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

[The_Jackal]

I look forward to seeing what the Classic server has to offer. They made some major mistakes IMO on designs after BC which I would like to see returned to the old system. Skill trees returning to the 3 tree mix and match is a big one for me. I liked the options it presented. I also want a return to the old Hunter Pet system where a hunter could go out and find rare pets and actually get bonuses for having them as well as having fairly unique pets from the casual hunters who didn't put time and effort into finding cool pets. So I guess we will see. At Blizzard speed we probably have another year to go anyway.

I agree that a return to proper talent trees would be welcome, but I'm not sure the hunter pet uniqueness is a winner from my perspective, as written. The problem is when everyone has to take the same pet. Now sure, I love getting unique and rare loots for my pet, but I want my choice of pet to be my choice, not the game designers'.

While i understand where you're coming from in terms of skill trees, and felt that they to some extent threw the baby out with the bathwater, I have to acknowledge that in practice it was solely a question if you knew what you were doing or not, since the number of usable builds within the skill trees was vastly lower than you'd think, and a lot of trap options that non-hardcore players wouldn't be able to spot unless they followed a guide (in which case the argument of 'choice' is moot)

I personally feel that they've gotten closer to a happy medium where it's simple, but you still have the ability to modify your build to taste, with Legion and BFA where the talent choices are real choices, but still mainly comes down to how you prefer to tailor your spec, rather than there being 1 true way and anyone who aren't following that are scrubs that doesn't deserve the game

Well, I'm compelled to disagree. It's incumbent on the designers to present a tree with interesting options, sure, but it's also incumbent on players to make intelligent decisions as to their talent choices. Dumbing the game down just to prevent players from doing a little thinking is a bad, bad design idea. For one thing, it's actually a false economy, because the game and its math is just as complex as it ever has been, and for another, it goes contrary to what games are all fundamentally about: Improvement and overcoming challenges. If you take away all the ways the game can thwart your ambitions, you won't feel any sense of accomplishment at having mastered it. The fact is, the scrubs are always going to be scrubs, regardless of how easy you make the game, so designing around them is an error.

[Corsair14]

Well part of the fun was trying to find the rare unique spawn out in the field and then successfully capturing it. I never saw a problem old school with other hunters having the same pet based on a minor improvement.

[The_Jackal]

Well part of the fun was trying to find the rare unique spawn out in the field and then successfully capturing it. I never saw a problem old school with other hunters having the same pet based on a minor improvement.

Yes, that still exists in the game: http://www.wow-petopia.com/browse/collector.html. However, I see no reason to bring back the era when 95% of hunters (at least the ones who cared about how math works) were using Broken Tooth.

[Psyren]

I agree that a return to proper talent trees would be welcome, but I'm not sure the hunter pet uniqueness is a winner from my perspective, as written. The problem is when everyone has to take the same pet. Now sure, I love getting unique and rare loots for my pet, but I want my choice of pet to be my choice, not the game designers'.

Agreed with this. Choice of pet should be mechanical at the broader archetype level (e.g. I want a tanky pet to do solo content with, a high damage one for group PvE content, and a tricky one for PvP), but at the individual animal level it should be cosmetic. You should be hunting and taming rarespawns because they look cool, not for some kind of numerical advantage that guarantees the rare will have a farming queue a mile long.

Well, I'm compelled to disagree. It's incumbent on the designers to present a tree with interesting options, sure, but it's also incumbent on players to make intelligent decisions as to their talent choices. Dumbing the game down just to prevent players from doing a little thinking is a bad, bad design idea. For one thing, it's actually a false economy, because the game and its math is just as complex as it ever has been, and for another, it goes contrary to what games are all fundamentally about: Improvement and overcoming challenges. If you take away all the ways the game can thwart your ambitions, you won't feel any sense of accomplishment at having mastered it. The fact is, the scrubs are always going to be scrubs, regardless of how easy you make the game, so designing around them is an error.

This however I disagree with. The old talent trees did not encourage thinking at all; they only encouraged netdecking the one best build that would maximize a spec's dps/hps/survivability, and there was very little variation of playstyle within a spec. If you were lucky, there'd be two builds for your spec based on whether you went 31/10 or 30/11 or whatever, but that would be it.

