HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
The current UI is a smaller version of the older one. It's just condensed, and in a good way. It doesn't fill out the full bottom of the screen, and as far as aesthetic goes I'll agree it's a loss in that regard. But as far as there being less buttons, particularly the second row that was on the right-bottom of the screen, that's not at issue for me personally. They cut back on how many buttons any given class had (though they're starting to prop back up again) so you naturally need less button availability.
Going a step further for me, the two right-side rows being overall shorter help me sort things out very uniformly.
Primary bar is my attacks (or heals if I'm a healer but that'll never happen). The bar above it is my secondary abilities, things usually associated with other spec roles, or AoEs, stuns, etc.
Bottom-right bar is my "RAWR SRS PLYR" bar, with my raid / trinket buffs. The bar above that has splash over from the left-top bar, and always has my mount buttons.
The two bars on the right side of the screen house my fast travel (warp) buttons, my tradeskills, long-term-why-wouldn't-these-be-on-always buffs, and anything I might have to access for the current expansion / zone; like because of Mechagon, now I have some grenades over there and such.
And for all that I still have spaces set between categories so I don't misclick. In Classic, especially in TBC, every goddamn button was in play on my characters and it was a mess to manage. Being a shaman in those days with so many totems, yikes.
How it went from 1-= and the lesser used ones I could place on the additional bars that were lesser used skills
So an example is playing holy priest ui I would have my heals and debuffs on my 1-= the right bottom bar had my dps skills/ res mount flying mount and hearth as they became gutted over the years with dps skills I used less and less of the additional bars
The current ui I feel is not fun I have no idea why I got rid of the default it was clunky but I dealt with it the current one is just alien to use I know it's a change but still why?
It's also quite annoying to log on and get the message of pick a pvp talent
Why f you, You took the fun talent/skills and made them pvp to entice people into pvp
If you pick your pvp talents it will never bother you about them again, whether you use them or not.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited August 2019
To be fair I encountered a bug last year where it kept telling my shaman to pick a PvP talent. When I reinstalled and reupped my subscription a couple days ago, the notification bug was no longer a thing.
Edit - And I had very much picked out all my PvP talents so I dunno wtf the game was doing with that bug or what caused it.
IIRC if they reworked a talent it forced players to reselect it.
Playing with the classic talent trees I know why they went with the cata talents to solve the power creep and other problems with that but the cata talents caused other problems
Part of me wants to play a shaman in classic to see the mess I played a affliction warlock then so I know the Ui gets messy then
On the topic of the lore, I actually really enjoy the WoW lore. Or I did enjoy it, but haven't really been a fan of the time travel and the spacetravel stuff. My biggest knock on WoW lore is the way it's presented. Like maybe there's a comprehensive story in the game somewhere, but it's impossible to find. The fact that they've hid so much CRUCIAL story and lore in content that's either inaccessible (ie in Raids, but not LFR raids!) or just hard to find if you don't know where to look is a huuuuuge oversight. There have been so many times that I had to check the wiki just to figure out who characters are or where other characters went. Like what happened to Cairne Bloodhoof? New players will never know. Why do the tie the story to Dungeons but then allow you to do the dungeons before you get to the appropriate part in the story?
If you haven't been playing since at least Cataclysm, it's nearly impossible to figure out what the hell is going on in the game. It's like you make a new character and go to Orgrimmar and hey, there's warchief Sylvanna, that's cool, then you start doing quests in Azeroth and they're telling you about Warchief Garrosh. Alright, oh now it's time to choose to go to either Burning Crusade or WotLK content. Hey now it's Warchief Thrall. Now you're choosing between Cataclysm or Mists, and once again new warchiefs. Or maybe old warchiefs? Also one is maybe evil now? Ok, now a troll's warchief for some reason? Are the alliance and horde friends or not? Am I travelling back in time to Draenor? Or is this alt-history present Draenor? What about burning crusade Draenor, has it been 'overwritten' or do both exist? Nothing makes sense and the game doesn't do anything to tell you what you need to know in order for it to make sense.
It's such a damn mess. And I don't think the devs realize that to new players, or returning players who haven't played in years, it feels like there may as well not be a story at all. It's like being dropped into season 6 of Game of Thrones and being told that you're only allowed to watch maybe 65% of the previous seasons, but you can't watch any of it in order.
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
I remain convinced that, storywise, Cata was the worst thing they could have done.
