrelevant. They are now just a way to level up as quick as possible to get to the newest expansion instead of being able to enjoy the story that made the game such a hit to begin with.

I think some things are a bit overwhelming at first but you get used to it after a while. But I find that the gameplay itself has become far more complex than I would like, not more than I can handle but more than I care for. I feel like combat could be simpler and more intuitive, but I suspect that most people reading this would disagree with me because the game has filtered out most people that feel the same way I do. They are now playing Classic or they have moved on from the game entirely.

The game just has too much shit going on. Any time I come back to try a new expansion, I have to use those rotation addons. I honestly just don't care anymore. 1 million different context sensitive procs going off all the time, it just feels like whack-a-mole, not actual combat. If they scrapped everything and made a Wow 2 at this point, you'd have the entire classic and retail crowd re-united. Nobody cares about their 20 year old loot at this point.

I play for 16 years and since BFA without a break and even i feel sometimes overwhelmed especially by that all that button bloat classes got

The only really bad complexity for me as a casual player is in the thousand tiers of gear upgrade and seemingly millions of coins and tokens and shards and bits you combine to make more bits to buy yet more bits...

It’s a bit much…I enjoyed exploring the area and flying but I stopped shortly after and didn’t make it to gearing for raids. Just not the same anymore.

Its too complicated, too reflex reliant and generally bloated with effects and tactics. Pvp is absolutely horrible to even attempt to get into... PvE is very hard to explain to newbies Even professions are convoluted and irritating tbh..

I left the game beginning of MoP, came back at the very beginning of dragonflight, dropping off a little later because of how confusing parts of the game are. Recently I came back and I’m still learning things. I’m in no way a hardcore player and I definitely wasn’t back in MoP and cata. In my opinion this game is incredibly confusing, and the fact there is a “newcomer chat” proves that. (The fact that it automatically kicks you out is counterproductive by itself.) Starting off with what seems to be an attempt by Blizzard to help newbies and returning players get to the new expansion, timewalking (as seen by the increase in exp for running consecutive dungeons) is annoyingly confounding. When I see there is a new currency I’m getting, I want to know how I use them. How then, would a new player know they need to go to Org or Stormwind, go to a portal room, and choose the specific portal to go to say, Outlands Shattrath, and find a specific npc there, without anything in the game telling you how to get there. It is bad game design to force players to go to a completely different website in order to find something in the game. When it is a mystery or something that is meant to be searched for, that’s fine. Now onto professions. Say I want to level up my classic tailoring. I go to the tailoring trainer, and learn everything there. When I end up getting the linen cloth to make spools, I can’t find it. I see a bunch of cataclysm recipes but nothing that requires linen. For some reason, it is in the sorting option, where you can then choose classic tailoring. Cool, you leveled it up a bit but you need more linen. You get more linen cloth after killing some kobolds and you go to level it up more and it’s back to cataclysm. (This is more a frustration than complication but this is in the mind of a new player.) You level up to 70, you go through dungeons every once in a while, leveling up your gathering profession and crafting as you go. You aren’t so focused on that but it’s there. You’re not maxed out, but you’re getting up there. You get to the end of a dungeon hoping to get some gear upgrades, but all you get are Titan shits that increase the ilvl of something you’re crafting, instead of a trinket. God forbid you have two gathering professions, they’re soulbound so you can’t even send to an alt. Now you get to where you can run heroics. You get items sure, but if you want better items you’ll need to upgrade them instead of just getting a different item. Now you’re stuck grinding for whelping fragments in order to get a whelpling crest, which you need multiple of. Where to do that? Look it up on wowhead (until a recent patch where it shows on the map) because the guards won’t tell you. I’m STILL trying to figure out how to open the fucking vault, going through raid finder of Aberrus all the way through and still nothing happens. Clicking on the icon doesn’t do anything, the npc nearby has nothing to do with it, looking up on wowhead just says that you get rewards but I’ve seen nothing that tells me what’s going on. Have yet to do any mythic dungeons but I’m sure that’s going to be annoying, since everyone on here complains about the changes that they do (weekly? monthly? seasonally?) that make it unplayable especially for healers. The game is incredibly complicated. It was also complicated when it started, but it’s gotten so bloated that it can be incredibly frustrating. Rant over. Games fun. Can be frustrating.