Current talents meanwhile, far from dumbing the game down, do actually involve thoughtful decisionmaking. They encourage both strategic playstyle choices (e.g. "Overall, do I prefer a more proactive playstyle with more cooldowns, where I have to know the fights better so I can use them properly? Or do I prefer a more reactive playstyle, one where I can quickly interrupt my rotation to take best advantage of whatever proc just fired?") as well as tactical playstyle choices (e.g. "the upcoming fight is AoE heavy, I need to tweak my talents more in that direction before we pull" or "the upcoming fight is mostly AoE-focused with some single-target, but my particular class' AoE toolkit isn't as useful against this boss as someone else's would be - I'll switch my talents up to be single-target and someone else can handle the AoE." In other words, real choices, not "I'll google this one setup and use it for the entire dungeon/raid/battleground."

[The_Jackal]

Agreed with this. Choice of pet should be mechanical at the broader archetype level (e.g. I want a tanky pet to do solo content with, a high damage one for group PvE content, and a tricky one for PvP), but at the individual animal level it should be cosmetic. You should be hunting and taming rarespawns because they look cool, not for some kind of numerical advantage that guarantees the rare will have a farming queue a mile long.

Agreed. The one change I would advocate for is to lose the 'Exotic pet' designation, so that you're not locked into a) taking an exotic pet if you prefer the aesthetics of a classic one as BM, and b) not forbidden from taming a T-Rex if you're a Marksman or Survival Hunter. I'm a huge fan of offering more customization to the player.

This however I disagree with. The old talent trees did not encourage thinking at all; they only encouraged netdecking the one best build that would maximize a spec's dps/hps/survivability, and there was very little variation of playstyle within a spec. If you were lucky, there'd be two builds for your spec based on whether you went 31/10 or 30/11 or whatever, but that would be it.

Sure, but the new talent trees still haven't put the online third-party guide sites out of business, rather the reverse, they're just as, if not more mandatory than ever. The new system is no better than the old, in terms of being transparent in its effects on your build's power, and most importantly to me, encourage the adoption of 'talents as gear', where players routinely swap out talents to optimize for each fight. This baldly does not comport with the notion that your talents are a customization of your character. They're just a different set of pants, or more specifically, a set of dip-switches you reconfigure on your internal system board between encounters.

Current talents meanwhile, far from dumbing the game down, do actually involve thoughtful decisionmaking. They encourage both strategic playstyle choices (e.g. "Overall, do I prefer a more proactive playstyle with more cooldowns, where I have to know the fights better so I can use them properly? Or do I prefer a more reactive playstyle, one where I can quickly interrupt my rotation to take best advantage of whatever proc just fired?") as well as tactical playstyle choices (e.g. "the upcoming fight is AoE heavy, I need to tweak my talents more in that direction before we pull" or "the upcoming fight is mostly AoE-focused with some single-target, but my particular class' AoE toolkit isn't as useful against this boss as someone else's would be - I'll switch my talents up to be single-target and someone else can handle the AoE." In other words, real choices, not "I'll google this one setup and use it for the entire dungeon/raid/battleground."

I think I would wildly prefer a 'Look it up once, pick my talents to suit my playstyle and priorities, and then leave it alone until the next balance pass', to be frank. It's the 'respect between pulls' aspect that I find most intrusive and annoying about the current paradigm, because the last thing I want to do is have to juggle between learning three or four different rotations and button layouts, because I'm constantly swapping in different clicky talents with different cooldowns and mechanics. Talents should be a reflection of who your character is, not a bank of settings to customize every 10 minutes.

And finally, let's not pretend that the talents were changed for any real reason save to reduce the workload of designing and balancing talents for the developers, which, tragically, have not actually resulted in actual improved balance between classes or specs. You still have arcane mages lagging far behind Frost Mages, even when Frost is arguably the 'PvP' spec for the class.

That's why I prefer the tree system: You get to make more choices, and you can make more nuanced choices, and those choices actually have a force and effect. Heck, I'd go even further and give only 3 talent respec's a week, per specialization, per character, if I had my way. And if your encounter design really warrants giving players ways to improve their AoE or single-target performance between fights, put those modifiers on gear, like relics on Legendary weapons. At least then it would make sense.

[Resileaf]

In the end, they're both fake costumizing options. At least the current tree gives obvious changes to your gameplay and how your abilities work.

The old talent tree was just increasing a percentage on something, which the artifacts do right now, and Azerite will do in BfA. Returning to the old talent tree will be redundant.

[The_Jackal]

In the end, they're both fake costumizing options. At least the current tree gives obvious changes to your gameplay and how your abilities work.

