On adding to classes. I think they need to find a better way to achieve a setup where they add to the classes without adding bloat, while implementing new changes that can bring in new players or re-engage former players. One idea might be that abilities get replaced with a more powerful ability or one that works slightly differently. For instance, take ret for example, maybe instead of crusade being a talent, at some level it just replaces avenging wrath. This also gets easier to pull off if the expansion is paired with a number squish because you can adjust things according so that people don't feel like they had a massive nerf, when the number are turned off, but have the new stuff feel like it's an actual upgrade. Though I feel like every MMO that last long enough will hit this problem.
As for talents. They should drop the idea and go with something like templates. It's a shame specs got implemented the way they did because it does make going with such an approach harder. Anyways the template approach would let them come up with 2-3 different packages, where they could keep the number tuning where it needs to be, but give people different options. I haven't looked too much at ret stuff for BfA but they could have a divine purpose template, where the build is more about proc management than the others, an inquisition build (or whatever the fuck they call the talent, where the build focuses on proper management of buffs) and if they go for a third, they could make that one the one that has more buttons that have to be managed. The big problem with the talents is that numbers often result in things being cookie cutter or blizz tries the stupid route of "well stick an AoE talent with a single target one, so that at least two of the talents are worth a damn" and people end up hating it because you have to respec between single and AoE. It also removes variables because now they don't have to do matrix trying to suss out each possible build and keep those all balanced. Finally, templates let you have some synergy between things that changed because any synergy between talents just makes it harder to make sure they are all viable. Artifacts worked rather well because they didn't just give the player new shinnies, most of which were passive, but they avoid the whole mess that talents run into because eventually everyone had them.
As for the farm, garrisons, class halls and such. I really want to see some of this stuff go account wide. Did the farm really need to be exclusive to each character? Same for the garrison, did it really need that setup? Class whole, well there are parts where you could make the argument that that was a good idea, but probably could have made part or all of the mission table account wide (namely the gold missions). I'd rather spend less time sending mooks on missions. Yeah, it hurts gold gain but I'd rather not have to pay like 20k for heirloom upgrade tokens in the after bfa expansion and all this stuff that is character exclusive for no real reason, that rewards tons of gold, is to blame for there being a 5 million gold mount.
As for writing, Blizz is doing a pretty shit job at it for BfA. Honestly, they probably have some people on story team and the game design team that need to be dropped. I don't expect every expansion to be better than the last and I expect legion is just going to be hard to top because it did a fairly good job with a number of things, that probably can't be improved or improved easily. That said, I'm see stuff crop up lately from the Blizzard team that is just shitty and not healthy for the game. I think BfA wouldn't be coming across so badly if they had taken the time trying to justify the stupid Horde Vs Alliance and appeasing the tryhard crowd and instead had put those resources into things that most of the player base, including the bleeding edge crowd, gave a damn about. Yeah, there are people that like the tired ass faction war, but I'd wager they are minority and good story telling could have a setup that makes them reasonable happy without annoying to fuck out of everyone else (It's card, have some faction that fall into the hardliner political factions, that cause problems without official sanction of their faction. These groups also have enough clout that they can't just be excise from the faction without a serious cost, so their antics are begrudgingly tolerated). As for prestige stuff, either re-balance some of it so that people can try later on. Have some of it, like the M+15 appearance, where it's just attached to some new challenge or just acknowledge that it would be pretty fucking dumb to change how people get it for various reasons (we have content in MoP that's going to be incredibly unfun for many because there is an expectation that the player has the cloak, an item that is no loner obtainable).
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I mean, the reason for the direction of BFA was pretty clear at the announcement. They want to take Warcraft back to its roots. They kind of forced it out of the story, but it is kind of the reason for all the simplifying and such. The name Battle for Azeroth was even picked for that reason. All the art alluding to the old Warcraft covers. All that stuff. They wanted to kind of effectively bring World of Warcraft back to being Warcraft.
The thing was, they had just finished a huge storyline that basically did the complete opposite. Made us superpowered. Made us unite to defeat the big bad. Etc. So it all feels forced.
I still kind of get the impression a lot of these gameplay changes are trying to go back to how things were for the same reason. Going back to when it was simple.
Hence, why I say they have some staff they need to get rid of. There are some aspects of the original warcraft that they can't really go back to the story has moved away from and IMO most player probably do not fucking want it. Horde was never billed as the villains of WoW, so they can't use the tired ass excuse of "but some people want to be the villains, so we're going to make this the villain faction." Plus, I think a majority believe or strong suspect that the forced hard faction setup actually restricts their ability to play with friends or make some group content more accessible.
Sure there a few tings they could go back to like making threat more relevant or move some melee damage back to white hits, but they are kidding themselves if they think moving back to orcs vs humans will sell well. That's not why a ton of people picked up this game and a ton of people didn't leave because it stopped being horde vs alliance.
I mean, the reason for the direction of BFA was pretty clear at the announcement. They want to take Warcraft back to its roots. They kind of forced it out of the story, but it is kind of the reason for all the simplifying and such. The name Battle for Azeroth was even picked for that reason. All the art alluding to the old Warcraft covers. All that stuff. They wanted to kind of effectively bring World of Warcraft back to being Warcraft.
The thing was, they had just finished a huge storyline that basically did the complete opposite. Made us superpowered. Made us unite to defeat the big bad. Etc. So it all feels forced.
I still kind of get the impression a lot of these gameplay changes are trying to go back to how things were for the same reason. Going back to when it was simple.