+5
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited August 2019
I'm inclined to agree. By removing/replacing the vanilla quests they essentially deleted chapter 1 of WoW's story, and by making the new quests cataclysmed zones be post-Wrath they maximized the confusion.
New characters start out at chapter 4, then they proceed to chapters 2 and 3, and when they're done with those they head over to chapter 4 part 2.
Well, at least that's how it was at the time. Now with the leveling redone again and the experience level of zones being flexible there's no kind of sensible linear order to anything.
They need to spend an entire expansion to do a complete streamline of the story, zones, leveling, and new-character experience. I realize that is a massive undertaking and what I'm proposing won't be cheap or easy. But it needs to happen. It's not something they can continue to let fester for much longer. This change is pretty much mandatory for the continued long-term health of the game.
They need to:
-Identify key story elements and craft a comprehensive MSQ story experience for the player that will give them the vast majority of the XP necessary to level a brand new character
-Rebalance all zones so that as a player levels from 1 to Max, they hit all crucial story beats
-Mark some zones as "story zones" and those zones will be the ones with the essential story elements and maybe some supporting side quests
-Rebalance non-story zones in such a way that they are still useful for leveling or questing in some way.
-They need to identify story elements that might not even be in the game anymore, such as the destruction of Theramore, and incorporate those back into the story
Basically, for the long term health of the game, they need to do a complete lore & story restructuring, leveling restructuring, and zone restructuring, and all of those things tie together and should be done simultaneously. They need to deliver a succinct story that is fun and engaging, and removes all of the fluff that was added over the years to pad it out.
It might even require some retconning and simplification to get it done, but at this point the story and lore is so convoluted and messy that a bit of retconning to smooth things out wouldn't be a bad thing.
I'm just curious, what would you all say is the amount of time a person should spend leveling a new character? Assuming a streamlined story experience? Is 20-30 hours a good amount of time? Too long for such an old game? What's the "sweet spot" for how long it would take to start a new character and get the caught up to current content.
I guess we should also consider the fact that at this point we know a level squish is coming. So for the sake of argument, we're talking level 1-60 here. How long should it take for a person to go 1-60, which would put them ready for 60-70 which would be new expansion content?
They need to spend an entire expansion to do a complete streamline of the story, zones, leveling, and new-character experience. I realize that is a massive undertaking and what I'm proposing won't be cheap or easy. But it needs to happen. It's not something they can continue to let fester for much longer. This change is pretty much mandatory for the continued long-term health of the game.
They need to:
-Identify key story elements and craft a comprehensive MSQ story experience for the player that will give them the vast majority of the XP necessary to level a brand new character
-Rebalance all zones so that as a player levels from 1 to Max, they hit all crucial story beats
-Mark some zones as "story zones" and those zones will be the ones with the essential story elements and maybe some supporting side quests
-Rebalance non-story zones in such a way that they are still useful for leveling or questing in some way.
-They need to identify story elements that might not even be in the game anymore, such as the destruction of Theramore, and incorporate those back into the story
Basically, for the long term health of the game, they need to do a complete lore & story restructuring, leveling restructuring, and zone restructuring, and all of those things tie together and should be done simultaneously. They need to deliver a succinct story that is fun and engaging, and removes all of the fluff that was added over the years to pad it out.
It might even require some retconning and simplification to get it done, but at this point the story and lore is so convoluted and messy that a bit of retconning to smooth things out wouldn't be a bad thing.
So....the Cata revamp? But bigger? And with people being loathe to sacrifice dev time from things like raids to get it?
I'm inclined to agree. By removing/replacing the vanilla quests they essentially deleted chapter 1 of WoW's story, and by making the new quests cataclysmed zones be post-Wrath they maximized the confusion.
New characters start out at chapter 4, then they proceed to chapters 2 and 3, and when they're done with those they head over to chapter 4 part 2.
Well, at least that's how it was at the time. Now with the leveling redone again and the experience level of zones being flexible there's no kind of sensible linear order to anything.
It's even worse because in almost every expansion, the 'conclusion' to the expansion is hidden in the final raid of that expansion. And sometimes in multiple raids, which obviously are no longer relevant content anymore. You could, in some cases, go back and experience that content when you're 10-15 levels overleveled, but that means going back to old content to find out how it ended, in most cases after you've completed the next content. So not only do you start in chapter 4, but you have to pretty much finish chapter 5 and start on chapter 6 before you can go back to see how chapter 4 ended.
