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On November 06 2015 12:40 Cyro wrote:Show nested quote +On November 06 2015 12:19 TomatoBisque wrote:
I've considered dicking around on Nostalrius until Legion came out or something but knowing half the specs are garbage is such a turn off. Even today they have a bunch of garbage specs, blizzard never truly learns there. Survival's gonna be unplayable for a straight year; they're in maintainence-mode for a bunch of other classes like DK's (10% buffs to a range of important abilities) but leaving the specs like Survival and Demonology in the dust, unplayable on purpose because they don't want them to be played until the reworks hit. It was a more widespread and important issue in Vanilla; i really think TBC was among the best times for the game in some ways. That's a bit more modern and generally "unbroken" WoW.
The gameplay of many specs in tbc was terribly bland. Like on my Elemental shaman literally all I did in raid was spam lightning bolt. Yep, I used one single spell. Obviously that is 10 times easier to balance than specs today where complexer rotations, single target, multi target and aoe dmg all play an important role in making a class viable or not.
Apart from that I dont think it is too bad if 1 or 2 specs of the pure DPS classes are not viable. If survival is shit just use marksman, I dont see the problem. On the other hand with classes where all 3 specs are different roles like monk, shaman, pally it is much more important to make them all viable.
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OMG! New Expansion is 50€ and you get 1-4 Week early playing with the new Class for PreOrdering? GTFO Blizzard!
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On November 06 2015 22:05 RusselPCMR wrote:
OMG! New Expansion is 50€ and you get 1-4 Week early playing with the new Class for PreOrdering? GTFO Blizzard!
The price includes a level 100 boost. Yes I wish they sold it without the boost for a lot less aswell.
Same shit as with WoD 
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United Kingdom20274 Posts
On November 06 2015 22:05 RusselPCMR wrote:
OMG! New Expansion is 50€ and you get 1-4 Week early playing with the new Class for PreOrdering? GTFO Blizzard!
Taking into account inflation and relative currency values, WOD was actually cheaper than TBC in £ and it looks like Legion is, too. The Euro has fallen a lot recently!
not that i like the price, i think it's ridiculous to pay £200 for an expansion that only adds one tier and no decent pve/pvp content outside of raids but blizzard has no serious competition. The expansion box price itself is pretty much irrelevant next to the cost of playing the game until the next expansion.
Even if you played 1/5'th as much as i did, that time is the direct equivelant of earning 1000 euros at minimum wage so 10 euros means little. It's an MMO, it's pretty much a hobby / lifestyle choice of its own if you want to look at it that way!
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On November 06 2015 22:10 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On November 06 2015 22:05 RusselPCMR wrote:
OMG! New Expansion is 50€ and you get 1-4 Week early playing with the new Class for PreOrdering? GTFO Blizzard! The price includes a level 100 boost. Yes I wish they sold it without the boost for a lot less aswell. Same shit as with WoD
I don't want that fucking boost, I hoped this shitty casual-feature would not exist. Leveling should always be the main focus of a MMO, like how it was in Vanill and TBC!
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United Kingdom20274 Posts
There's no need to flip flop between "leveling doesn't matter at all!" and "leveling is the only thing that matters" but i would love for them to have made it like level 100-110, super slow EXP so that it took like four times longer than some previous expansions. It's a good opportunity to flesh out all of the zones and build a playground for the max level chars; not just a step along the way to be discarded
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On November 06 2015 22:32 Cyro wrote:
There's no need to flip flop between "leveling doesn't matter at all!" and "leveling is the only thing that matters" but i would love for them to have made it like level 100-110, super slow EXP so that it took like four times longer than some previous expansions. It's a good opportunity to flesh out all of the zones and build a playground for the max level chars; not just a step along the way to be discarded
Yeah, I have no problem with the boosts since you want potential new players to have that "wow look at all these people" experience we all enjoyed during Vanilla/BC, but it's extremely sad that the leveling content is over so quickly. It contributes to the marginalization of the world, since if you don't spend much time in it you don't really get to know it.
I'm hoping that they'll stick to the philosophy that made them hold off on flying for most of the expansion, since that same philosophy should encourage them to make leveling in new content a slower process.
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United Kingdom20274 Posts
I think part of the problem is such a huge distinction between "leveling content" and "content". You just do the leveling stuff and it's done and you never see 80% of the continent ever again because there's no meaningful reason to; TBC was the time where i saw the most stuff by a mile, frequently visiting many zones. It was also the most flying-centric continent so i don't believe that flying is the reason for that stuff not happening much any more.
