LFR though? I always found it petty that people complain about casuals getting at least some form of gear (and quests!) done.
It's not at all about what other people have equipped. People make that argument a lot (often as a strawman) as if it's the only reason for people to care about lower raid difficulties existing; it's not.
For me the main downside to having 4+ difficulties with strong rewards on each of them is the mindset that all content should be done on day 1 on an ezmode difficulty and then repeated on less-ez and then normal and then hard mode. In Classic-WOTLK you never walked through a brand new raid in 60-90 minutes, one shotting all of the bosses without knowing half of the stuff that they did and skipping over the raid dialogue. I'm sad that it's become the standard today for experiencing new content.
It's the game's fault for incentivizing gameplay that isn't fun (content below their target difficulty being more rewarding than content of their target difficulty, in this case), that's an enormous and key part of game design
LFR though? I always found it petty that people complain about casuals getting at least some form of gear (and quests!) done.
It's not at all about what other people have equipped. People make that argument a lot (often as a strawman) as if it's the only reason for people to care about lower raid difficulties existing; it's not.
For me the main downside to having 4+ difficulties with strong rewards on each of them is the mindset that all content should be done on day 1 on an ezmode difficulty and then repeated on less-ez and then normal and then hard mode. In Classic-WOTLK you never walked through a brand new raid in 60-90 minutes, one shotting all of the bosses without knowing half of the stuff that they did and skipping over the raid dialogue. I'm sad that it's become the standard today for experiencing new content.
I'd remove WoTLK from that list because thats when they started doing the shenanigans with the easy modes and stuff. God bless, Naxx was so disappointing.
I wouldn't mind the difficulty if they made it specifically necessary to do LFR. in WoD you were incentized to do LFR for Valor Points towards the end, and in Legion for the chance at leggos + tier set bonuses.
I may like BFA in that regard, since there's no tier set bonuses, my goal is never set foot in LFR.
On September 27 2018 03:05 Cyro wrote: Cool, they keep raising the price though to the point where it's way out of my range for a year that won't have much WoW or SC2 content - it's basically expansion price. I paid £5 less for TBC on release day.
I'l have a bit of fun watching some streams when the gates open
They've only raised the price once. In 2008, it was $40.
On September 27 2018 03:55 Gorsameth wrote: People are into a rose tinted vision from the past. Or never even played the original in the first place.
The group of people that actually wants what Vanilla WoW is, is tiny and they wont play it for the years that it would take for it to be actually worth it for Blizzard.
Na, I think there is a rose tinted glasses aspect to it, but a lot of people liked the feel of the world + community in Vanilla.
Meanwhile, people on retail bitch about having to walk 2 feet to queue for Isle expeditions.
On September 27 2018 03:45 m4ini wrote: WoW today, at least subjectively, is a much better game than it was when it released. I heard people argue that the talent trees/system were so much better and more diverse, but really, they were not. It basically boiled down to people chosing 2% crit and 3% haste over 4% haste and 1% crit, something like that. The main points of the build were always the same, just a little bit of runspeed or secondary stats varied - you were much, much more locked in than you're today..
Yea I have a hard time understanding why people would like the old Talent Trees, rather than the current talent choices. Also you were locked into your talents and had to pay if you wanted to play a different spec (or swap a single talent for a specific fight, which is cool design imo). Overall I remember the talent trees just being incredibly cookie cutter and uninteresting. I never had a conversation with someone about "what talent is better for this" it was always "look up the best build"
The one cool thing I can think of about the old Trees was that you could sorta dual-spec. As in you could create a build that would allow you to do ok DPS, but give you some flexibility to tank/heal. This is coming from my recollection of like Wrath times though as...
I never actually played in Vanilla. I may have tried the game a bit but never got into it, never hit max level and really got into the content until Wrath. So in that regard I would probably give a Vanilla server a try, but I can't imagine I would stick with it for long. Still, a few of my RL friends seem pretty hyped for a Vanilla server so there could be a chance that would drag me into it a bit more.
Yeah I did a sort of hybrid spec in Vanilla when playing a Warlock in battlegrounds. There were definitely some significant choices to make beyond what m4ini describes. I'm looking at a talent calculator now and remembering some of the choices. Maybe in PvE the optimal builds were figured out but for PvP I think people definitely had some stylistic choices to make.
I actually thought it was pretty good gameplay but I can't speak for other classes and for PvE. However I would not want to level again. But if someone gave me a lvl 60 warlock I think I would enjoy grinding some battlegrounds and getting geared up.