I feel like a lot of the "back to the roots" ideology somehow involves the huge interest in classic wow. Like they want to show that classic and retail can be combined somehow. I think that's partly why they are slowing things down, pruning some things, it looks like the base damage is higher but scales slower. The story parts just seem like they havent got a fucking clue since metzen left, and even he seemed to not really know what to do with wow anymore.
Sure there a few tings they could go back to like making threat more relevant or move some melee damage back to white hits, but they are kidding themselves if they think moving back to orcs vs humans will sell well. That's not why a ton of people picked up this game and a ton of people didn't leave because it stopped being horde vs alliance.
Orc vs human is exactly why people picked up the game, that's literally what the rts games were. Without the world from the rts, wow would have just been another generic mmo. and a ton of people did leave when it stopped being horde vs alliance. When that stopped mattering pvp development went to almost zero, and pvp participation went in to the shitter.
I would argue that PVP participation went in the shitter because each expansion there for a while made PVP worse and worse.
People get upset when PVE is nerfed because of PVP imbalances. People get pissed with PVP is "raid to win." People get pissed when you can't just jump in and play PVP without first meeting some ridiculous threshold of Resilience. People get pissed when they earn tons of Resilience and then Blizzard does away with that stat because it's a garbage stat. People get pissed when there are very clearly defined racial and factional imbalances. Such as Fear Ward. Such as Will of the Forsaken. Such as every fucking team in the World Invitational Arena being Dwarves because they are the master race for PVP.
There are many non-story reasons why PVP has gone to shit in WoW. Most of it is because Blizzard has failed like 98% of the time to deliver a fair and balanced PVP experience.
PvP in WoW has always been shit because the game was never really designed with it in mind. I'd argue the first step to any solid PvP design is to ensure that the differences between victory in defeat come out primarily as a result of differences in skill or tactical designs. With some RNG mixed in and at worst, it comes down to some specs/classes not having the right balance. It wouldn't ever allow for the difference to come down to one person running a freshly geared character, while the other winner had far better gear, nor would it let levels be the deciding factor. Heck, IIRC several specs and classes had major last minute changes in the original beta and it came down to PvP balance concerns.
I'll also point out that WoW peaked in WotLK and early Cataclysm. TBC, WotLK and Cataclysm didn't treat orc vs human as the primary draw and one of those expansions was pretty far removed from the idea. I'd say that the vast majority of players don't give a fuck about orc vs human and if they have left or do leave, it's going to be something along the lines of either RL not working out with out time consuming the game is (and it has become more so) or it's going to come down to them becoming unhappy with an aspect of the game that certainly be "well there isn't enough orc vs human conflict." Hell, if they do stick with sitting all over the horde by making them out to be the villains, expect a huge number of players to drop their sub because many of us Horse sure as fuck didn't roll to be villains.
I get why they churn and burn content like the farm and garrisons between expansions, but it still sucks. I guess they don’t want you to have to go back and keep up your farm 5 years later, especially if you weren’t around when the farm was new, but it does feel bad to look behind you and see a lot of honestly cool stuff just might as well not exist anymore.
+1
Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
You know what I'm really tired of? Abandoning everything I have built each expansion.
Halfhill farm - abandoned and irrelevant
Garrison - abandoned and irrelevant
Class Hall - abandoned and irrelevant
Artifact Weapon - broken for story mcguffins and abandoned
Like... just once I'd like something added to the game in an expansion that they can keep relevant to the game after that expansion is over.
Hell, Guild leveling/reputation/rewards. "Oh yeah, we aren't doing that anymore... you can still use whatever perks we don't remove from the game."
I'm still baffled they completely abandoned that system. Seems like so much room for expansion and unlike the other things listed, not even limited to like a specific zone.
I would argue that PVP participation went in the shitter because each expansion there for a while made PVP worse and worse.
People get upset when PVE is nerfed because of PVP imbalances. People get pissed with PVP is "raid to win." People get pissed when you can't just jump in and play PVP without first meeting some ridiculous threshold of Resilience. People get pissed when they earn tons of Resilience and then Blizzard does away with that stat because it's a garbage stat. People get pissed when there are very clearly defined racial and factional imbalances. Such as Fear Ward. Such as Will of the Forsaken. Such as every fucking team in the World Invitational Arena being Dwarves because they are the master race for PVP.
There are many non-story reasons why PVP has gone to shit in WoW. Most of it is because Blizzard has failed like 98% of the time to deliver a fair and balanced PVP experience.
Man there was one expansion (I think it was Cata? Maybe MoP.) where honor gains in PVP were so bad you needed to grind the old PVP dailies in Wrath to get enough honor to buy PVP gear so you weren’t completely dog shit in battlegrounds.
Blizzard are just bad at writing; really they always have been. The writing in Diablo is so bad that it’s almost self-parody, though they clearly intend it to be serious.
I’m not sure whether they just don’t much care about the writing in WoW, or if they somehow think it’s actually good. It’s weird because they do seem to care a lot about world-building and do it pretty well, but the story itself is routinely dogshit.
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
+7
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
PvP in WoW has always been shit because the game was never really designed with it in mind.
Some of yall keep bringing this up, and it is still 100% false. I mean both points. It wasn't always shit, and they ALWAYS intended to make the game have pvp. How it was designed for it is subjective because no one knew what the hell they were doing in the MMO genre back then.