Don't even get me started on how nonsensical the allied race stories are. The Mag'Har's story starts during the epilogue of chapter 6, which you can't access until you've beaten most of chapter 8, and then once you actually unlock them, they start in chapter 4 before moving to chapter 2.
They need to spend an entire expansion to do a complete streamline of the story, zones, leveling, and new-character experience. I realize that is a massive undertaking and what I'm proposing won't be cheap or easy. But it needs to happen. It's not something they can continue to let fester for much longer. This change is pretty much mandatory for the continued long-term health of the game.
They need to:
-Identify key story elements and craft a comprehensive MSQ story experience for the player that will give them the vast majority of the XP necessary to level a brand new character
-Rebalance all zones so that as a player levels from 1 to Max, they hit all crucial story beats
-Mark some zones as "story zones" and those zones will be the ones with the essential story elements and maybe some supporting side quests
-Rebalance non-story zones in such a way that they are still useful for leveling or questing in some way.
-They need to identify story elements that might not even be in the game anymore, such as the destruction of Theramore, and incorporate those back into the story
Basically, for the long term health of the game, they need to do a complete lore & story restructuring, leveling restructuring, and zone restructuring, and all of those things tie together and should be done simultaneously. They need to deliver a succinct story that is fun and engaging, and removes all of the fluff that was added over the years to pad it out.
It might even require some retconning and simplification to get it done, but at this point the story and lore is so convoluted and messy that a bit of retconning to smooth things out wouldn't be a bad thing.
So....the Cata revamp? But bigger? And with people being loathe to sacrifice dev time from things like raids to get it?
No, not the Cata revamp.
I'm talking about a complete story experience that delivers the highlights of every expansion, from Classic to BfA, all in one shot.
A person starts at level 1 and they are a nobody. They do some stuff and attract the attention of important people. They are given a couple missions that increases their rise in fame and renown. The story would be designed in such a way that a person levels from 1-60 (taking into account the level squish we all know is coming) and in that time, they play a complete story that takes them through Classic, to BC, to WotLk, and so forth.
And the goal would be to hit all the high points of the story and major plot beats. The important stuff. Like for example, the Wrathgate scenario in WotLK. And the fall of the Lich King of course.
What I'm proposing isn't a Cataclysm event. What I'm proposing is a complete retelling of all of WoW, but in such a way that the story flows together in a logical way, the quests and plot all make sense, and a brand new character is given a complete experience on their way to level cap.
Edit: And along the way, it will fix all of the weird time skip, fragmented, and disjointed storytelling that exists right now. The idea would be to preserve the WoW story, but fix all the problems with the new-character experience along the way. They would fix all of the phasing issues, so that all the half dozen horde warchiefs aren't showing up at random times, when the story doesn't make sense for them to be there, and so forth. The idea here is just to straighten the timeline out, and tell a comprehensive story along the way, and fix all the back and forth wackiness that currently exists.
WoW's story is also difficult to follow because so much of it is told through alternate media like books and comics.
+10
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
And what content is created for existing players in this massive undertaking that takes the place of an expansion?
There's the problem they're having. With every expansion, the new player experience gets more and more disjointed, but to go back and fix it would be a herculean effort that would essentially take the place of an expansion leaving existing players with an almost completely abrupt cessation of what is more or less a predictable dev cycle.
I haven't done this in a while, but if I order 20 bucks of bnet store credit on amazon, I can then spend 15 to buy a game time token, then use that to activate my time without having to use a credit card to activate a subscription, right?
They need to spend an entire expansion to do a complete streamline of the story, zones, leveling, and new-character experience. I realize that is a massive undertaking and what I'm proposing won't be cheap or easy. But it needs to happen. It's not something they can continue to let fester for much longer. This change is pretty much mandatory for the continued long-term health of the game.
They need to:
-Identify key story elements and craft a comprehensive MSQ story experience for the player that will give them the vast majority of the XP necessary to level a brand new character
-Rebalance all zones so that as a player levels from 1 to Max, they hit all crucial story beats
-Mark some zones as "story zones" and those zones will be the ones with the essential story elements and maybe some supporting side quests
-Rebalance non-story zones in such a way that they are still useful for leveling or questing in some way.