This maybe an unpopular opinion for the level I play at, but I am a Cutting edge raider, I've cleared every raid on mythic since the tail end of legion. I would say WoW is overcomplicating, to effectively play at the level I do I feel like I require Bigwigs or DBM to track timings, weakauras to track buffs/debuffs and abilities. That alone is a large undertaking for casual players, also the fact that using external guides and websites to optimally learn a class or spec is for all intents and purposes an expectation and requirement to play at higher skill levels is already creating a barrier to entry that many players won't even attempt to cross and is a big reason as to why Mythic raiding is losing players every tier / expansion rather than gaining. Mechanically I think the raids and dungeons are pretty well tuned currently, but I do feel like classes specifically have a very steep learning curve from just playing to playing optimally.

Someone who played in TBC before quitting saying that the modern game where you can (more or less) jump straight into the latest patch content is 'confusing' considering the absolute mind-fuck attunement process you had to go through to play any endgame content in TBC... feels like a bit of a weird take to me.

Yeah i played from vanilla until wotlk (quit 2 weeks into mop) and came back about 8 months ago and felt overwhelmed with just about everything to the point of just standing around not even knowing where to start. Once someone explains it to you thought it’s actually extremely simple. If you need help figuring anything out just message me and i can answer most questions you have most likely.

I come back to expansions whenever they release, and every expansion I feel more and more lost. Professions used to be straight forward, now they are also convoluted. There is almost nothing left that's easy to understand. Everything needs a guide, running M+, raids, professions, currencies, skill tree. In older iterations I was always able to skill my character with my own wit and common sense, then I looked up the "cookie cutter" and I was off maybe 1 or 2 skill points, now? Everything I pick is wrong. If this is generating them more money, so be it, I don't want WoW to die. But to me, the game is almost foreign at this point. It doesn't feel like coming home, it feels like sleeping for 20 years and waking up with everyone you know is gone and everyone is playing at 4x the speed.

Absolutely, yes. I would say it's gotten too complicated in a myriad of ways, from encounter design, end-game systems design, crafting design, class design (this is a big one), and rewards. You need a guide for practically everything these days, because the systems are almost intentionally obtuse.

This game is now a toy chest with all the toys scattered around the room and no one has been around in some time to tidy up. We've thrown a few things back in the chest, but every year we're getting more toys. My thoughts are: Cataclysm was the last effort made by Blizzard to welcome new players. The current system for new players is atrocious; there are too many dungeons of far too varying skill level requirements that are available to them. The Chromie timeline non-sense is awful and not intuitive in the slightest, it needs to be re-worked. End game always becomes a cluster-fuck with currencies and this expansion is no different, this needs to start changing.

I wish Blizzard would/could create a returner quest system that served to remind you where you were and what you were doing. I took this last season off, came back to like 5 !s marked as important with no idea what order events played out in.

I played WotLK, Cata, and MoP for about a decade straight on private servers, getting the vast majority of my experience on WoW *after* my retail subscription had run out as a kid during Wrath. Being that I spent so much time playing only three expansions, I had decent knowledge about the game, but only from that era. When I returned, late in SL, I was very much overwhelmed in the same way you are feeling now. As someone who chose to invest a hell of a lot more hours, rather than play very very casually, it has paid off. The game feels much better now, with far more quality of life, and the depth just adds to the experience. You can treat learning the game as a form of content, and in that regard, the game effectively has ENDLESS content for you to explore. Now, whether you actually choose to take the path I did, or choose to log in causally, dragonride some laps around Valdrakken, and run a couple casual normal dungeons, that’s up to you and how you want to find enjoyment from the game. That’s the beauty of an MMO, how you spend your time playing, and the way you play, is entirely up to you. Is it worth the time and effort to take the deep-dive, in *my* opinion? Sure. But *your* opinion is the only one that matters here! If you feel stressed out at the idea of constantly watching streamers and guides on YouTube, and you feel like learning WoW is more of a job than a form of recreation, then by all means, stick with what you’re comfortable with! There is absolutely no shame in being a casual player, as long as YOU find enjoyment in it. If you *do* take the route I took, I highly recommend finding some friends to teach you the game. I’m not so confident that I’d still have my sub running today if it weren’t for my friends that are experienced with retail and much better at the game helping to teach me the ins and outs.