I can see why people beleive it was never orcs as bad guys. Because War 3 actually made a huge effort to humanize the orcs and make them not bad. But War 1 and 2 were both basically making the orcs evil savages. But then again, the story in both of those was super simple and empty and people likely filled in a lot of blanks there in their mind.
On adding to classes. I think they need to find a better way to achieve a setup where they add to the classes without adding bloat, while implementing new changes that can bring in new players or re-engage former players. One idea might be that abilities get replaced with a more powerful ability or one that works slightly differently. For instance, take ret for example, maybe instead of crusade being a talent, at some level it just replaces avenging wrath. This also gets easier to pull off if the expansion is paired with a number squish because you can adjust things according so that people don't feel like they had a massive nerf, when the number are turned off, but have the new stuff feel like it's an actual upgrade. Though I feel like every MMO that last long enough will hit this problem.
As for talents. They should drop the idea and go with something like templates. It's a shame specs got implemented the way they did because it does make going with such an approach harder. Anyways the template approach would let them come up with 2-3 different packages, where they could keep the number tuning where it needs to be, but give people different options. I haven't looked too much at ret stuff for BfA but they could have a divine purpose template, where the build is more about proc management than the others, an inquisition build (or whatever the fuck they call the talent, where the build focuses on proper management of buffs) and if they go for a third, they could make that one the one that has more buttons that have to be managed. The big problem with the talents is that numbers often result in things being cookie cutter or blizz tries the stupid route of "well stick an AoE talent with a single target one, so that at least two of the talents are worth a damn" and people end up hating it because you have to respec between single and AoE. It also removes variables because now they don't have to do matrix trying to suss out each possible build and keep those all balanced. Finally, templates let you have some synergy between things that changed because any synergy between talents just makes it harder to make sure they are all viable. Artifacts worked rather well because they didn't just give the player new shinnies, most of which were passive, but they avoid the whole mess that talents run into because eventually everyone had them.
As for the farm, garrisons, class halls and such. I really want to see some of this stuff go account wide. Did the farm really need to be exclusive to each character? Same for the garrison, did it really need that setup? Class whole, well there are parts where you could make the argument that that was a good idea, but probably could have made part or all of the mission table account wide (namely the gold missions). I'd rather spend less time sending mooks on missions. Yeah, it hurts gold gain but I'd rather not have to pay like 20k for heirloom upgrade tokens in the after bfa expansion and all this stuff that is character exclusive for no real reason, that rewards tons of gold, is to blame for there being a 5 million gold mount.
As for writing, Blizz is doing a pretty shit job at it for BfA. Honestly, they probably have some people on story team and the game design team that need to be dropped. I don't expect every expansion to be better than the last and I expect legion is just going to be hard to top because it did a fairly good job with a number of things, that probably can't be improved or improved easily. That said, I'm see stuff crop up lately from the Blizzard team that is just shitty and not healthy for the game. I think BfA wouldn't be coming across so badly if they had taken the time trying to justify the stupid Horde Vs Alliance and appeasing the tryhard crowd and instead had put those resources into things that most of the player base, including the bleeding edge crowd, gave a damn about. Yeah, there are people that like the tired ass faction war, but I'd wager they are minority and good story telling could have a setup that makes them reasonable happy without annoying to fuck out of everyone else (It's card, have some faction that fall into the hardliner political factions, that cause problems without official sanction of their faction. These groups also have enough clout that they can't just be excise from the faction without a serious cost, so their antics are begrudgingly tolerated). As for prestige stuff, either re-balance some of it so that people can try later on. Have some of it, like the M+15 appearance, where it's just attached to some new challenge or just acknowledge that it would be pretty fucking dumb to change how people get it for various reasons (we have content in MoP that's going to be incredibly unfun for many because there is an expectation that the player has the cloak, an item that is no loner obtainable).
The cloak in MoP is an endgame thing you'd get for raiding, and the locked content is a small piece of Timeless Isle (TI bring a place full of daily quests but not much of a story, and nobody levels there).
PvP in WoW has always been shit because the game was never really designed with it in mind.
Some of yall keep bringing this up, and it is still 100% false. I mean both points. It wasn't always shit, and they ALWAYS intended to make the game have pvp. How it was designed for it is subjective because no one knew what the hell they were doing in the MMO genre back then.
I can see why people beleive it was never orcs as bad guys. Because War 3 actually made a huge effort to humanize the orcs and make them not bad. But War 1 and 2 were both basically making the orcs evil savages. But then again, the story in both of those was super simple and empty and people likely filled in a lot of blanks there in their mind.
When WoW launched we were coming off of WC3 where the Horde (at least Thrall’s Horde) were protagonists who had been transitioned from evil to noble savages. There were still Orc villains (such as the Blackrocks), but Vanilla was very much a dual storyline structure (for whatever story WoW introduced) where the worst you could point out for the PC faction Orcs was the logging in Ashenvale. Same with TBC. Wrath had a few incidents and then we had Cata and well...
That’s why the whole Orcs vs Humans thing that is getting pushed for BFA feels so regressive. Nevermind we had a similar storyline in Cata/MoP, but Blizzard can’t even stick with giving us a good rationalization for Horde players to want to fight the Alliance.
+1
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I mean, "sticking" with things is hard for a series that has been going on for 20 years, and a GAME going on 14. Even before Metzen left I am sure a lot of the overall writing and direction has shifted through different peoples vision at this point.
