WoW XX: It's Not A Recolor, It's An Original Thread

[Spore]

Wait, are Orc Priests a thing now?

Why, yes. Though I find Orc Mages a lot more odd. At least shadowmoon void shamans aka shadow priests make sense. And there is no outcry seeing undead holy priests (they should be destroyed by their magic), or the undead discipline priest Alonsus Faol who is canon btw.

Maybe emboldened: At least they are not destroyed by their primary source of magic!

(Yes, I realize a player character permanently in shadow form would be insane after a couple hours and only an undead would not waste away by using shadow magic constantly. the priest class is a walking contradiction if you use both healing and shadow)

[Kish]

Not only that, how do mages work? Fire? Fire kills people (and that's what fire mages use it for)!

Or maybe using magic to control an element doesn't imply being constantly immersed in the most destructive manifestation of that element.

[Psyren]

It's a short hop from Orc Priests to Orc Paladins, which... sigh.

Well, if they end up abolishing all race/class restrictions at least I'll finally get my friggin' Worgen Monk.

[The_Jackal]

Eh, I'm conflicted about race/class restrictions. On the one hand, I think some of the most classic fantasy characters are people who fly in the face of tropes. On the other hand, some combinations really make no sense, like a Tauren Rogue.

[Spore]

Well, if they end up abolishing all race/class restrictions at least I'll finally get my friggin' Worgen Monk.

Monk needs additional animations but you can do Pandaria's rolling daily quest as worgen so at least a Worgen rolling animation is ingame.

[Icewraith]

Why, yes. Though I find Orc Mages a lot more odd. At least shadowmoon void shamans aka shadow priests make sense. And there is no outcry seeing undead holy priests (they should be destroyed by their magic), or the undead discipline priest Alonsus Faol who is canon btw.

Maybe emboldened: At least they are not destroyed by their primary source of magic!

(Yes, I realize a player character permanently in shadow form would be insane after a couple hours and only an undead would not waste away by using shadow magic constantly. the priest class is a walking contradiction if you use both healing and shadow)

Undead Holy/Disc priests aren't weird as soon as you establish that Forsaken aren't harmed by healing magic. Orc Mages though... I am having a bit of trouble with that.

[Spore]

Undead Holy/Disc priests aren't weird as soon as you establish that Forsaken aren't harmed by healing magic. Orc Mages though... I am having a bit of trouble with that.

The forsaken startimg area explicitly states that channeling the light is imcredibly painful for undead. A fact that drives many light wielding undead humans away from it.

[Kish]

Anyone know what Ben Brode did for/to WoW?

[The_Jackal]

Anyone know what Ben Brode did for/to WoW?

He was a QA tester, he was one of the first people assigned to Team 5, the Hearthstone team, put there by Rob Pardo, WoW's lead designer at the time. He good his moonshot opportunity at Blizz, and made the most of it, so good on him.

Does anyone care enough to calculate the force of said explosion?

A 22 gram frog converted entirely into energy would produce approximately 6.6 million joules of energy, according to Einstein's special theory of relativity, which is equivalent to about a kilogram and a half of TNT. If released more slowly, it's enough energy to heat water for a 7 minute shower.

[Kish]

So little or nothing in WoW can be traced to him, is the answer to my question?

[The_Jackal]

So little or nothing in WoW can be traced to him, is the answer to my question?

Well, nothing that's been published, but speaking as someone who works in the industry, don't underestimate the influence and impact of good QA, and the crippling time-suck that is bad QA.

[Spore]

A 22 gram frog converted entirely into energy would produce approximately 6.6 million joules of energy, according to Einstein's special theory of relativity, which is equivalent to about a kilogram and a half of TNT. If released more slowly, it's enough energy to heat water for a 7 minute shower.

Ah, total conversion to energy and back with the weight difference would do the trick. You need more energy to produce the missing "prince" parts. :)

Anyone know what Ben Brode did for/to WoW?

I don't know but he will always be Lumberjack Santa to me.