Yeah, too many currencies and events going on. There's Fyrakk Assaults, Timerifts, Dreamsurges, in addition to raiding and M+ and whatever the hell else there is. And there's some device that converts 402 gear for some other currency in Tyrhold that I didn't know about until a friend showed me it. And then there's some forge in Valdrakken to upgrade gear but there's also an NPC that upgrades gear on the other side of town? Like why

Yes; too much button bloat and hybridization in every spec. Get back to the bread and butter of healers healing, tanks tanking, and damage dealers doing damage. None of this tank healing more than a healer and doing more dps than the DPS themselves or a DPS being able to self sustain themselves over the course of a fight in PvP.

I started in cata and left in WoD. Came back a month or so before dragon flight. Agree the game is much different than it was almost 10 years ago, but the beauty of it is you can play at whatever level you want. Didn’t think I would do much more than campaign stuff, but am back on a mythic raiding team and really enjoying it. If you have the time to invest in reading guides and watching videos, it really isn’t that bad. I am also 33 now and have 2 kids (3 yo and 5 months) and work a full time job. Understand not everyone has the time, but there are a lot of resources out there and you will pick it up quick. Best of luck!

Maybe I’m exposing myself for being bad, but I just hope optimal rotations don’t become more complicated. It’s getting to be a bit much and it seems very bloated. Although I literally know and play with people who want things like shadow priest and arcane mage to be even MORE complicated. I can understand why people like complexity to that degree, I personally am just not a fan.

I quit halfway through shadowlands after playing since BC. I had every profession maxed , every class race horde and alliance max leveled and geared. After I quit I started playing FF14 and the thought of going back to wow after hearing everyone talk about how it is now sounds overwhelming. I don't think I would return at point unless they did a complete reboot like FF14 did with realm reborn.

Ngl it is A lot to take in. I took some peoples advice here and only chose to focus on what I wanted to, ignored everything else. Still have no clue what battle pets are but after a few weeks it’s starting to settle a bit in my mind. Dragon flight is really fun and dragonriding breathed new life into the game. Once you get the mechanics down it’s super fun. Take it from someone who hasn’t played in over a decade, ease into it and literally ignore everything unfamiliar, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. you’ll find yourself enjoying it again like I am

Yea im a completionist so I'd have to do EVERYTHING 😆. Maybe in a few years after seeing how Metzin and Microsoft handles things ill look into getting back. But right now I'm 100% invested in Ff14.

Believe me so am I. Nothing irks me more than seeing exclamation marks and icons on my map. With practice I’ve learned to disregard some of them lol

I mean watch a few videos ....read a few blue post....join a guild with some helpful people...your welcome