I dunno. I am bad at the whole story discussion because I willingly admit to tuning it out. I feel lucky I can ignore that aspect of the game considering how poorly it is received from people who obviously care. No offense to those that do, but I just never really could. Sometimes I give it a shot and say hey this might be interesting, but then I stop caring again.
PvP in WoW has always been shit because the game was never really designed with it in mind. I'd argue the first step to any solid PvP design is to ensure that the differences between victory in defeat come out primarily as a result of differences in skill or tactical designs. With some RNG mixed in and at worst, it comes down to some specs/classes not having the right balance. It wouldn't ever allow for the difference to come down to one person running a freshly geared character, while the other winner had far better gear, nor would it let levels be the deciding factor. Heck, IIRC several specs and classes had major last minute changes in the original beta and it came down to PvP balance concerns.
I'll also point out that WoW peaked in WotLK and early Cataclysm. TBC, WotLK and Cataclysm didn't treat orc vs human as the primary draw and one of those expansions was pretty far removed from the idea. I'd say that the vast majority of players don't give a fuck about orc vs human and if they have left or do leave, it's going to be something along the lines of either RL not working out with out time consuming the game is (and it has become more so) or it's going to come down to them becoming unhappy with an aspect of the game that certainly be "well there isn't enough orc vs human conflict." Hell, if they do stick with sitting all over the horde by making them out to be the villains, expect a huge number of players to drop their sub because many of us Horse sure as fuck didn't roll to be villains.
PVP was in the fucking game from the start, it was designed with it in mind, that's why there are two fucking factions. If anything raiding was the tacked on part because molten core was made in a week just palette swapping assets.
Numbers wise they might have peaked in wotlk, but gameplay-wise it was trash and a lot of people who played from the start quit after a month or two. TBC and WotLK had the big popular characters as their draw in kael, vashj, illidan, and arthas. That's where they got a lot of hype. Cataclysm didnt have the rts background and sub numbers got torpedoed. And because the game hadnt got so easy to have multiple alts on both factions the blood elf/draenei addition certainly fueled faction conflict as a player created thing if not directly from a story perspective. And that they changed classes due to pvp concerns in the beta (the thing BEFORE a game is released) shows that it was a conscious design decision to have it in the game.
I would argue that PVP participation went in the shitter because each expansion there for a while made PVP worse and worse.
People get upset when PVE is nerfed because of PVP imbalances. People get pissed with PVP is "raid to win." People get pissed when you can't just jump in and play PVP without first meeting some ridiculous threshold of Resilience. People get pissed when they earn tons of Resilience and then Blizzard does away with that stat because it's a garbage stat. People get pissed when there are very clearly defined racial and factional imbalances. Such as Fear Ward. Such as Will of the Forsaken. Such as every fucking team in the World Invitational Arena being Dwarves because they are the master race for PVP.
There are many non-story reasons why PVP has gone to shit in WoW. Most of it is because Blizzard has failed like 98% of the time to deliver a fair and balanced PVP experience.
Your whole post basically agrees with what I said. Which all comes down to they just stopped any real pvp development and that's why it went to shit for so long. Then in MoP they made it amazing again, and there was at least an attempt at faction conflict with the hozen and jinyu which turned into an old god manifestation (sound familiar?). As a result somehow sub numbers stayed pretty static the whole expansion until there was like 2 years of Siege of Orgrimmar while they fucked up everything working on WoD. And their grand contribution to pvp in wod was ashran... Then in legion they had the gall to put ashran in the fucking queue list, and decided pvp gear had to be 50 ilvls lower than lfr gear because fuck you if you want to do world quests.
I'd say of course people get upset when ANYTHING gets nerfed, it doesn't matter whether it's for pvp or pve. Resilience wasn't a very good fix because it did put a barrier to entry into the game, which is poor design because pve didnt have a special stat you had to farm for weeks before you could do it, you could just slam yourself into karazhan in greens and come out with a couple pieces of gear if you were lucky.
Nothing is going to be balanced with like 36 or so specs to balance things around, but they just never spent the time to try and fix the problem areas of excessive burst and cc creep that was added to the game for pve. Now that M+ is a thing, they had to suddenly look at all the stuff theyve stacked on the last few expansions and fix it because the MDI isn't very exciting to watch when it's the same class comps doing the same things the whole time. PvP is getting some nice balance changes because they need to balance the PvE competition. They still aren't putting in much development towards pvp, it's really just a trickle down of their vision for M+.
Rich wasnt at last weekends arena thing either, it was great. Nagura also has the funniest clip of the mdi, and sloots face when he realizes is funny as hell.
I'd be more interested in the MDI if it wasn't a whole bunch of cookie cutter teams with DK tanks, Affliction Warlocks, and Druid Healers.
I do not understand why Blizzard is so against making mid-expansion class changes (as a general rule of thumb, not as a set in stone kind of thing. They obviously make tweaks here an there).
But when there is something so fundamentally skewed that every team looks the same, I would think they would make a little more effort to fix it. And fix it for that expansion, not for the next one.
Of course, from everything I've seen and read, class balance in BfA is a total shitshow, so who knows what competitive M+ will look like. Or even M+ for us plebs.
It just tells you how little you can predict based on beta; if you’d said at Legion launch that the cookie cutter best m+ comp would be aff locks and a blood dk you’d have gotten laughed off the forum (or discord or whatever.) You’d have been on decent ground w/r/t druids I guess.
I guess that’s why I’m pretty sanguine about the bfa class stuff; it’ll probably look totally different in 8.0.5 or .1 or whatever the first major patch is
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
+1
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
Which team will win: the team with five blood elves, the team with four blood elves and a tauren, or the team with four blood elves and a troll? Super much excitement in the air.