-They need to identify story elements that might not even be in the game anymore, such as the destruction of Theramore, and incorporate those back into the story
Basically, for the long term health of the game, they need to do a complete lore & story restructuring, leveling restructuring, and zone restructuring, and all of those things tie together and should be done simultaneously. They need to deliver a succinct story that is fun and engaging, and removes all of the fluff that was added over the years to pad it out.
It might even require some retconning and simplification to get it done, but at this point the story and lore is so convoluted and messy that a bit of retconning to smooth things out wouldn't be a bad thing.
So....the Cata revamp? But bigger? And with people being loathe to sacrifice dev time from things like raids to get it?
No, not the Cata revamp.
I'm talking about a complete story experience that delivers the highlights of every expansion, from Classic to BfA, all in one shot.
A person starts at level 1 and they are a nobody. They do some stuff and attract the attention of important people. They are given a couple missions that increases their rise in fame and renown. The story would be designed in such a way that a person levels from 1-60 (taking into account the level squish we all know is coming) and in that time, they play a complete story that takes them through Classic, to BC, to WotLk, and so forth.
And the goal would be to hit all the high points of the story and major plot beats. The important stuff. Like for example, the Wrathgate scenario in WotLK. And the fall of the Lich King of course.
What I'm proposing isn't a Cataclysm event. What I'm proposing is a complete retelling of all of WoW, but in such a way that the story flows together in a logical way, the quests and plot all make sense, and a brand new character is given a complete experience on their way to level cap.
Edit: And along the way, it will fix all of the weird time skip, fragmented, and disjointed storytelling that exists right now. The idea would be to preserve the WoW story, but fix all the problems with the new-character experience along the way. They would fix all of the phasing issues, so that all the half dozen horde warchiefs aren't showing up at random times, when the story doesn't make sense for them to be there, and so forth. The idea here is just to straighten the timeline out, and tell a comprehensive story along the way, and fix all the back and forth wackiness that currently exists.
Here is the problem none of that makes money. People burn through leveling so fast and everyone is constantly parroting “the real game starts at end cap” that not a lot of people really care. At which point people start complaining there isn’t a raid to do and unsubscribe . Hence the “ can’t do x without sacrificing a raid tier” meme. For what it’s worth I do agree with you and something like that as well as the public trial and execution of the writing staff would go a long way to making me actually care about the franchise again I just don’t see it happening after how much people complained about cataclysm.
I think you can just buy game sub time directly with blizzard wallet money, without interacting with tokens... probably. I don't know why they wouldn't let you spend wallet money on that anyway. You can't actually buy a game time token directly for dollars, and you wouldn't want to either because you can only spend $20 to buy gold equivalent in value to whatever the current gold price for 1 token is which is 1 month of game time and thus worth $15. It's supposed to be essentially spending dollars = buying gold, spending gold = buying game time.
If you have enough gold between your characters on a single server for a token's current price, you can also log in to the character select screen and directly buy a month of game time from there without actually entering the game, with the gold taken directly from your characters.
And what content is created for existing players in this massive undertaking that takes the place of an expansion?
There's the problem they're having. With every expansion, the new player experience gets more and more disjointed, but to go back and fix it would be a herculean effort that would essentially take the place of an expansion leaving existing players with an almost completely abrupt cessation of what is more or less a predictable dev cycle.
Which is why the solution leads to "let players skip as much as possible". That's why Ion is talking about a level squish, if you fit everything into 1-60, you can level up to 50 on Cata revamp content and then do the last 10 on any expansion, for example.
They need to spend an entire expansion to do a complete streamline of the story, zones, leveling, and new-character experience. I realize that is a massive undertaking and what I'm proposing won't be cheap or easy. But it needs to happen. It's not something they can continue to let fester for much longer. This change is pretty much mandatory for the continued long-term health of the game.
They need to:
-Identify key story elements and craft a comprehensive MSQ story experience for the player that will give them the vast majority of the XP necessary to level a brand new character
-Rebalance all zones so that as a player levels from 1 to Max, they hit all crucial story beats
-Mark some zones as "story zones" and those zones will be the ones with the essential story elements and maybe some supporting side quests
-Rebalance non-story zones in such a way that they are still useful for leveling or questing in some way.
-They need to identify story elements that might not even be in the game anymore, such as the destruction of Theramore, and incorporate those back into the story
Basically, for the long term health of the game, they need to do a complete lore & story restructuring, leveling restructuring, and zone restructuring, and all of those things tie together and should be done simultaneously. They need to deliver a succinct story that is fun and engaging, and removes all of the fluff that was added over the years to pad it out.