Except that the math is just as uncertain and inscrutable now as it ever was. Honestly, getting 10% more to total damage, or 15% more to a main stat is way easier to understand and explain than whether Ray of Frost or Lonely Winter gives you more DPS.

The old talent tree was just increasing a percentage on something, which the artifacts do right now, and Azerite will do in BfA. Returning to the old talent tree will be redundant.

Right, so the complexity level is the same, the degree to which you'll still need to refer to 'net decking' your build will be as large if not larger, so what precisely is the merit of the paradigm where we've done nothing but shuffled the 'change how your build works' off of the talent tree into your pants? This isn't innovation or streamlining, it's just change for change's sake. In point of fact, we'd be just as well off if they'd simply reduced every item to 'item level', and poured all the choices about how your build worked into your talent tree, so you wouldn't have to cope with clunky resource mechanics and rotations until you hit whatever magic threshold the designers baked into your itemization to get the thing to work properly. You know, crit floors, crit-ceilings, haste breakpoints, etc.

What Artifact Power is doing in Legion, and what Azerite Bucks will do in BFA is the same thing that Paragon points do in Diablo 3: Offering long-term progression. And I'm fine with that, but I see no compelling reason that long-term progression should come at the expense of my character's customization choices.

[Psyren]

Sure, but the new talent trees still haven't put the online third-party guide sites out of business, rather the reverse, they're just as, if not more mandatory than ever. The new system is no better than the old, in terms of being transparent in its effects on your build's power, and most importantly to me, encourage the adoption of 'talents as gear', where players routinely swap out talents to optimize for each fight. This baldly does not comport with the notion that your talents are a customization of your character. They're just a different set of pants, or more specifically, a set of dip-switches you reconfigure on your internal system board between encounters.

Nothing would put those sites out of business, and that's okay. But when you actually go to those sites now, you see a page that looks more like this:

Spoiler

Show

In other words, one with actual choices and situational analysis on it, rather than "this single build for your spec is objectively better than all the others if you PvE, and this other one if you PvP. Don't do anything else." What's in the spoiler is what a talent spec should be, in my not-so-humble opinion.

[Spore]

Personally I have always found sites like Icy Veins a decent primer for beginners. But the actual choices will be different ones.

1) If you want to raid hardcore or play mythic plus, you have several 'builds' that are set in stone barring some mobility/CC tools depending on the dungeon or fight.

2) For a vast majority of players - me included - ease of use is far more important than a marginal DPS increase with an unproportional increase in effort.

Take a Brewmaster Monk for example. On Lv 100, it has the feat Blackout Combo which powers up your main spells depending on which rotation you use at which specific time. Using this correctly (with the right haste level) and getting into a rhythm tends to give the perfect amount of damage reduction that the fight currently needs. While being the offtank you can even optimize for tank DPS.

For a beginner however, or even maybe a tank that is raid leading on the side coordinating ALL players, High Tolerance might just be better. Damage spikes might be a bit higher with it, and it might lead to phases where the healers are out of things to do (which is a bad thing since small heals spread over a long time is better than short burst windows from a healer perspective). But for the overall raid it is better since it does require much less attention. (If you are a pro, you can manage this both).

[Resileaf]

My current goal in WoW: Acquire every challenge appearance. I only have three classes left to do the mage tower with. Druid, death knight and demon hunter. I'm almost able to do it with druid, but I want to make sure I have the legendary to cheese the tank challenge.

Because f*** Kruul and the designer who made him.

[The_Jackal]

Nothing would put those sites out of business, and that's okay. But when you actually go to those sites now, you see a page that looks more like this:

Spoiler

Show

In other words, one with actual choices and situational analysis on it, rather than "this single build for your spec is objectively better than all the others if you PvE, and this other one if you PvP. Don't do anything else." What's in the spoiler is what a talent spec should be, in my not-so-humble opinion.

But they're *not* choices, or at least, not choices that matter, and certainly no better than the more complex, nuanced system they replaced. Let's examine, for the sake of simplicity, the Frost Mage talents, just by way of example. I'm taking the recommendations straight out of Icy Veins, by the way, not my own editorializing.

Tier 1: Lonely Winter is the go-to option for all situations.
Tier 2: Shimmer for fights with 'bursty' movement, Ice Floes for fights with more regular movement.
Tier 3: Incanter's Flow is the best talent in virtually all situations.
Tier 4: Splitting Ice is the best option for either end tier talent and should be used in virtually all end game environments.
Tier 5: None of these talents have use for raiding currently.
Tier 6: Unstable Magic is the best option on single target encounters. Arctic Gale is the best choice for 2+ targets.
Tier 7: Thermal Void is our default choice for virtually all situations in raids.