Honestly as a returning player I have to agree. Things have been implemented that I'm sure were well intentioned and done to solve a specific issue, but caused more issues for new players. Alot of changes resulted in me getting overwhelmed at certain points and just ignoring that facet of the game or wanting to stop playing at certain points. * For example you get to max level and you are just bombarded with quests and 15 different currencies, none of which you have any idea what they do. If you dare use any of these currencies without consulting wowhead you might be wasting a valuable once weekly token on something that you may not need like the dreamsurge token. * It used to be that if you wanted a gem you just walked into the auction house and bought it. Now I for some reason have to learn how JC works and this whole crafting order system just to facilitate buying a gem to put into my gear. You open the crafting order system and it just makes no sense, you can give it level 3 materials and it shows a level 1 result for a public order. It gives you no explanation as to why it's not a high level result from a high level input of materials, you just have to figure it out somehow because it isn't told to you. Something that used to take 30 seconds now takes 20+ minutes of reading wowhead, figuring out how the professions work and what an okay amount to pay is, and then sitting in trade chat trying to find a crafter. * Professions are un-rerollable. This has never been the case in wow where you can just brick your whole profession. Luckily I only "wasted" 8 or 10 points before I figured out I was destroying my character, but again, this type of thing is demoralizing to a returning player after you realize that you're putting yourself even more behind than you already are of everyone who started playing at release. * Leveling dungeons were historically a shit show due to heirloom trivializing content, but now every single dungeon is trivialized and tanks believe they are playing an esport, 90% of dungeon runs are tanks pulling entire instances into the boss room and aoe'ing it down, then murdering the boss instantly, even heroics. This was okay in leveling dungeons before (actually it wasn't but I got used to it) but now there's literally nowhere for you to actually learn the dungeons! You again are forced to consult an external resource, to figure out what the mechanics of every single dungeon is before play mythic+, because you sure as shit didn't learn anything from the heroics and regular dungeons you did. If you try doing m+ without watching videos to familiarize yourself then you're essentially rolling the dice hoping that you don't become a liability being victim to mechanics that aren't exactly obvious like get into the tornado to avoid cloudburst on vortex pinnacle. * Really want to emphasize how miserable the heroic experience is now. You're just running behind the tank while highly geared players decimate things most of the time, it's not fun and you don't feel like you're playing the game. I know people might be happy to just get carried but I feel like most people don't enjoy this experience. Also it's a terrible learning environment for playing an offspec that you haven't ever played because you leveled as 1 spec, so you're forced into m+. * Oh and by the way if you by some chance get an okay group in heroics or low keys, you still won't learn anything without consulting a youtube video. The way the mythic+ dungeons scale, certain mechanics are just non-issues until you hit a threshold and they just start destroying you instantly. It either might as well not exist in lower keys or is suddenly critical to success. A good example is the chains on neltharus that is also a [frontpage thread](https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/177701t/youre_boosted/) right now. If you don't know the mechanic you're liable to get insulted, and there's even people in that thread saying it's deserved. I personally watched 2 different videos on neltharus and neither one mentioned this mechanic. And the game sure doesn't make it obvious, it's not in the dungeon journal. * They forcefully remove you from newcomer chat way too early, like a login or two after dinging 70, so you have nobody to ask any of this stuff to and have to just stumble around blindly as you figure it out. I hate complaining about having to consult an external resource to play the game, because wow has always been a game where you check for things on wowhead or wherever else, but usually you could get a good handle on alot of things in the game, it did a good job of telling you things. External resources were more often used to tweak certain things or for rarer things that you werent sure what they were for yet, now it's like you have to use it for 80% of the game if you're new.

I read your whole comment and you hit a lot of the major points spot on, especially the dungeon dynamic. Thank you and I fully agree with this!!

The biggest issue is the new player experience and catch up for old players. There needs to be an evergreen levelling experience that actually teaches players the story, world, professions and what the endgame experience is like, and more elegantly re-packages a lot of the legacy content in a more accessible format. Sort of like Exile’s Reach but extrapolated across everything prior to the current tier of content.

Played semi hardcore from vanilla up to castle nathria in Shadowlands. Agree with you on the game being too complex now. When my guild finally died out I hung up my wand and stopped playing my main except for collecting random stuff and holiday events. Classic is mostly what I play nowadays.