You know what I'm really tired of? Abandoning everything I have built each expansion.
Halfhill farm - abandoned and irrelevant
Garrison - abandoned and irrelevant
Class Hall - abandoned and irrelevant
Artifact Weapon - broken for story mcguffins and abandoned
Like... just once I'd like something added to the game in an expansion that they can keep relevant to the game after that expansion is over.
I like how the mag'har make a joke about you abandoning your garrison
At the end of Antorus, theres the cutscene where the Titans pull Sargeras out of some sort of cloud around the planet. How did that cloud get there? I have seen no in-game source for it.
It just tells you how little you can predict based on beta; if you’d said at Legion launch that the cookie cutter best m+ comp would be aff locks and a blood dk you’d have gotten laughed off the forum (or discord or whatever.) You’d have been on decent ground w/r/t druids I guess.
I guess that’s why I’m pretty sanguine about the bfa class stuff; it’ll probably look totally different in 8.0.5 or .1 or whatever the first major patch is
I mean, I still remember Warlords launching with a bug in Envenom or something which they then fixed but caused Assassination Rogues to plummet in the DPS meters. Stuff like that is why you should always been doing these kind of evaluations I feel.
I think What I'd like to see in BFA would be a more stratefied PVP system that took players performance into account; not neccesarily a hard ranking system but something that would compare gear scores and prestige levels and divvy up players accordingly. that way you don't have someone feeling the need to grind to end game raid content in order to be competetive in random PvP.
The other thing that would be nice, is more of a focus on objective gameplay over killdozering. I suck at twitch gameplay, but I can concoct good strategies and tactics to counter the enemy and as a result I find myself frustrated with a lot of PVP. Having a more dynamic system that encourages players to achieve objectives that you can't do by just zerging around the map would make for a hell of a more interesting system.
At the end of Antorus, theres the cutscene where the Titans pull Sargeras out of some sort of cloud around the planet. How did that cloud get there? I have seen no in-game source for it.
Second, are we to assume Sargeras loses? We haven't seen a body.
As you do Antorus look up in to the sky. You can see that cloud growing larger over Azeroth up in the sky and you progress further in. I'm not sure this works right when done on LFR because the boss order is somewhat scrambled.
I dunno. I am bad at the whole story discussion because I willingly admit to tuning it out. I feel lucky I can ignore that aspect of the game considering how poorly it is received from people who obviously care. No offense to those that do, but I just never really could. Sometimes I give it a shot and say hey this might be interesting, but then I stop caring again.
Yeah, I've given up on caring too much about the story. It's like it's written using dream logic. In the morning, nothing about it holds up under the scrutiny of common sense, but it has some characters and vignette moments that stick with you for a long time.
I will say that in Legion, a lot of the characterization is really fun even though (because?) the plot is nonsensical. Dhadgar is a dorky delight, and I love Illidan's gleeful murderousness. And both were great voice acting performances.
I dunno. I am bad at the whole story discussion because I willingly admit to tuning it out. I feel lucky I can ignore that aspect of the game considering how poorly it is received from people who obviously care. No offense to those that do, but I just never really could. Sometimes I give it a shot and say hey this might be interesting, but then I stop caring again.
Yeah, I've up on caring too much about the story. It's like it's written using dream logic. In the morning, nothing about it holds up under the scrutiny of common sense, but it has some characters and vignette moments that stick with you for a long time.
I will say that in Legion, a lot of the characterization is really fun even though (because?) the plot is nonsensical. Dhadgar is a dorky delight, and I love Illidan's gleeful murderousness. And both were great voice acting performances.
The voice acting has been nice, a far cry from days of Metzen doing half the voices and the guy that does Chef Pisketti on Curious George doing the other half of the voices.
I dunno. I am bad at the whole story discussion because I willingly admit to tuning it out. I feel lucky I can ignore that aspect of the game considering how poorly it is received from people who obviously care. No offense to those that do, but I just never really could. Sometimes I give it a shot and say hey this might be interesting, but then I stop caring again.
Yeah, I've up on caring too much about the story. It's like it's written using dream logic. In the morning, nothing about it holds up under the scrutiny of common sense, but it has some characters and vignette moments that stick with you for a long time.
I will say that in Legion, a lot of the characterization is really fun even though (because?) the plot is nonsensical. Dhadgar is a dorky delight, and I love Illidan's gleeful murderousness. And both were great voice acting performances.
The voice acting has been nice, a far cry from days of Metzen doing half the voices and the guy that does Chef Pisketti on Curious George doing the other half of the voices.
Overuse of Metzen for Orc voices has certainly been a problem, but I think I think that the golden age of WoW voice acting was BC through Ulduar. And in that time frame, the original Karazhan was probably the best. Moroes, the Opera, Aran, and Malchezaar were all amazing. The Shade of Aran, imo, is the best and most underrated boss voice performance in the whole game.
ICC should have been great, but most of it was really over the top and cringeworthy, and it's kind of been that way since. I have to turn off dialog for Antorus, it's so bad.
I dunno. I am bad at the whole story discussion because I willingly admit to tuning it out. I feel lucky I can ignore that aspect of the game considering how poorly it is received from people who obviously care. No offense to those that do, but I just never really could. Sometimes I give it a shot and say hey this might be interesting, but then I stop caring again.