[The_Jackal]

Here's an interesting video I ran across recently, some interesting observations, not all of which I agree with, but still, worth looking at and discussing, if people are interested:



It's a long video, but I think he's got some good points and bad points, and I'm interested in what other folks might think.

[Psyren]

I mean, Cliffnotes? That's a lot of WestWorld episodes I could be catching up on

[The_Jackal]

I mean, Cliffnotes? That's a lot of WestWorld episodes I could be catching up on

Fair point.

[Kish]

Yeah...I know why I want it. If someone made a long video based on the premise that they speak for everyone who want(ed/s) it, using the past tense, I suspect watching it would just be needlessly annoying.

[MCerberus]

I know a lot of people have their reasons, but I still don't think the classic server is going to be long-term successful. Imagine you get transported back into high school with adult memories, experience, and competencies. Even your SO/best friends... you couldn't relate to them at all. You're different.

What I think people want is more modern WoW where realms matter again. Where if you see someone on the gulch, IT'S ON. Where you meet someone who invites you to tag along on farm content, leading you to a new guild. They want alliances, and ad-hoc PvP events, the heroes, the heels, the "personalities", the clique channels. The server is its own story, and people want to be one of all these things. Hell, I was in a "heel" guild all through vanilla. The best times.


I don't think wow is in a state to provide these by going back to past mechanisms.

[Psyren]

I don't think a summary of the

good points and bad points

from a 2+ hour video is too much to ask for. Or just pull out the 1 or 2 you want to discuss most.

I know a lot of people have their reasons, but I still don't think the classic server is going to be long-term successful. Imagine you get transported back into high school with adult memories, experience, and competencies. Even your SO/best friends... you couldn't relate to them at all. You're different.

Yep.

What I think people want is more modern WoW where realms matter again. Where if you see someone on the gulch, IT'S ON. Where you meet someone who invites you to tag along on farm content, leading you to a new guild. They want alliances, and ad-hoc PvP events, the heroes, the heels, the "personalities", the clique channels. The server is its own story, and people want to be one of all these things. Hell, I was in a "heel" guild all through vanilla. The best times.


I don't think wow is in a state to provide these by going back to past mechanisms.

Outside of an RP server I've never really connected with the other folks online. My favorite online games are the ones that I can play with IRL friends, and for the most part the online-only players are just bots capable of complex behavior. If I needed help (or they did) we could interact, but that was about the extent of what I wanted. No doubt it's a minority experience but I don't want "personalities" or "alliances" or "heels" clogging up my free time for gaming, I want to be left alone. (Or as Yahtzee put it in his Guild Wars 2 review, "I want to play by myself where everyone can see me.")

[Icewraith]

He was a QA tester, he was one of the first people assigned to Team 5, the Hearthstone team, put there by Rob Pardo, WoW's lead designer at the time. He good his moonshot opportunity at Blizz, and made the most of it, so good on him.



A 22 gram frog converted entirely into energy would produce approximately 6.6 million joules of energy, according to Einstein's special theory of relativity, which is equivalent to about a kilogram and a half of TNT. If released more slowly, it's enough energy to heat water for a 7 minute shower.

You forgot to square the c.

22g is .022kg
c is ~3x10^8 m/s
E=m*c^2 (Special Relativity mass-energy equivalence at rest)
.022*(3x10^8)^2 = 1.98x10^15 kg*m^2/s^2 = 1.98*10^15 Joules.

Using your links, that's almost a day's worth of natural gas for the entire continent of Australia.
Or ~470000 metric tons of TNT. (Just under half a Megaton of TNT)

I was reading your examples and thinking to myself "that can't be right, if I took a seven-minute shower using the heat from anything macroscopic completely converted to energy I should be dead several times over. Probably from plasma exposure, not steam burns."

[The_Jackal]

You forgot to square the c.

22g is .022kg
c is ~3x10^8 m/s
E=m*c^2 (Special Relativity mass-energy equivalence at rest)
.022*(3x10^8)^2 = 1.98x10^15 kg*m^2/s^2 = 1.98*10^15 Joules.