Those aren't so much choices as settings, and almost all of them are non-choices. There's a indisputably superior pick in most tiers, and the other tiers have picks which are determined the encounter mechanics. Now I should point out that I don't use the Icy Veins cookie cutter build, no more than I precisely followed cookie-cutter tree builds back in pre-MoP days. And for my part, I would much rather my talents return to being a mechanism for expressing player customization, and have an actual consequence of choosing one over another.

Now sure, some of the talents in a more complicated tree are going to be less 'interesting', like 3% crit chance to frost spells. But on the whole, Wrath or Cata's tree system offers more opportunities to tweak a build and make it your own. Better yet, the smaller number of 'keystone' talents, ie: powerful activated abilities which revolutionize your build, mean that more functionality can be baseline to the class, and the consequences of picking some 'off-meta' picks to suit your playstyle and priorities are less onerous. For example, I, personally, love Ice Nova. I play with Ice Nova, and pay a non-trivial tax on my DPS on cleave fights to do so. But a tree system might afford me to get both Ice Nova and Splitting Ice, and trade off some other points in a portion of the tree I'm not as worried about. But the current system will never afford that kind of freedom. You can't pack points into a tier crowded with fun, strong, or useful talents. They're just dip-switches.

[Spore]

Now sure, some of the talents in a more complicated tree are going to be less 'interesting', like 3% crit chance to frost spells. But on the whole, Wrath or Cata's tree system offers more opportunities to tweak a build and make it your own.

I've been thinking and with the demon hunter there ARE several builds one can take. So it is really more of a mage problem than a design problem imho.

You need synergistic talents (such as Eye Beam resetting when entering Metamorphosis, Eye Beam TRIGGERING a short Metamorphosis, and Eye Beam shortening the cooldown on Metamorphosis), not talents with isolated effects (such as mage).

Mage has almost exclusive talents that don't interact. How would it be if Unstable Magic would randomly proc a Blizzard close to your character's main target on Frost Bolt casts? Or if Blizzard hits would push up your Incanter's Flow level? Or if Splitting Ice procs would reduce the cast time of Blizzard and/or reduce the CD on Frozen Orb?

[The_Jackal]

I've been thinking and with the demon hunter there ARE several builds one can take. So it is really more of a mage problem than a design problem imho.

You need synergistic talents (such as Eye Beam resetting when entering Metamorphosis, Eye Beam TRIGGERING a short Metamorphosis, and Eye Beam shortening the cooldown on Metamorphosis), not talents with isolated effects (such as mage).

Mage has almost exclusive talents that don't interact. How would it be if Unstable Magic would randomly proc a Blizzard close to your character's main target on Frost Bolt casts? Or if Blizzard hits would push up your Incanter's Flow level? Or if Splitting Ice procs would reduce the cast time of Blizzard and/or reduce the CD on Frozen Orb?

Okay, how about Arms Warrior (another class I play regularly):

Tier 1: Dauntless is the clear choice and should be taken in nearly all situations.
Tier 2: Double Time is the go to choice in the tier when there is no extra crowd control needed, as it is a significant increase to mobility.
Tier 3: Depends on itemization. Tier 21 set, use Trauma, Tier 20, use Rend.
Tier 4: Bounding Stride for mobility, Defensive stance for survival cooldown in less mobile fights.
Tier 5: Fervor of Battle if Tier 21 set, otherwise use Titanic Might.
Tier 6: In for the Kill is the best choice in this tier.
Tier 7: Another 'depends on set bonus' pick.

I actually have less problem with a talent pick that offers some synergy with itemization, but I think it's still a matter of 'if you know what's good for you, consult a spreadsheet'.

[Kish]

Demon Hunter has only two specs.

Reason given: It couldn't have a ranged spec because of lore.

Somehow, not having a ranged spec didn't restrict warriors, death knights, or rogues (who don't even have a tank spec) to two specs (or to one for rogues).

I wouldn't want to make an argument for significant amounts of character customizability in modern WoW that used demon hunters as its example, m'self.

[Psyren]

But they're *not* choices, or at least, not choices that matter, and certainly no better than the more complex, nuanced system they replaced. Let's examine, for the sake of simplicity, the Frost Mage talents, just by way of example. I'm taking the recommendations straight out of Icy Veins, by the way, not my own editorializing.