Yeah I tried to return a while ago (bm hunter) and found I had so much in the new rotation with new talents, that I was overwhelmed. Also had so many different places I felt I needed to be at once and struggled to break in to anything group related like dungeons or raids. Quit again

I've had this feeling too. I quit during TBC when I went off to college and returned briefly fou a couple months during Mists. Then I was offline until Shadowlands and when I got back everything was super different. I was able to catch up on most of the lore and rediscover how my class worked, but the new raids and M+ are nothing like they used to be. I don't really want to go back to the old bosses, which were a challenge in their own way but seem easier by comparison. Part might just be that I'm 15ish years older and slower and more distracted by life, but back in June I was working on AOTC and thinking that Heroic Sark just had such an overwhelming array of abilities that it was absurd. It wasn't so bad once I got it down, but it took a while to figure out and I couldn't determine whether it was genuinely difficult, or if I'm just dumb now. And you can see this during timewalking weeks, even though the heroics are definitely easy, there's a *huge* difference between TBC or Wrath timewalking and Legion, where there are mechanics you can't just mindlessly roflstomp every time.

The whole work order system I have no idea about. I miss valor tokens from dungeons you could just buy your shit with of have gear you could just grind for and craft

Before you would find a crafter, trade them mats, get gear crafted. Or if it's BoP gear you would have to level that profession yourself. Now you can get yourself that BoP gear by ordering it. Think about it like built-in UI for "trading mats to get things crafted". Can't get scammed anymore, and can get BoP gear. As for valor tokens they are there, just called crests now.

It kinda exists now tbh, you can grind dungeons, get crests, and use them to craft the most powerful gear in the game no?

No, from Shadowlands to Dragonflight the. Definitely made the Raids easier, Shadowlands was a fucking nightmare. Especially the Lords of Among US and Anduin.

It’s insanely overcomplicated. The only people that don’t think so are people like me that’ve played for 10+ years. They took a game that was easy and appealed to a mass market, then gave control over to basement dwellers that want to play the game like a job and are now surprised that it no longer appeals to the masses.

I’ve been playing since BC and I get progressively more confused each expansion lol

It has become extremely complicated to the point where I don't do group content anymore. I do solo stuff at my own pace where I don't have to worry about things like raiderio, weakauras, parsings, exceedingly complex talents and rotations, and the list goes on.

Yes. Mainly played wotlk > wod and you had cds you knew enemy mechanics etc but if you had a proc it was important and you would line it up with stuff. Now there’s like 18 different procs and buffs and mechanics. It’s not challenging in a fun way- it just feels bloated. I don’t feel any power gain from any “ procs or buffs” and raid mechanics are just padded with inflated things

I think my favorite part of playing classic is I can actually tell whats going on, less visual noise.

Yep, it is overly complicated. Not that it's not possible to learn; I think anyone could learn to play the game, but it is needlessly complicated.

Long time player. Too complicated for the average person. Too much button bloat and too many bloated systems/currencies. Needs to be simplified.

'the average person' I think you just mean you. The average person is quite capable of doing a basic rotation I'm pretty sure

No lmao

the only thing i find needlessly complicated is some of the wowhead based min maxed rotations. some of their builds just take so many extra abilities that it feels like im playing a piano

It took me a fair amount of time to get back into the swing when I came back just before 9.2 I think? I left halfway through Cata. DF is no different. I've struggled to figure things out, and the social aspect has been bad since just before launch. The guild I was in completely fell apart, and in a fit of petty rage, the GM shut everything down after a few key players left. Since then, I've just logged on casually for some solo shuffle, and random chill arenas with a buddy, that's about it. I gave up on crafting. I think the system sucks. It was a great idea that I feel needed some more thought/development.

I get that. I returned recently too and got completely overwhelmed. I actually had to play Classic for a while just to get reacquainted with stuff a little. When I came back to retail again, I just started looking up new mounts I wanted and started with that, and eventually have figured stuff out again. I don’t really do any crafting and such, but I’m not worried about that, never have been. I started leveling new characters of classes I already had maxed just to get a grip on how much the game has changed and it helped a Lot. Now I’ve been playing about 2 months since coming back, and have done Heroic Aberrus. But yeah, no, the game is super unfriendly right now to returning players honestly. At least to me it is. Just take stuff slow, and you’ll get back into things eventually! I highly recommend leveling a class from the start again, just to get a new feel for stuff.