Using your links, that's almost a day's worth of natural gas for the entire continent of Australia.
Or ~470000 metric tons of TNT. (Just under half a Megaton of TNT)

I was reading your examples and thinking to myself "that can't be right, if I took a seven-minute shower using the heat from anything macroscopic completely converted to energy I should be dead several times over. Probably from plasma exposure, not steam burns."

Whoops, you're totally right.

[MCerberus]

I was reading your examples and thinking to myself "that can't be right, if I took a seven-minute shower using the heat from anything macroscopic completely converted to energy I should be dead several times over. Probably from plasma exposure, not steam burns."

Eventually, we all get jaded enough in age to need a shower that will physically destroy the room it's taken in to wake up in the morning.

edit, such a thing would actually make sense in the Wow universe. The only thing is getting chewed out because the spirit healer hasn't had her coffee yet.

[The_Jackal]

I don't think a summary of thefrom a 2+ hour video is too much to ask for. Or just pull out the 1 or 2 you want to discuss most.

Indeed not. I'll just pick the first point I find interesting:

"The demand for classic servers is driven by changes introduced to the game over time. The game has improved in ways, but gotten worse in some ways, and in my opinion the things it has lost do not make up for the things it has gained"

This is a point that really resonates with me. I think anyone trying to trot out some kind of mechanistic argument saying that any particular expansion is 'better' is probably going to run afoul of accusations of nostalgia and subjectivity, but the notion that the trade-offs made between early WoW and the modern game have been, on balance, for the worse. Now you might argue that the game has had to evolve to stay relevant, and that if the game had stayed in its "Golden-Age" format, whatever Golden Age you'd choose, it would not be as successful as it is now, but I basically reject that reductive argument, that the only alternative to 'progress' is 'stasis'.

Noxious's musings are grounded in game design terminology, namely the MDA framework, analyzing the game in terms of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics.

Graphically, Blizzard is, in my opinion, beyond reproach. WoW is still among the best-looking MMOs on the market, and while aesthetics are subjective, if you accept that Wrath-era WoW was great, it's hard to argue that it's worse now. Any aesthetic quibbles I have with their art team's choices are, for lack of a better term, superficial. So I can't argue that WoW is aesthetically flawed. Mechanically is a bit more debatable, though it's certainly hard to argue that modern WoW compares unfavorably mechanically to, say, Vanilla or Burning Crusade. Certainly the game engine is more polished, and there are fewer bugs, fewer dead specs, fewer dumb rotations, etc. So really, the discussion of what's ailing WoW, to my mind, really occurs in the game's dynamics, the effect that the design choices made by the developers have altered the player behavior and the experience of the game.

Take the dungeon/raid queue mechanics. Certainly, there's nothing mechanically flawed with this system, and you should have no trouble pointing out the drawbacks of the system that preceded its introduction (basically, the manual matchmaking nightmare that vanilla WoW could devolve into). But the introduction of these systems had, IMO, devastating knock-on effects on the the direction the game wound up taking, and those decisions had repercussions that continued to carry us down the track to where we are today. Let me expound on one simple example:

Tanking: Thunderclap vs. Consecrate

In Vanilla and TBC, thunderclap had a target cap: You could affect a maximum of 4 targets in your AOE target rotation, and 3 of those targets would be chosen randomly. In early WoW, this limit had profound implications: You needed to make use of crowd control to ensure that your warrior tank could get enough aggro on his targets. A good tank would supplement his thunderclap damage by switching targets and hitting with sunder armor and heroic strike, to ensure that healers would get too much aggro, and would be able to quickly switch to a loose target and taunt->sunder->heroic to regain aggro should anything get loose on your DPS. By comparison, Paladin had a really easy aggro grab with Consecrate, supplemented by abilities which damaged enemies as they him, but had less straight-up durability when compared to the warrior. Each class provided different challenges to the player, and different rewards for playing well, and also the game mechanics encouraged liberal use of the crowd control abilities that were dispersed among the various classes and specs. Too many mobs could overwhelm a Paladin, while too many mobs might not kill a warrior, but he'd struggle mightily to cope with juggling aggro on too many targets.