I had a lot of fun with subspecs in that era; stuff like pompyro or elemental mage. It was nice for play that wasn't centered around competition. I liked it much more than the whole "You're a fire mage, you don't get frost nova, evocation, ice barrier and all that stuff any more because they're not FIRE" approach.
On September 27 2018 03:55 Gorsameth wrote: People are into a rose tinted vision from the past. Or never even played the original in the first place.
The group of people that actually wants what Vanilla WoW is, is tiny and they wont play it for the years that it would take for it to be actually worth it for Blizzard.
On September 27 2018 08:39 Cyro wrote: I had a lot of fun with subspecs in that era; stuff like pompyro or elemental mage. It was nice for play that wasn't centered around competition. I liked it much more than the whole "You're a fire mage, you don't get frost nova, evocation, ice barrier and all that stuff any more because they're not FIRE" approach.
I remember doing a frost/fire mage hybrid in BGs during TBC. No elemental pet, lots of rank 1 frostbolts for quick snares, lots of instant-cast abilities. It was awesome.
On September 27 2018 03:55 Gorsameth wrote: People are into a rose tinted vision from the past. Or never even played the original in the first place.
The group of people that actually wants what Vanilla WoW is, is tiny and they wont play it for the years that it would take for it to be actually worth it for Blizzard.
Blizz must have done some kind of analysis before making the decision that showed them it would be worth it.
I think they are counting on the private-server crowd, and I think they are planning on giving it a cheap-ish price, kind of like BW Remastered, and betting that tons of people will buy it. Even if they don't play it for long, Blizz gets a profit.
I'm very excited for classic. I played it back when it was current and i want to play it again. Also no rose tinted glasses here, i remember all the shit that sucks about vanilla wow, plenty of really idiotic things. The rest makes up for it to me however.
If it wasn't for the fact that i hate the idea of being able to lose all progress from one day to another based on drama or cease and desist stuff i'd be playing a vanilla private server at the moment over BFA.
On September 27 2018 03:45 m4ini wrote: WoW today, at least subjectively, is a much better game than it was when it released. I heard people argue that the talent trees/system were so much better and more diverse, but really, they were not. It basically boiled down to people chosing 2% crit and 3% haste over 4% haste and 1% crit, something like that. The main points of the build were always the same, just a little bit of runspeed or secondary stats varied - you were much, much more locked in than you're today..
Yea I have a hard time understanding why people would like the old Talent Trees, rather than the current talent choices. Also you were locked into your talents and had to pay if you wanted to play a different spec (or swap a single talent for a specific fight, which is cool design imo). Overall I remember the talent trees just being incredibly cookie cutter and uninteresting. I never had a conversation with someone about "what talent is better for this" it was always "look up the best build"
The one cool thing I can think of about the old Trees was that you could sorta dual-spec. As in you could create a build that would allow you to do ok DPS, but give you some flexibility to tank/heal. This is coming from my recollection of like Wrath times though as...
I never actually played in Vanilla. I may have tried the game a bit but never got into it, never hit max level and really got into the content until Wrath. So in that regard I would probably give a Vanilla server a try, but I can't imagine I would stick with it for long. Still, a few of my RL friends seem pretty hyped for a Vanilla server so there could be a chance that would drag me into it a bit more.
Yeah I did a sort of hybrid spec in Vanilla when playing a Warlock in battlegrounds. There were definitely some significant choices to make beyond what m4ini describes. I'm looking at a talent calculator now and remembering some of the choices. Maybe in PvE the optimal builds were figured out but for PvP I think people definitely had some stylistic choices to make.
I actually thought it was pretty good gameplay but I can't speak for other classes and for PvE. However I would not want to level again. But if someone gave me a lvl 60 warlock I think I would enjoy grinding some battlegrounds and getting geared up.
I dont know what Maini is talking about either the choices were alot more varied but the knowledge wasnt as robust either.
Even for PVE you didnt reallyyy have resources to tell you what to do so you were sitting on EJ all day talking to people, and then people on EJ started running real number crunching as they tiers went through and cookie cutter builds started coming along.
I dont know, I loved my time playing Vanilla - Cat. I think my played on all chars was probably like 1.5 years out of that period. And so much of it very long raid hours. But I dont want to go back to it.. really. I might play it to play with some friends. But thats for the friends, not because Im particularly excited about the game. I have way too many people I know getting so hype and beyond the nostalgia value I just dont get it. I generally prefer where the game is at right now.