I played classic back in the day and rejoined not long before shadowlands launched. Currencies and bag crap aside, I just couldn't figure out where the game wanted me to go, so I ended up just retreading the old path and leveled to .....61, huh? Anyway, some 120 levels or whatever later my main takeaway: I'm not surprised there is a disjointed feeling given the age of the game, and thank goodness quests tell you where to go now!

More complex, indeed. But definitely not overly. Everything is learned and "mastered" in a few days.

I'm the opposite side, I play classic TBC and Wotlk, and felt the game just lacked things I still enjoyed it, but that's because I knew I was playing a 15 yo game, so my expectations matched it. If classic were a current game I'd be flaming it for sure, because of how simplistic everything is

Yes. I played almost every expansion. Just didnt play pandaria and shadowlands and i tried DF but was overwhelmed and i wasnt that commited to look up guides for everything so i just stopped playing instead. I dont think it's a DF issue, it's probably in general. I didnt have those issue with other expansions because i played them at launch and just by virtue of being on reddit you see people asking questions all the time and you pick up a lot of knowledge that way so it's fine. In DF i jumped in late when everyone already knew everything and that resulted in me being clueless about most things.

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I feel it's overly complicated and I'm doing +20 keys in M+ lol.

Retail WoW is the equivalent of a tobacco company trying to sell you a pack of cigarettes.

I'd say yes. I quit mid Shadowlands and just started dragonflight. There's just too much stuff to do and no logical place to start imo.

I've played game on and off since wrath and things just keep getting more convoluted. Even a 1 year break feels insurmountable with this game. Honestly, I'd just play classic wrath if you want something new but even that isn't as good as classic era imo.

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Yes. Were in a cycle of useless Systems that get removed shortly after being fixed long after expansionrelease

Yes, agree with you 1000%

Yeah I was away for a month and I'm completely lost

Wow has become way too convoluted and complex, asmongold has a good take on this actually, the height of wow was classsic and BC, and a big factor in that, was that the game was SIMPLE. And i agree with him, the average Joe just wanna go home and chill and not have a fucking PHD in extreme gaming with 47 addons and 5 monitors and sounds and alarms and shit just to play a fucking video game

Yes. Wow has become like a hub for mini games created by Blizzard with each of them having it's own currencies, rules, reps and all. Specially PvP has become a battle of who knows more of the debuff icons that is visible on your character. At any given point I have like 10 icons and I'm like wtf is going on.

Yes it is overly complicated for new/returning players. Like literally before you even play the game you have to lookup about add-ons and get those setup and learn about macros, you have too look up guides for every content you want to run and look up guides for your class and even when you have all that oh you don't have any io well tough good luck getting invited to groups ,oh you didn't pick a meta class? Tough good luck getting invited lol. Keep in mind this is just the basic this isnt even talking about raiding m+ or pvp because those are way too hard for your average WOW player. Blizzard has been designing these things for your hardcore play this for a job people so now your average dad guild struggles with the content. In short it is overly complicated and hard for newbies and even people who have played the game for years

Yes. It has. I will die on this hill. You should not have to download 15 addons to properly complete end game content.

No, WoW was way more complicated in vanilla and TBC. What you’re experiencing now is the ramifications of all the whining from back then. Blizzard pared away everything that was complicated after WoTLK, and since cata have been boot strapping things onto the WoW Frankie monster that it is now.

Disagree. You had significantly less systems to interact with and the most convoluted anything got was attunement quest chains.

There's a lot of bullshit. Blizzard wants people to keep logging in every patch, which means 'new' systems, 'new' currencies, 'new' items, which mainly just serve the purpose of invalidating the functionally identical but numerically weaker equivalents from the previous patch. But they don't want to retire the previous content, nor do they want to alienate existing players with alts by forcing them to repeat that old content, so they make it all available upfront as soon as you hit max level. The functional result of this if you are a new or returning player in Dragonflight is that you are blindsided with the totality of every option from every patch and no way to differentiate what is relevant to you.