The solution the Blizzard developers came up with was pretty unremarkable, and worked fairly well: The thunderclap target cap was removed, and it was given a DoT component to make it stickier, while the paladin's durability was bolstered, and tank threat was improved across the board. Now you had a situation in which you could fairly rely on a decently geared stranger to drop into your group, and be able to keep aggro while you DPSed. Problem solved, right? Well, yes... but you now had a different problem: Namely, once players began to get geared up, the improved aggro control and durability of tanks meant that crowd control became more or less unnecessary. Now you had the late-era Wrath problem where heroics had turned into a boring faceroll. To be sure, other design decisions also contributed to this problem, such as the liberal injection of non-raid content that the designers added to wrath, improving the median level of gear for nearly every player to the point where just about everyone could sleepwalk through, say, Azjol-Nerub.

Once the next expansion dropped, team 2 decided to swing the pendulum in the other direction: Ensure really challenging dungeon content, to make sure the game stayed engaging and challenging. Except that the player based, by this point, weaned on cakewalk dungeons for the past 2 years, immediately rebelled, and unsubscribed in droves, as many dungeons turned into aggravating repair parties where players would routinely drop queue, looking for greener pastures (or, more accurately, someone over-geared to carry them). Clearly, challenge wasn't what players wanted; at least, that's what they said when voting with their feet. So, the dungeon difficulty was patched, and more changes made to ensure parity between various players, and smooth operation of dungeon queues, so that no one would be confronted with an unpleasant experience. The loot systems were changed, talents scrubbed down to a tiny set of minimal options to ensure nobody could make too bad a build, itemization was broken up to reduce loot contention, dropping a large set of items for a wide variety of classes (hunters being the most affected).

Now the narrative I offer here suffers from the flaw of every narrative, that it's never that simple, and more than one motive is behind any decision. But I think I would find few arguments with the assertion that Blizzard's overriding motive has been to make WoW more approachable, less complicated, and more conducive to low-engagement play. Where I might find some argument, however, is my own opinion that those goals have made the game substantially less rewarding to play than the game it has replaced. Other commentators have likened the MMO experience to a mountain climb: Each step may not be profoundly challenging, but it's a pastime that rewards persistence and dedication, and I think it's an apt metaphor, or at least one that suits my point, which is that Blizzard has been steadfastly been re-grading the mountain for the past 12 years, to the point where it all feels like a kiddie slope.

Well, that turned into a bit of a meandering rant on my own. :P

[Kish]

That sounds substantially more accurate and less aggravating than I feared it might be. Thanks, Jackal.

[Winthur]

I tried playing on a TBC private server that shall not be named the other day, and I found the need to pull every single mob with 100% health and mana rather aggravating and the levelling pace to be too slow, though I do agree with the fact that the late Wrath approach had many obvious flaws. It seems like it's very difficult to reconcile "need to push for the end-game of every expansion ASAP because that's where the meat is" with "making levelling fun and challenging instead of a sleepwalk".

[Psyren]

On the subject of the leveling experience I don't have much to say, as I haven't leveled a new character start to finish since Cataclysm, multiple expansions ago at this point. It's possible that the most recent pre-BfA world-scaling changes have made that feel more challenging/rewarding and less faceroll/tedious, I wouldn't know. If I ever get compelled to reroll for WoW - which might be this expansion or the one after - I'll try it out then.