On September 27 2018 12:22 Unleashing wrote: I'm very excited for classic. I played it back when it was current and i want to play it again. Also no rose tinted glasses here, i remember all the shit that sucks about vanilla wow, plenty of really idiotic things. The rest makes up for it to me however.
If it wasn't for the fact that i hate the idea of being able to lose all progress from one day to another based on drama or cease and desist stuff i'd be playing a vanilla private server at the moment over BFA.
Like what ? Im not being sarcastic but since there is a "rest" which seems rather nebulous to me at the moment so I am genuinely curious.
On September 27 2018 03:55 Gorsameth wrote: People are into a rose tinted vision from the past. Or never even played the original in the first place.
The group of people that actually wants what Vanilla WoW is, is tiny and they wont play it for the years that it would take for it to be actually worth it for Blizzard.
I am firmly in the camp of those who want classic WoW (ideally, TBC, but that's another story).
And that despite the fact that I have a level 60 Priest on a private server with half the raid content clear in about two years. So I know exactly what I'm getting into.
The game was far from perfect, but it was a far cry better than the streamlined arcade bullshit it is now.
It was very much a different game. I'd say an objectively worse one overall - especially Vanilla and to some extent TBC - but different for sure. Modern WoW isn't a straight upgrade from older WoW, it's made a lot of design tradeoffs that have positives and negatives while obsoleting all of the older content.
Classic-TBC-WOTLK drove subscriber growth from zero to 12 million and they still have much of their value even though standards have moved on.
Content flow isn't much of an issue because Ulduar and ICC have already been built, that kind of stuff can be launched whenever if there's an old expansion setup available to play. All of the art assets, music, voicelines are there. If the infrastructure is set up, that kind of content can be ran and maintained without requiring attention from the enormous WoW content production machine. It'd need programmers, server engineers and such but it would take a lot less work to run a WOTLK server using all of this stuff that you already built 10 years ago than it would take to develop and run an expansion from scratch.
We could go back and raid Ulduar on patch 8.1, sure, but it would be a fucking mess - all of that stuff is pretty much deleted from the game. It's not maintained, the experience can't be reproduced in any meaningful way because of major changes to the core game. Raiding it with patch 3.2 design+tuning, classes and tier 8-9 gear would be awesome!
I'd even be in favor of some balancing passes, particularly light stuff like "all frost DK damage reduced by 7%" or whatever which does not noticeably change the gameplay of the spec. That stuff would improve the game much more than it hurt it IMO! If you're not looking at a damage meter then you most likely wouldn't notice the difference but it means the world for diversity and being able to play specs that you enjoy without crippling a raid group because you're not stacking the poorly balanced FOTM's.
I'd even be in favor of some balancing passes, particularly light stuff like "all frost DK damage reduced by 7%" or whatever which does not noticeably change the gameplay of the spec. That stuff would improve the game much more than it hurt it IMO! If you're not looking at a damage meter then you most likely wouldn't notice the difference but it means the world for diversity and being able to play specs that you enjoy without crippling a raid group because you're not stacking the poorly balanced FOTM's.
That would be so simple. Give every DPS spec a simple percentage based modifier that you can tune at will.
Instead of nerfing fun spell interactions to the fucking ground...
And regarding the effort, my TBC hunter is on a perfectly scripted 2.4.3 realm (sans Sunwell), and a bunch of completely clueless hobby developers maintain it without any compensation.
I doubt it'd take more than a couple of experienced engineers to keep a version of TBC around.
That would be so simple. Give every DPS spec a simple percentage based modifier that you can tune at will.
They have that on the current version of the game, but they often also make other changes like buffing one ability relative to another in the interest of improving gameplay.
To keep gameplay the same i'd be happy to pass over those, simple percentage based changes to the entire spec can even out most of the balance problems where one class is just way better than another for no particular reason.
The recent blue post regarding azerite gear is super weird. It is blatantly condescending. I am honestly surprised they let that be posted. It reflects extremely poorly on Blizzard.
Gotta agree there. I'm kinda sad that the general community and blizzard is 6 months late on a lot of this stuff, it was all said before and i feel that the game would be far better if it had half a year's worth of design improvement/iteration on the core systems and classes.
I mentioned the imbalance between traits before, but just to expand on that: that's why we've focused so much effort into tuning Azerite traits over the past few weeks.
Glad that they're putting effort in here but at the same time, the tuning adjustments that we got are what i'd consider appropriate for a post-beta patch. Havoc at the moment is still in a sort of 0.9 state, we're waiting on 8.1 / 8.1.5 polish on basic stuff like not having stats worth 1.5x less than Versatility because they have not yet been tuned at all for the major Legion to BFA reworks.