Yeah, I've up on caring too much about the story. It's like it's written using dream logic. In the morning, nothing about it holds up under the scrutiny of common sense, but it has some characters and vignette moments that stick with you for a long time.
I will say that in Legion, a lot of the characterization is really fun even though (because?) the plot is nonsensical. Dhadgar is a dorky delight, and I love Illidan's gleeful murderousness. And both were great voice acting performances.
The voice acting has been nice, a far cry from days of Metzen doing half the voices and the guy that does Chef Pisketti on Curious George doing the other half of the voices.
Overuse of Metzen for Orc voices has certainly been a problem, but I think I think that the golden age of WoW voice acting was BC through Ulduar. And in that time frame, the original Karazhan was probably the best. Moroes, the Opera, Aran, and Malchezaar were all amazing. The Shade of Aran, imo, is the best and most underrated boss voice performance in the whole game.
ICC should have been great, but most of it was really over the top and cringeworthy, and it's kind of been that way since. I have to turn off dialog for Antorus, it's so bad.
Nothing is as bad as the guy at the beginning of Dragon Soul.
Why is Rich is even in this, is there some sort of legal thing that requires them to have someone there to echo whatever anyone else says.
Yeah its so confusing, like he offers nothing on commentary as far as insight, tactics or just generally anything. He's just there to slobber over whoever is currently considered a number 1 seed and ruin broadcasts.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
I dunno. I am bad at the whole story discussion because I willingly admit to tuning it out. I feel lucky I can ignore that aspect of the game considering how poorly it is received from people who obviously care. No offense to those that do, but I just never really could. Sometimes I give it a shot and say hey this might be interesting, but then I stop caring again.
Yeah, I've given up on caring too much about the story. It's like it's written using dream logic. In the morning, nothing about it holds up under the scrutiny of common sense, but it has some characters and vignette moments that stick with you for a long time.
I will say that in Legion, a lot of the characterization is really fun even though (because?) the plot is nonsensical. Dhadgar is a dorky delight, and I love Illidan's gleeful murderousness. And both were great voice acting performances.
Eh, for the most part I'd say that the plot of Legion holds up just fine.
There are notable moments that fall down hard. The whole finale in Argus/Antorus feels kinda rushed and superglued together, and the whole "misunderstanding" at Broken Shore relies on everyone being Plot Stupid, but pretty much every zone storyline in the Broken Isles was great, Suramar was EXCELLENT, and the majority of the class halls were great fun. There were a lot more hits than misses in Legion.
Ugh, pvp servers going away can't happen soon enough. Finished up a quest, turned it in and was watching the little cutscene play out, very serene sort of emotional kind of thing and BAM killed by a ret pally and missed the ending trying to run back. Thankfully youtube saved the day but damn that's annoying.
Posts
As for talents. They should drop the idea and go with something like templates. It's a shame specs got implemented the way they did because it does make going with such an approach harder. Anyways the template approach would let them come up with 2-3 different packages, where they could keep the number tuning where it needs to be, but give people different options. I haven't looked too much at ret stuff for BfA but they could have a divine purpose template, where the build is more about proc management than the others, an inquisition build (or whatever the fuck they call the talent, where the build focuses on proper management of buffs) and if they go for a third, they could make that one the one that has more buttons that have to be managed. The big problem with the talents is that numbers often result in things being cookie cutter or blizz tries the stupid route of "well stick an AoE talent with a single target one, so that at least two of the talents are worth a damn" and people end up hating it because you have to respec between single and AoE. It also removes variables because now they don't have to do matrix trying to suss out each possible build and keep those all balanced. Finally, templates let you have some synergy between things that changed because any synergy between talents just makes it harder to make sure they are all viable. Artifacts worked rather well because they didn't just give the player new shinnies, most of which were passive, but they avoid the whole mess that talents run into because eventually everyone had them.
As for the farm, garrisons, class halls and such. I really want to see some of this stuff go account wide. Did the farm really need to be exclusive to each character? Same for the garrison, did it really need that setup? Class whole, well there are parts where you could make the argument that that was a good idea, but probably could have made part or all of the mission table account wide (namely the gold missions). I'd rather spend less time sending mooks on missions. Yeah, it hurts gold gain but I'd rather not have to pay like 20k for heirloom upgrade tokens in the after bfa expansion and all this stuff that is character exclusive for no real reason, that rewards tons of gold, is to blame for there being a 5 million gold mount.
As for writing, Blizz is doing a pretty shit job at it for BfA. Honestly, they probably have some people on story team and the game design team that need to be dropped. I don't expect every expansion to be better than the last and I expect legion is just going to be hard to top because it did a fairly good job with a number of things, that probably can't be improved or improved easily. That said, I'm see stuff crop up lately from the Blizzard team that is just shitty and not healthy for the game. I think BfA wouldn't be coming across so badly if they had taken the time trying to justify the stupid Horde Vs Alliance and appeasing the tryhard crowd and instead had put those resources into things that most of the player base, including the bleeding edge crowd, gave a damn about. Yeah, there are people that like the tired ass faction war, but I'd wager they are minority and good story telling could have a setup that makes them reasonable happy without annoying to fuck out of everyone else (It's card, have some faction that fall into the hardliner political factions, that cause problems without official sanction of their faction. These groups also have enough clout that they can't just be excise from the faction without a serious cost, so their antics are begrudgingly tolerated). As for prestige stuff, either re-balance some of it so that people can try later on. Have some of it, like the M+15 appearance, where it's just attached to some new challenge or just acknowledge that it would be pretty fucking dumb to change how people get it for various reasons (we have content in MoP that's going to be incredibly unfun for many because there is an expectation that the player has the cloak, an item that is no loner obtainable).