On the subject of tanking - I think you can make heroic tanking fun and interesting even without arbitrary limits like AoE caps, and in a way that's independent of the ease of LFG. Cataclysm pulled that off very well, and I'm convinced it did so as a direct refutation of the faceroll heroics that had typified Wrath. In TBC and Vanilla, managing aggro was part of the difficulty in the harder dungeons - but in Cataclysm, holding aggro was never the problem because any tank had no problem getting groups of any size to stick. Rather, it was powerful mobs in a pack that needed cc, being mindful of patrols when pulling larger packs, knowing how to LoS ranged mobs, knowing when to silence and interrupt casters, knowing when your group is both able and willing to complete optional objectives in a dungeon or not, etc. The idea is that difficulty should come from the dungeon mechanics, not from fighting with the mechanics of your own class. Now, in Cata, some of the dungeons were actually overtuned (Stonecore at launch for example, and a couple of fights in Grim Batol, and the sheer length of Deadmines was an issue) and these were seen as frustrating - but the majority were fine.

[The_Jackal]

On the subject of the leveling experience I don't have much to say, as I haven't leveled a new character start to finish since Cataclysm, multiple expansions ago at this point. It's possible that the most recent pre-BfA world-scaling changes have made that feel more challenging/rewarding and less faceroll/tedious, I wouldn't know. If I ever get compelled to reroll for WoW - which might be this expansion or the one after - I'll try it out then.

Hopefully Team 2's introduction of level scaling will address this issue somewhat, though I still think the mentor/sidekick mechanic is genius, from a community-building and content value standpoint.

The idea is that difficulty should come from the dungeon mechanics, not from fighting with the mechanics of your own class. Now, in Cata, some of the dungeons were actually overtuned (Stonecore at launch for example, and a couple of fights in Grim Batol, and the sheer length of Deadmines was an issue) and these were seen as frustrating - but the majority were fine.

I think 'Difficulty should come from dungeon rather than class mechanics' is a bit of a false dichotomy. Rotational complexity and interesting decisions are absolutely part and parcel of what make a class interesting to play, and why few mages, for example, would campaign for a return to Vanilla era frostbolt spam. I completely agree that the class mechanics should be fun and satisfying, and will concede that thunderclap as originally conceived may not have been the best-designed ability.

But my point is more about how the dedication to automating the match-making process and then relentlessly simplifying the game mechanics and dynamics to try and eradicate the resulting consequences of an anonymous queue has resulted in a game which has progressively had its aesthetics and challenge washed away. Signature abilities and class features have been pruned away, or watered down to the point where they no longer feel as impactful as they once did. To be fair, not every change was made exclusively to cater to the needs of the PvE queue systems, but I feel like the most consequential changes have been. Also, I do understand why many of the changes were made, because balancing options is hard, and when you've got 36 talent trees, each with 30+ talents, regression testing and iteration becomes progressively more insane, to say nothing of having problems just running out of ideas. But I really do mourn the loss of detail. That ability to tweak a couple talent points off a cookie cutter build, or to come up with something off the approved template, and make it work, really made the game more rewarding, and made me more invested in my character. Now they've got a system where you're more or less expected to swap talents between each fight. It's not longer a piece of your character's identity, it's just a strange new set of trousers, or stance you can swap when you're out of combat.

[Psyren]

A lot of what you're calling bugs, I call features. Being able to queue for group content and being able to swap your build between boss fights for optimal effectiveness are both very good things in my opinion. And we have more "signature abilities" (by spec now, not just by class) than ever before thanks to Legion.

[Spore]

All this sounds like Classic Servers will fail spectacularly.

[Kish]

This thread is probably the last place it makes sense to look for people who actually want old World of Warcraft back.

[The_Jackal]

This thread is probably the last place it makes sense to look for people who actually want old World of Warcraft back.

I don't think you're going to find many places where you have more people who are sufficiently invested in a 12+ year old game to consider going back to a time when it wasn't as much of an over-curated theme-park. Sporeegg is right, imo. Classic WoW will be a damp squib. At best it will be a 6 month affair while nostalgic players come back, take a spin around the old stomping grounds, then go back to playing what they're playing. But I also think it's fair to suggest that there's more to the nostalgia than just nostalgia, if you know what I'm saying.