I feel that with WOD they just removed flying on a whim without making any effort to do the things that would make the game great without flying, even that it was worse than removing flying during a previous expansion because of changes to highly devalue world content, addition of super-aggressive phasing etc.
Rewarding world content and a solid server (you can chase that guy across a subzone border and he won't despawn or have 20 allies appear out of nowhere) is the bread and butter for noflying to be fun, IMO. What WoW has become actually feels a bit like one of the things i hated most on runescape - they just had a list of 300 servers. Someone else was farming those creatures you wanted? Log out, check another server. Someone there too? Another one. Three hours later you've relogged 47 times. It'd be the same on WoW if there were meaningful things to farm and there is no sense of persistence or server community; it's impossible or at least far, far harder for a 2 hour battle over a subzone to happen because people on either side will just leave or phase to another phase. Silvermoon-alliance has like 5 instances of Tanaan just from existing; you're unlikely to get in the same one as your friend from just flying to Tanaan.
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To be fair you probably spent a fair chunk of BC with a 60% flying mount. It makes a difference.
That said you're right, removing flying by itself is only a half-measure, you need the zone and the questing to support that change.
Gorgrond is a pretty good example of a zone that largely fails to work. You basically shoot out from the central hub in spokes and never connect any of the places you go to any of the other places you go save for their connection to the hub. The zone also has a lot of unintuitive barriers and few landmarks.
As for questing, you're never going to connect to a zone when you only visit any given sub-area for 15 minutes while you do 2-3 short quests. Gorgrond was extremely guilty of this. You'd go to some self-contained area, complete a couple simple objectives, and then move on. With so little time spent in any one place it's no surprise that getting a sense of the world is hard.
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United Kingdom20274 Posts
176% flying :D got 456% after not too long though. Funny, we now pay for an extra level of flying but it's only 420-430% because they nerfed the mount speed scaling (bonus is now additive instead of multiplicative)
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I think the small quest hub system works wonders in some situation, like Fionas' caravan in plague-lands, but there has to be a zone-story in that case. Gorgorond has some connecting story with the laughing skull, but it's mostly meeh.
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More important than making leveling longer would be making it more interesting or challenging. As it is right now it is impossible to die or anything. It is simply running here and there from marker to marker. For me it is nothing but a chore. A waste of time I have to get through to get to the content that is fun.
On November 06 2015 22:20 RusselPCMR wrote:Show nested quote +On November 06 2015 22:10 Gorsameth wrote:On November 06 2015 22:05 RusselPCMR wrote:
OMG! New Expansion is 50€ and you get 1-4 Week early playing with the new Class for PreOrdering? GTFO Blizzard! The price includes a level 100 boost. Yes I wish they sold it without the boost for a lot less aswell. Same shit as with WoD I don't want that fucking boost, I hoped this shitty casual-feature would not exist. Leveling should always be the main focus of a MMO, like how it was in Vanill and TBC!
Rather annoying how everything someone does not like gets called "casual". In my experience the people that hate leveling the most are Arena players. In contrast casual players rather like it.
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On November 06 2015 23:47 Redox wrote:
More important than making leveling longer would be making it more interesting or challenging. As it is right now it is impossible to die or anything. It is simply running here and there from marker to marker. For me it is nothing but a chore. A waste of time I have to get through to get to the content that is fun.
This is something I've noticed as I've been messing around on Nostalrius. Despite the fact that in vanilla most classes don't even have a "rotation" so much as "spam this button, and maybe press this other button", combat is more engaging because enemies are actually a threat.
It's a lot of small things that add up to something much bigger:- A single enemy is a threat, if you simply idle you can be dead in 10 seconds. Needless to say multiple enemies are extremely deadly.
- Enemies are often positioned such that isolating a single enemy is difficult or impossible. This means you either have to push your boundaries or group up for quests.
- Enemies run faster than you do, meaning if you don't have a way of CCing them you need to either book it early or fight to the death.
- Aggro radii are huge. If you don't watch your surroundings you can suddenly have incoming from behind, or be forced to run from one danger into another.
So instead of optimizing how quickly you can mow through everything like a Dynasty Warrior, the primary question is "How do I not die?".
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United Kingdom20274 Posts
pull mob
try not to die
die a lot
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Another problem is that you only play the patch and not the expansion, since Blizz always adds these stupid catch-up mechanics. why would anyone still go Highmaul or BRF, except for the legendary quests?