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
The thing was, they had just finished a huge storyline that basically did the complete opposite. Made us superpowered. Made us unite to defeat the big bad. Etc. So it all feels forced.
I still kind of get the impression a lot of these gameplay changes are trying to go back to how things were for the same reason. Going back to when it was simple.
Sure there a few tings they could go back to like making threat more relevant or move some melee damage back to white hits, but they are kidding themselves if they think moving back to orcs vs humans will sell well. That's not why a ton of people picked up this game and a ton of people didn't leave because it stopped being horde vs alliance.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I feel like a lot of the "back to the roots" ideology somehow involves the huge interest in classic wow. Like they want to show that classic and retail can be combined somehow. I think that's partly why they are slowing things down, pruning some things, it looks like the base damage is higher but scales slower. The story parts just seem like they havent got a fucking clue since metzen left, and even he seemed to not really know what to do with wow anymore.
Orc vs human is exactly why people picked up the game, that's literally what the rts games were. Without the world from the rts, wow would have just been another generic mmo. and a ton of people did leave when it stopped being horde vs alliance. When that stopped mattering pvp development went to almost zero, and pvp participation went in to the shitter.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
People get upset when PVE is nerfed because of PVP imbalances. People get pissed with PVP is "raid to win." People get pissed when you can't just jump in and play PVP without first meeting some ridiculous threshold of Resilience. People get pissed when they earn tons of Resilience and then Blizzard does away with that stat because it's a garbage stat. People get pissed when there are very clearly defined racial and factional imbalances. Such as Fear Ward. Such as Will of the Forsaken. Such as every fucking team in the World Invitational Arena being Dwarves because they are the master race for PVP.
There are many non-story reasons why PVP has gone to shit in WoW. Most of it is because Blizzard has failed like 98% of the time to deliver a fair and balanced PVP experience.
I'll also point out that WoW peaked in WotLK and early Cataclysm. TBC, WotLK and Cataclysm didn't treat orc vs human as the primary draw and one of those expansions was pretty far removed from the idea. I'd say that the vast majority of players don't give a fuck about orc vs human and if they have left or do leave, it's going to be something along the lines of either RL not working out with out time consuming the game is (and it has become more so) or it's going to come down to them becoming unhappy with an aspect of the game that certainly be "well there isn't enough orc vs human conflict." Hell, if they do stick with sitting all over the horde by making them out to be the villains, expect a huge number of players to drop their sub because many of us Horse sure as fuck didn't roll to be villains.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Hell, Guild leveling/reputation/rewards. "Oh yeah, we aren't doing that anymore... you can still use whatever perks we don't remove from the game."
I'm still baffled they completely abandoned that system. Seems like so much room for expansion and unlike the other things listed, not even limited to like a specific zone.
Man there was one expansion (I think it was Cata? Maybe MoP.) where honor gains in PVP were so bad you needed to grind the old PVP dailies in Wrath to get enough honor to buy PVP gear so you weren’t completely dog shit in battlegrounds.
I’m not sure whether they just don’t much care about the writing in WoW, or if they somehow think it’s actually good. It’s weird because they do seem to care a lot about world-building and do it pretty well, but the story itself is routinely dogshit.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Some of yall keep bringing this up, and it is still 100% false. I mean both points. It wasn't always shit, and they ALWAYS intended to make the game have pvp. How it was designed for it is subjective because no one knew what the hell they were doing in the MMO genre back then.
I can see why people beleive it was never orcs as bad guys. Because War 3 actually made a huge effort to humanize the orcs and make them not bad. But War 1 and 2 were both basically making the orcs evil savages. But then again, the story in both of those was super simple and empty and people likely filled in a lot of blanks there in their mind.
When WoW launched we were coming off of WC3 where the Horde (at least Thrall’s Horde) were protagonists who had been transitioned from evil to noble savages. There were still Orc villains (such as the Blackrocks), but Vanilla was very much a dual storyline structure (for whatever story WoW introduced) where the worst you could point out for the PC faction Orcs was the logging in Ashenvale. Same with TBC. Wrath had a few incidents and then we had Cata and well...
That’s why the whole Orcs vs Humans thing that is getting pushed for BFA feels so regressive. Nevermind we had a similar storyline in Cata/MoP, but Blizzard can’t even stick with giving us a good rationalization for Horde players to want to fight the Alliance.
I dunno. I am bad at the whole story discussion because I willingly admit to tuning it out. I feel lucky I can ignore that aspect of the game considering how poorly it is received from people who obviously care. No offense to those that do, but I just never really could. Sometimes I give it a shot and say hey this might be interesting, but then I stop caring again.
PVP was in the fucking game from the start, it was designed with it in mind, that's why there are two fucking factions. If anything raiding was the tacked on part because molten core was made in a week just palette swapping assets.
Numbers wise they might have peaked in wotlk, but gameplay-wise it was trash and a lot of people who played from the start quit after a month or two. TBC and WotLK had the big popular characters as their draw in kael, vashj, illidan, and arthas. That's where they got a lot of hype. Cataclysm didnt have the rts background and sub numbers got torpedoed. And because the game hadnt got so easy to have multiple alts on both factions the blood elf/draenei addition certainly fueled faction conflict as a player created thing if not directly from a story perspective. And that they changed classes due to pvp concerns in the beta (the thing BEFORE a game is released) shows that it was a conscious design decision to have it in the game.