Tier 1: Lonely Winter is the go-to option for all situations.
Tier 2: Shimmer for fights with 'bursty' movement, Ice Floes for fights with more regular movement.
Tier 3: Incanter's Flow is the best talent in virtually all situations.
Tier 4: Splitting Ice is the best option for either end tier talent and should be used in virtually all end game environments.
Tier 5: None of these talents have use for raiding currently.
Tier 6: Unstable Magic is the best option on single target encounters. Arctic Gale is the best choice for 2+ targets.
Tier 7: Thermal Void is our default choice for virtually all situations in raids.

For the few talents that are just better at a given tier, that just comes down to numbers - numbers can be tweaked. What cannot be tweaked are playstyle differences, which the tired and obsolete single-build talent system doesn't give you.

For example, Rune of Power can actually provide superior throughput to Incanters Flow (which the site itself tells you) provided you're good with your placement and the fight doesn't require much movement. Skill ceiling. Choice.

For others, they apply heavier weighting to options that don't change your playstyle, not because they are objectively better. This is the case for Thermal Void, which actually comes behind Glacial Spike in sims.

Lastly, for the encounter-dependent ones, these often come down to playstyle too. Or as the site itself puts it: "Ultimately the choice is encounter dependent and also comes down to the preference and comfort level of the player with each talent."

Which, again, is what talents are meant to do - come down to preference and situation. Anything else is a boring, linear track and they might as well not even ask you what you want to pick.

Demon Hunter has only two specs.

Reason given: It couldn't have a ranged spec because of lore.

Somehow, not having a ranged spec didn't restrict warriors, death knights, or rogues (who don't even have a tank spec) to two specs (or to one for rogues).

I wouldn't want to make an argument for significant amounts of character customizability in modern WoW that used demon hunters as its example, m'self.

Honestly, I don't blame them for doing this. Not every class needs 3 specs. Look at how they've been struggling to make Survival be somehow different than "bow guy with beast" and "beast guy with bow," to the point that their best idea so far has been "hey, what if we ditch the bow but also they're not a rogue?" And speaking of rogue, the best we got there is "the super sneaky one should do heavy burst damage, while the assassin should be the one that kills slowly, and also there's a fake warrior with RNG mechanics." To say nothing of the near-constant rollercoaster that is tuning Discipline.

[Kish]

Look at how they've been struggling to make Survival be somehow different than "bow guy with beast" and "beast guy with bow," to the point that their best idea so far has been "hey, what if we ditch the bow but also they're not a rogue?"

I fear we, once again, critically disagree on whether you just said what amounts to "Look at how hard differentiating specs is" or "Look at how utterly devoid of creativity the current WoW development team is and how cookie-cutter every spec now is."

As I implied before, but more explicitly, as of last I played, I didn't see a meaningful difference between different specs of different classes as long as their role was the same. A warlock is a purple-magic mage. A hunter is a bow-wielding mage. An arms warrior is a rogue who uses a single two-handed weapon. Etc. Four character types: Ranged damage, melee damage, tanking, healing. You might as well choose one of those roles, then roll a die to determine which specific class and spec you go with. It gets more like that with every major patch (which is indeed meant to imply that if the patches went backward it would steadily become less like that and wind up very unlike that).

Again:

Your memories of pre-wotl WoW are completely unlike mine. People experimented with talent trees a lot. Taking the top-tier talent in any of them was optional; for every tree there were a lot of people who did, and for nearly every tree there were a lot of people who didn't. Only the tiny minority (one of the developers estimated 2% in an interview) of players who viewed the game as All About getting to the end of Naxxramas or Sunwell Plateau cared about guides that said "This talent gets you two percent more dee pee ess than that one, so that one is an abomination unto our (web)site!" 'Course, that group also made it clear that they thought they were the only people actually playing the game, and somewhere between wotl and Cataclysm Blizzard started a push to turn that into reality for some reason I will never understand.

I dunno if you were always one of the tiny minority of endgame raiders, or if you're looking at the past with whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses would be, but...no, the people who followed those talent guides slavishly used to be seen as all kinds of weird by the vast majority of the playerbase. If you told the average Survival 30/Beast Mastery 21 hunter, circa BC, "You'd have higher damage if you were all one thing and still more if that thing was Marksmanship," their reaction would be, "Who is this person who thinks I want his opinion on how I play?"

[Psyren]

You're right about one thing Kish - we critically disagree.

Enjoy your classic servers whenever they drop, I guess.