In Vanilla you did 5-Mans for Blue Gear, then Molten Core, then BWL, then AQ/Naxx. Same for TBC Heroics=>Karazhan=>Gruul=>SSC=>Tempest Keep=>Hyjal=>BT
Now you get to maxlevel and go HFC instantly, so much content wasted and thats the reason people get bored. ._.
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On November 07 2015 02:18 RusselPCMR wrote:
Another problem is that you only play the patch and not the expansion, since Blizz always adds these stupid catch-up mechanics. why would anyone still go Highmaul or BRF, except for the legendary quests?
In Vanilla you did 5-Mans for Blue Gear, then Molten Core, then BWL, then AQ/Naxx. Same for TBC Heroics=>Karazhan=>Gruul=>SSC=>Tempest Keep=>Hyjal=>BT
Now you get to maxlevel and go HFC instantly, so much content wasted and thats the reason people get bored. ._.
This is pretty much the problem. Blizzard wants everyone to see all the content, but to ensure people they do they make everything pretty much trivial.
Think about WoD. People say there's no casual content, but what content was there in TBC or Wrath? Dailies and more incentivized 5-mans? Is getting a quest to go kill 10 bears or something more interesting than filling up a blue bar? Would the former be worse if it was just a "Kill bears to fill up the bar" quest where each bear gave 10% of the bar?
The thing is that in WoD, leveling and gearing is so easy that people cap out in a couple weeks if they don't raid/PvP, and a lot of people don't want to raid/PvP. This didn't happen in Vanilla/TBC because leveling took forever, so most of the playerbase never hit this plateau where they HAD to join a guild and raid or go PvP if they wanted to keep up character progression, because leveling took forever and gearing up from 5 mans took forever. in no small part because 5 mans were harder and took longer, you couldn't just queue up and do 10 of them a day.
I believe that this started with Wrath, where leveling still took a while because of vanilla and such, but once you hit max level you had LFD and a bunch of different raid difficulties, half of which were easily puggable. However, this stuff was still fresh and new to a lot of people, and leveling was still a big gate.
Cut to Cataclysm, with its big vanilla content overhaul and leveling redone, which made the whole thing way easier, because you could run around 2 shotting mobs because you got your powerful abilities at level 10. Now everyone was getting to max level, because everything before that was irrelevant content. And, let's be honest, the people who didn't reach max level before likely consisted heavily of people who either didn't have much time or are just bad at the game. Didn't know how to use their abilities, didn't pay attention, etc. But now with the Cata rework that doesn't matter, and you get to max level and the only content is PvP and dungeons, the same it's always been.
And you can say, well, maybe if the heroics had been easier people woulda still had content and wouldn't have left. But we saw even later in Cata that when you introduce easy heroics and LFR it doesn't matter, and we saw this again in MoP and WoD. There's nothing to DO because everything is so easy, tuned so that everyone can do it in the name of accessibility, and so everyone beats stuff in 2 weeks and then gets bored of it, not wanting to do the same content over and over again, whine on forums, and leave.
Honestly, I don't think Blizzard will ever move away from this model even though it's killing the game. And even if they did, would changing things so drastically now undo the damage or just accelerate the game's death?
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United Kingdom20274 Posts
This is pretty much the problem. Blizzard wants everyone to see all the content, but to ensure people they do they make everything pretty much trivial.
Our damage tripled going from BRF to HFC, yet they still nerfed BRF bosses health and damage by 1.25x. Why?
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If the changes come slowly enough I think Blizzard could work some of the important things that have been lost back into the game, but as of yet I don't think they've identified the nature of the problem (or at least come to a consensus that it is a problem).
They might be able to learn some lessons from Garrisons that will set them on that path though. Killing the few remaining reasons players had to care about the world or stay logged in during off hours had obvious negative repercussions. If Blizzard follows those problems to their logical conclusions they may recognize that accessibility can be harmful.
People often talk about how gaming is different now, and WoW is competing with a much more diverse market for people's time and attention, and suggest that therefore WoW can't afford to be anything but accessible. To some extent that is true, we shouldn't seek to emulate every archaic aspect of Vanilla/BC design, but it's also short sighted. If your players find your game engaging even if they aren't in a dungeon, raid, arena, or battleground, it won't matter to them that they didn't get to see absolutely everything.
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Part of the problem is it seems there's a vocal part of the playerbase WoW has nowadays hates grindy "chores" like dailies or doing dungeons so they just want more more constant content but that's just impossible for the devs to keep up a pace with. That group isn't just "casuals" though, I see a lot of that from people who mythic raid and don't want to "have" to do anything other than log in and raid, which I think is an equally unhealthy attitude towards the game
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EPT