It might even require some retconning and simplification to get it done, but at this point the story and lore is so convoluted and messy that a bit of retconning to smooth things out wouldn't be a bad thing.
So....the Cata revamp? But bigger? And with people being loathe to sacrifice dev time from things like raids to get it?
No, not the Cata revamp.
I'm talking about a complete story experience that delivers the highlights of every expansion, from Classic to BfA, all in one shot.
A person starts at level 1 and they are a nobody. They do some stuff and attract the attention of important people. They are given a couple missions that increases their rise in fame and renown. The story would be designed in such a way that a person levels from 1-60 (taking into account the level squish we all know is coming) and in that time, they play a complete story that takes them through Classic, to BC, to WotLk, and so forth.
And the goal would be to hit all the high points of the story and major plot beats. The important stuff. Like for example, the Wrathgate scenario in WotLK. And the fall of the Lich King of course.
What I'm proposing isn't a Cataclysm event. What I'm proposing is a complete retelling of all of WoW, but in such a way that the story flows together in a logical way, the quests and plot all make sense, and a brand new character is given a complete experience on their way to level cap.
Edit: And along the way, it will fix all of the weird time skip, fragmented, and disjointed storytelling that exists right now. The idea would be to preserve the WoW story, but fix all the problems with the new-character experience along the way. They would fix all of the phasing issues, so that all the half dozen horde warchiefs aren't showing up at random times, when the story doesn't make sense for them to be there, and so forth. The idea here is just to straighten the timeline out, and tell a comprehensive story along the way, and fix all the back and forth wackiness that currently exists.
Here is the problem none of that makes money. People burn through leveling so fast and everyone is constantly parroting “the real game starts at end cap” that not a lot of people really care. At which point people start complaining there isn’t a raid to do and unsubscribe . Hence the “ can’t do x without sacrificing a raid tier” meme. For what it’s worth I do agree with you and something like that as well as the public trial and execution of the writing staff would go a long way to making me actually care about the franchise again I just don’t see it happening after how much people complained about cataclysm.
The problem with that of course, is it basically abandons attracting new players to the game and pretty much just tells people that only the newest content matters. This would mean that if Blizzard cares about their story, they'd be better off making more self-contained stories that don't rely on the history of what has come before in the game and would be better off just giving new players a way to go directly to the new self-contained story and avoid the complex mess of all the various wow stories to date. One approach that may result in less effort required is to just turn the different expansions content into Volumes (as in book volumes) and let players pretty much choose which volumes to play, making them as self-contained as possible. There would still need to be some effort required, but not as much as the MSQ method that Lucascraft suggested above.
I’m not advocating for that approach. I’m just saying that’s the status quo , and as far as blizzard losing business good. Maybe the genre would benefit from fresh perspectives of other developers . Or failing that blizzard actually trying to do something other then time /rep gates .
I don’t see why the story needs to be re-told; I don’t imagine new players necessarily care about eight year old story and if for some reason they do, well, it’s there. Existing players already know the story, such as it is.
Really they just need to write stories that’re less reliant on a “corrupt” villain and everyone else being a dumbass
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I agree they need to make substantial changes to the story, both the writing and how it's presented in the game. However I think it sucks to have to play through the entire timeline of the game from the start, either as a new player or on an alt. All those old stories are in the past, nobody really cares about them anymore, and you don't get to actually see the conclusions to any of stories while leveling anyway. People just watch the endings on YouTube.
If I had my way the level boost experience would basically be the default way to experience the game. That's certainly the way I already recommend that people play it. You don't really need to see the scorpion-killing origins of your character, just give them a backstory that they are already an accomplished adventurer. I'd like to see the old world zones kept up to date with modern content, not preserved as newbie zones forever.
Most non-allied race characters never had much of an origin anyway; you’re just like, an orc/human/whatever who picked up a sword/hammer/staff and has been an orgy of violence ever since.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
It's an MMO, as time goes on the story is going to be inconsistent and weird. That should be an understood thing just by thinking and breathing. "Oh this is what the story was back in year 20XX, and it's currently the year 20YY, I get it, time is linear and the MMO is still live."
Blizzard doesn't have to fix anything, players don't have to play in a specific order to "get it." Nobody has to do anything.
it doesn't have to be that way! they just never bothered!