I'm glad that the traits are working and i've been having a lot of fun with some of the previously unusable ones today, although i've gotta make it clear that this is a basic level of polish that i expect to be shipped with the game and not 2 months later. It's harder to be celebratory about the game being unfucked, especially when it's only half unfucked so far. The general attitude of the community towards the game is down for some fairly good reasons and it's just depressing to see it every day
Like fuck, i just tabbed over to reddit and read this, that the weekly m+ cache was just reworked to include loot that doesn't belong to your selected loot spec:
On September 27 2018 23:31 Mohdoo wrote: The recent blue post regarding azerite gear is super weird. It is blatantly condescending. I am honestly surprised they let that be posted. It reflects extremely poorly on Blizzard.
It can, but I can sympathize with them. No matter how frustrated you are saying things like
"340 traits are out-performing 385 traits. Significantly. This is just embarrassing, and should not be the case. How did this sort of imbalance between traits make it to live"
is never going to go down well with someone you are trying to get to listen to you.
Even when The points ARE valid when the tone is sardonic everyone has a limit to their patience on how much they can politely reply to until some of the bristles they are feeling dont also come across.
You shouldnt expect a higher standard for the person responding to you. Anyone providing a service will always to to stay higher, but you shouldnt be too perturbed if they end up coming closer to the standard you are setting in framing your issues.
Basically dont ask your questions like an asshole. And literally every question makes me think this guy is just an overentitled asshole. Even if he isnt.
The game is clearly unpolished and I dont know what level of corporate decision making made them rush it but yes there are significantly more hiccups here then there were. I dont like it and it annoys me here and there but I am ok with it, I am not pushing the cutting edge of content or competing with anyone so it really doesnt bother me.
None of the issues are stopping me from doing the things I want to do (except maybe the charity loots thing), but Im ahead of the curve on that and the playerbase has normalized taking those into account already for the most part.
On September 27 2018 23:31 Mohdoo wrote: The recent blue post regarding azerite gear is super weird. It is blatantly condescending. I am honestly surprised they let that be posted. It reflects extremely poorly on Blizzard.
It can, but I can sympathize with them. No matter how frustrated you are saying things like
"340 traits are out-performing 385 traits. Significantly. This is just embarrassing, and should not be the case. How did this sort of imbalance between traits make it to live"
is never going to go down well with someone you are trying to get to listen to you.
Even when The points ARE valid when the tone is sardonic everyone has a limit to their patience on how much they can politely reply to until some of the bristles they are feeling dont also come across.
You shouldnt expect a higher standard for the person responding to you. Anyone providing a service will always to to stay higher, but you shouldnt be too perturbed if they end up coming closer to the standard you are setting in framing your issues.
Basically dont ask your questions like an asshole. And literally every question makes me think this guy is just an overentitled asshole. Even if he isnt.
The game is clearly unpolished and I dont know what level of corporate decision making made them rush it but yes there are significantly more hiccups here then there were. I dont like it and it annoys me here and there but I am ok with it, I am not pushing the cutting edge of content or competing with anyone so it really doesnt bother me.
None of the issues are stopping me from doing the things I want to do (except maybe the charity loots thing), but Im ahead of the curve on that and the playerbase has normalized taking those into account already for the most part.
This would all be true if it was 2 peers. This is not 2 peers. This is a company replying to the concerns of customers. I'm very surprised to see you defend this kind of language when they are speaking on behalf of their employer. It is never acceptable for this kinda of language to be used when addressing a customer.
I think if someone is really concerned about excellence and doing their job well then when people are upset because of your failures and you have the opportunity to craft a measured reply, it should be easy to do so.
I think some of the criticisms of the system don't make sense. But there are some fundamental things about the system that are simply broken. And given how many people are working on it and how long they've been working on it, it's just unacceptable. And they don't give explanations. They maybe acknowledge there's a problem and they maybe say they're working on a fix. But they don't explain how multiple people on the team responsible for the gear system, who have had so many months to design a system, manage to come up with a fairly simple system with some obvious goals, and then have egregious failures despite tons of feedback warning that those failures existed. I think the class devs should also take some responsibility for the class-specific traits.
I honestly don't think that every class has a dev capable of 90th percentile parses in Mythic raiding. Which is pretty ridiculous since that's a pretty low bar to set for the person responsible for designing a class. And if their whole team consists of shitters, then they have to take player feedback more seriously. A smart person who understands game systems and takes the feedback of good players seriously could still get the job done despite not being able to play the game well.
EPT
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