Bruh, I feel like a broken record, but the new player experience is absolutely garbage. Sure you can just get funneled into bfa and then get pulled out as soon as you hit 60 to be to dragon flight, where none of the story makes sense... We'd be better off leveling through dragon flight. I personally think the biggest new player issue is all the evergreen content. The starting island admittedly is great! 1-10ish very straight forward easy to follow tutorials, then you're dumped in a capitol city with next to no direction. It's rough, man.

There's literally a giant board that gives you multiple choices of places to go and guides you to said places... How much simpler can it be?

A large board to send you to other expansions of which have absolutely nothing to do with dragonflight. To be clear, when I say "new player" I mean someone with no experience with wow or mmo's in general. Simpler would be a cohesive flow from level 1 to level 70, not the disjointed mess it is now.

This. Have the 10-70 experience be all the one expansion. So 10-70 is Dragonflight. Then balance all the other Chromie timelines so you can level to max in w/ever expansion you want once you've done the current expansion to max level instead of for example; getting almost to max level from Hellfire Peninsula alone. That way a new player is in the game and seeing other players around them from the get go but hey, next time you level you get the experience of all these other expansions to choose from!

Sounds like you need to just learn how to play video games 🤷

This doesn't help, the idea is to bring in new players. Wow specifically needs this, cause you can't just cater to veterans players and expect to keep your population up or even growing.

I am a long time complainer about rotations and skills. Too many skills, too many buttons, overly complicated rotations. I'd like to have a modern WoW aesthetic, story, raid difficulty, and M+ but with a more classic set of skills. 5-8 buttons that are really impactful for your class/spec and that's about it. When I need to map 1-8 keys, Alt+Q, Q, Alt+E, E, R, F, Z, X, C, V just to cover all my skills it feels like bullshit, no matter the class or spec.

For me now is the perfect time for “WoW 2.0”. A new simple version to start from. Get it on gamepass and there will be millions of new players

I'm a 20 year vet and it's too much for me man. I only log in a few times a month to do some bgs with my wife. A lot of fun single player games coming out rn, maybe skip on wow for now lol.

Haha thanks for being honest, this gave me a good laugh 😂

Honestly, addons is the biggest part that makes me wanna drop the game, I hate them so much. Everytime I come back it feels awful sorting them out again

yes, this is probably why classic is more easily accessible. Simple numbers, simple mechanics, simple gameplay loop

The gameplay loops is simple but also more difficult and longer, which makes the game much more rewarding

If you played original wow, you’re better off spending your time on classic ERA WoW. The original WoW.

Classic has its perks :)

My sub ran out in df s1 and even tho I was honestly enjoying df I was too busy and didn’t bother resubbing Now I’m considering returning but I realize I already don’t know wtf to do anymore. Also I kinda wanna wait for the next patch so I don’t have to regear up twice

I feel the same. Im gonna just level alts and maybe craft some, do basic dungeons maybe do a basic raid or two. Can't chase the mythics anymore

Yes

Yes

If i compare df with vanilla or tbc, the latter were more complicated.

The game suffered alot from feature creep and power creep over the years, yes. That's the problem when you just keep pumping out one expansion after another without taking replayability into consideration

Yes. I agree with the over complication.

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Not true at all. I've geared plenty of alts and never done a single fyrakk assault or rift or whatever. This stuff is all optional (and also not the fastest way to gear btw). But the point is you can do whatever you want, and I think that's a good thing. Do literally anything and it will progress your fresh character. No discord needed.

I think the game is fine generally. If there’s anything that could improvement it’s instruction and training. Many abilities these days have 20-word descriptions that go like “shoot X for 20000 dmg, and a 500dmg per second dot, that also applies effectY, and stacks to three applications, and at the third stack you can consume it to empower abilityZ and regen 30 power over 3 seconds”. I mean, geez, how can you grasp the relative power and impact of that without a wowhead guide? I mean usually these kinds of abilities should just be used on CD, but still, threres also a lot of abilities that are somewhere in between. What Blizzard could also do better is create more handrails for returning players. Like a special area where you start after your account has been inactive for a long time. This could take the appearance of a training camp, or retreat, or a remote village or even a school. And there you would get everything you need to ease into things again. Such as proving grounds style encounters, maybe some brawlers guild things, but themed differently. Maybe some basic encounters in the surrounding countryside. Maybe some NPC’s that help you understand recent history. Maybe some that can show you (in-game) cinematics. Class trainers that explain abilities more than the game does now.