Your whole post basically agrees with what I said. Which all comes down to they just stopped any real pvp development and that's why it went to shit for so long. Then in MoP they made it amazing again, and there was at least an attempt at faction conflict with the hozen and jinyu which turned into an old god manifestation (sound familiar?). As a result somehow sub numbers stayed pretty static the whole expansion until there was like 2 years of Siege of Orgrimmar while they fucked up everything working on WoD. And their grand contribution to pvp in wod was ashran... Then in legion they had the gall to put ashran in the fucking queue list, and decided pvp gear had to be 50 ilvls lower than lfr gear because fuck you if you want to do world quests.
I'd say of course people get upset when ANYTHING gets nerfed, it doesn't matter whether it's for pvp or pve. Resilience wasn't a very good fix because it did put a barrier to entry into the game, which is poor design because pve didnt have a special stat you had to farm for weeks before you could do it, you could just slam yourself into karazhan in greens and come out with a couple pieces of gear if you were lucky.
Nothing is going to be balanced with like 36 or so specs to balance things around, but they just never spent the time to try and fix the problem areas of excessive burst and cc creep that was added to the game for pve. Now that M+ is a thing, they had to suddenly look at all the stuff theyve stacked on the last few expansions and fix it because the MDI isn't very exciting to watch when it's the same class comps doing the same things the whole time. PvP is getting some nice balance changes because they need to balance the PvE competition. They still aren't putting in much development towards pvp, it's really just a trickle down of their vision for M+.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
pleasepaypreacher.net
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
I do not understand why Blizzard is so against making mid-expansion class changes (as a general rule of thumb, not as a set in stone kind of thing. They obviously make tweaks here an there).
But when there is something so fundamentally skewed that every team looks the same, I would think they would make a little more effort to fix it. And fix it for that expansion, not for the next one.
Of course, from everything I've seen and read, class balance in BfA is a total shitshow, so who knows what competitive M+ will look like. Or even M+ for us plebs.
I guess that’s why I’m pretty sanguine about the bfa class stuff; it’ll probably look totally different in 8.0.5 or .1 or whatever the first major patch is
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I like how the mag'har make a joke about you abandoning your garrison
I'm mostly just mad their taking my dude
At the end of Antorus, theres the cutscene where the Titans pull Sargeras out of some sort of cloud around the planet. How did that cloud get there? I have seen no in-game source for it.
Video here:
Second, are we to assume Sargeras loses? We haven't seen a body.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I mean, I still remember Warlords launching with a bug in Envenom or something which they then fixed but caused Assassination Rogues to plummet in the DPS meters. Stuff like that is why you should always been doing these kind of evaluations I feel.
He also isn’t dead; the pantheon imprisons him on/in the husk of Argus where apparently illidan fights him forever.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
The other thing that would be nice, is more of a focus on objective gameplay over killdozering. I suck at twitch gameplay, but I can concoct good strategies and tactics to counter the enemy and as a result I find myself frustrated with a lot of PVP. Having a more dynamic system that encourages players to achieve objectives that you can't do by just zerging around the map would make for a hell of a more interesting system.
pleasepaypreacher.net
As you do Antorus look up in to the sky. You can see that cloud growing larger over Azeroth up in the sky and you progress further in. I'm not sure this works right when done on LFR because the boss order is somewhat scrambled.
It probably wouldn’t be very fair, but it’d be a lot more entertaining
Yeah, I've given up on caring too much about the story. It's like it's written using dream logic. In the morning, nothing about it holds up under the scrutiny of common sense, but it has some characters and vignette moments that stick with you for a long time.
I will say that in Legion, a lot of the characterization is really fun even though (because?) the plot is nonsensical. Dhadgar is a dorky delight, and I love Illidan's gleeful murderousness. And both were great voice acting performances.
The voice acting has been nice, a far cry from days of Metzen doing half the voices and the guy that does Chef Pisketti on Curious George doing the other half of the voices.
Yeah that was a legitimately like down to the last few seconds type of moment.
Glad to see Free Marsy has recovered from their form in the oceania tourney where they looked sloppy.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Overuse of Metzen for Orc voices has certainly been a problem, but I think I think that the golden age of WoW voice acting was BC through Ulduar. And in that time frame, the original Karazhan was probably the best. Moroes, the Opera, Aran, and Malchezaar were all amazing. The Shade of Aran, imo, is the best and most underrated boss voice performance in the whole game.
ICC should have been great, but most of it was really over the top and cringeworthy, and it's kind of been that way since. I have to turn off dialog for Antorus, it's so bad.
Nothing is as bad as the guy at the beginning of Dragon Soul.
Yeah its so confusing, like he offers nothing on commentary as far as insight, tactics or just generally anything. He's just there to slobber over whoever is currently considered a number 1 seed and ruin broadcasts.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Eh, for the most part I'd say that the plot of Legion holds up just fine.
There are notable moments that fall down hard. The whole finale in Argus/Antorus feels kinda rushed and superglued together, and the whole "misunderstanding" at Broken Shore relies on everyone being Plot Stupid, but pretty much every zone storyline in the Broken Isles was great, Suramar was EXCELLENT, and the majority of the class halls were great fun. There were a lot more hits than misses in Legion.
White FC: 0819 3350 1787
SniperGuyGaming on PSN / SniperGuy710 on Xbone Live