[Spore]

Only having two specs is enitirely okay for Demon Hunters in my books.

[Sian]

On the other hand, look at how long it took Blizzard to split Feral and Guardian, which for the longest time was part of the same talent tree

[Spore]

On the other hand, look at how long it took Blizzard to split Feral and Guardian, which for the longest time was part of the same talent tree

Yeah, but while Feral is interesting, Guardian is likely the blandest spec out there. I LOVE the idea of becoming a hulking bear to protect my friends but the gameplay is just...so....boring...

[Resileaf]

Yeah, but while Feral is interesting, Guardian is likely the blandest spec out there. I LOVE the idea of becoming a hulking bear to protect my friends but the gameplay is just...so....boring...

Swipe
Swipe
Swipe
Ironfur
Swipe
Swipe
Ironfur

And so on.

[Sinewmire]

I think I mostly prefer the new Talent system, as a few impactful choices seems better than several minor tweaks.

That said, I do miss the customisation available in the old system... like when in Arena I found a holy/prot build for my character that rendered me nigh unkillable, and made me a pretty decent healer for whoever I was teamed up with.

I guess it really is a matter of preference.

[Kish]

You're right about one thing Kish - we critically disagree.

Enjoy your classic servers whenever they drop, I guess.

Oh, I hope to. I'd say "Enjoy modern WoW," but you protested when I read your defenses of it as indicating that you like it, so...enjoy your sense that the game you don't like is still somehow objectively superior to its earlier forms, I guess.

[Psyren]

Oh, I hope to. I'd say "Enjoy modern WoW," but you protested when I read your defenses of it as indicating that you like it, so...enjoy your sense that the game you don't like is still somehow objectively superior to its earlier forms, I guess.

Eh, I'm here for the same reason you are - not enjoying the game in it's current form, discussing the reasons why, hoping they'll wise up and release something more to my tastes. That doesn't mean I can't celebrate the things they got right (like ripping out the obsolete talent trees like so many rotting floorboards.)

[Resileaf]

Funny. I'm here for entirely different reasons. I (mostly) enjoy the gameplay and company I have... But I have grown to absolutely despise the story and where it's been going.

[Kish]

Now I'm curious about something.

Hands up, anyone who would say "I like modern WoW" without any caveats. (Should this be unclear: Psyren doesn't qualify, Resileaf doesn't qualify, and I sure as death don't qualify.)

[The_Jackal]

Now I'm curious about something.

Hands up, anyone who would say "I like modern WoW" without any caveats. (Should this be unclear: Psyren doesn't qualify, Resileaf doesn't qualify, and I sure as death don't qualify.)

I'd have to say that modern WoW, while I don't prefer it to the Vanilla through Wrath era, or even Mists, for that matter, is still the best MMO I've tried on the market, on the whole. It's still a well-executed game, I just bemoan the generalization, simplification, and feature creep that's gradually taken over the game. I'd like to see them launch WoW 2.0, or even better, a new MMO property.

But I'd have to say I prefer it to Wildstar. I prefer it to Star Trek Online. I prefer it to SW:TOR. I can't say I've tried Guild Wars 2 or FFXIV or Eve Online, but those games never had any aesthetics which grabbed me to begin with. So it has the benefit of being a high-production value, high quality MMO with an aesthetic that I still find appealing. Final Fantasy looks like the characters fell out of Japanese YA manga, GW2 couldn't look more bland and uninspired if they hired a team of experts from Initech to replace their art department.

So... yeah, I guess I'm not a "hands up". Shrug.

I'm not sure it's a useful question to ask, though. I'm sure you could ask a thousand WoW fans what needs to change about the game to make it better, and you might get a thousand different answers.

[Kish]

You ask the questions you want to know the answers to, and I'll ask mine.

[Sian]

You ask the questions you want to know the answers to, and I'll ask mine.

I want to know what happens inside a black hole ... doesn't make it certain that I'm going to like the answer (or that the answer even is something I consider a answer)

[sonofzeal]

I'm introducing my nephew to WoW.

He's pretty young, doesn't have experience in MMOs or even Action RPGs before, but he really seems to like it. So far he's gravitating to Hunters and Warlocks as his preferred classes (I've got a Mage, Hunter, Druid, and Monk, and my wife has a Rogue), but having not played regularly myself since before Warlords, there's a lot that's different.

What's the consensus on class/spec balance these days? Especially at lower levels, are there any that lag behind or are noticably OP? What are the biggest changes to watch out for if we're not playing end-game content?