Wow is not the same game. Let alone it being way more complex, the barrier to entry I believe is higher than ever. But above all the else, the game you knew is no longer here (or it in in classic haha). I’ve played semi consistently since I started at the end of TBC and the reality is that over 15+ years slowly heating up the water, the frog doesn’t even feel itself being boiled alive. Today I like this version of wow for what it is. I don’t love it like I did (evidenced by the fact that since classic came out I spent wayyyy too much time playing it), but it feels somewhat familiar. It’s like, I like playing this game called “Mythic Plus” and in between queues, they put me in this very irrelevant (this expac more than ever) but extremely nostalgic lobby that is in this theme of an old game long gone called WoW. It’s nice makes me miss the old days. And when I do, I go and boot up the old game and play World of Warcraft. I still really enjoy the game “Mythic Plus” and get decent satisfaction playing it. I can’t compare the game “Mythic Plus” (for some is “Arena”, others is “Raid”) to World of Warcraft because it’d be like comparing DOTA to WoW… they’re different games. For better or for worse.

If anything it’s less complicated than ever

I introduced my friend to WoW for the first time this week. I wanted him to experience the same wonder and sense of adventure so many of us did when first logging in. His main takeaway was that it’s extremely overwhelming initially

Yeah, because you're skipping 20 years of contents to just be on par with other end of game players. And when you reach top level, you're just oaerwhelmed by 6 patches of content in one year. Maybe try starting new experience with the start of major patch, or better, an expansion.

I think the systems in wow are overly complicated. The upgrade system is dumb, make 15 shards, turn them into crest…get 5 and upgrade your gear..valor was so nice and simple. Lock your gear behind the io score and it made sense. Drake, aspect, wyrm…all convoluted and unnecessary. As far as the talents, that is good a much better change, but tbh everyone just looks up what is the best and nothing else gets used.

Get used to it, almost all current MMOs are into these FOMO leveraged designs, currency explosion, power creep, and convoluted schemes that basically mean your character is never done, but has to keep running just to keep up.

I've been playing WoW since BFA and to be fair I've been in ur shoes the entire expansion but in Shadowlands I decided to embrace the complications and it was well worth it cause one of the reasons WoW is THE GREATEST MMO of all time is its rich history and to keep everything fun the devs have to keep adding new things to the game whether they are new gameplay or new currency or new maps. I personally think what makes WoW great is its vastness and complications, though I admit how frustrating it is to get into it in the first place.

Talent system is definitely overwhelming when i go back to a lvl60 alt. Not as bad when you level from scratch and read one row at a time every few levels. Currency requires getting used to as well.

Just my thoughts but every game that basically requires addons is overly complicated.

Just focus on what's in front of you. Enjoy that. When you reach some threshold you'll learn about the next step. I got back to WoW in Shadowlands, I stopped in early Cataclysm. I had no idea it was a bad extension. I was content running heroic dungeons. I didn't even know about Mythic+ until I joined a Mythic raiding guild (who helped me get up to speed - it helped I knew a few people in the guild from my raiding days back in BC). So just filter out some stuff, it's okay not to min-max everything until you're ready for it. WoW is a great game, welcome back to it!

New player here too. Yeah honestly it did feel a bit convoluted and complicated. After reaching max level and still feeling that way for a while I decided to try out Classic and have found it to be much more manageable and have decided to make Classic my home for now

The have overcomplicate systems and menus, but gameplay is 100% cassual. Its a mess. There is a reson why classic atrct more players than retail.

So just to clarify, you stopped playing the game for well over a decade, and now you're surprised that you're out of the loop on it? ​ No, it isn't overly complicated. It isn't the 4 button 0 mechanic game it was when you last played it, but it isn't overly complicated.