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
So I'm a dumbass and a friend just clued me in that the worgen and goblins have a model update on PTR right now. The improvement on female worgen is really good.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Thing that has made me sad: Trade goods in BfA sell for jack shit on the AH, to the point that you should vendor most of it. That is... wow. Maybe it's because of the server I'm on; huge population density and thus a lot of people scrapping items.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Thing that has made me sad: Trade goods in BfA sell for jack shit on the AH, to the point that you should vendor most of it. That is... wow. Maybe it's because of the server I'm on; huge population density and thus a lot of people scrapping items.
The stuff that comes from scrapping, that's certainly true. Herbs still sell for a fair amount and Osmenite Ore from Naz is pretty pricey.
So I'm a dumbass and a friend just clued me in that the worgen and goblins have a model update on PTR right now. The improvement on female worgen is really good.
Yes it fixes a few of my major issues with them. They got rid of the looks half asleep if you look at them straight on and they looked like rabid chihuahua from the side. Their muzzles are more tapered now and they don't have the weird side snarl. The change is not huge but the overall effect is a lot more appealing than the previous insanity.
Thing that has made me sad: Trade goods in BfA sell for jack shit on the AH, to the point that you should vendor most of it. That is... wow. Maybe it's because of the server I'm on; huge population density and thus a lot of people scrapping items.
The stuff that comes from scrapping, that's certainly true. Herbs still sell for a fair amount and Osmenite Ore from Naz is pretty pricey.
Ore in general is the one thing that holds up price wise. A lot of professions need it in large amounts and you don't get nearly as much of it from scrapping as you do cloth/leather/gem stuff.
I just unlocked the puzzle world quests in Nazjatar and I've gotta say, that ley lines one is fantastic. It actually takes some effort.
The bejeweled one was harder for like first 3 says until people complained it was too hard.
People thought Bejeweled-WoW was hard?
It's easy now, was harder right at patch release (doable, but actually took some thought).
Yeah, rather than just be "eliminate X number of Y colored runes" it was "match 5 of Y colored rune at once" which was tricky given the size of the board.
And once people realized that the best way to complete it was to keep restarting the quest until they had the solution right under their nose, it got changed quick.
I just unlocked the puzzle world quests in Nazjatar and I've gotta say, that ley lines one is fantastic. It actually takes some effort.
The bejeweled one was harder for like first 3 says until people complained it was too hard.
People thought Bejeweled-WoW was hard?
It's easy now, was harder right at patch release (doable, but actually took some thought).
Yeah, rather than just be "eliminate X number of Y colored runes" it was "match 5 of Y colored rune at once" which was tricky given the size of the board.
And once people realized that the best way to complete it was to keep restarting the quest until they had the solution right under their nose, it got changed quick.
I also misread what the quest wanted, i thought it was asking to make 5 matches if save color without any other color matches in between, i.e.
3 red times 5, and if you do 3 red 4 times then a 3 yellow then 2 more red, that's fail. Which is way harder, again, due to board size.
A single row of 5 is way easier, though it takes thought. It's also faster than the current solution, though the current is completely brainless, and you can get it just by completing matches as you see them if any color, eventually you'll do enough.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I am fucking crying laughing.
Most of you probably know about the one quest on Mechagon where you help a Goblin build a gun, and the reward is a 12 hour buff for a new temporary power. Shoots the gun a few times, actually respectable damage and huge knockback.
After getting it one of the bosses, some hog, was available, so I went to join everyone in fighting it. I was thinking "tee hee, I'm gonna use my gun on it," and just as I did, three people unloaded on it with theirs. And it was a nonstop knockback parade of this poor boss just getting massively disrespected by all of us. The fight took longer as a result but I mean, damn, that was worth seeing.
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Going a step further for me, the two right-side rows being overall shorter help me sort things out very uniformly.
Primary bar is my attacks (or heals if I'm a healer but that'll never happen). The bar above it is my secondary abilities, things usually associated with other spec roles, or AoEs, stuns, etc.
Bottom-right bar is my "RAWR SRS PLYR" bar, with my raid / trinket buffs. The bar above that has splash over from the left-top bar, and always has my mount buttons.
The two bars on the right side of the screen house my fast travel (warp) buttons, my tradeskills, long-term-why-wouldn't-these-be-on-always buffs, and anything I might have to access for the current expansion / zone; like because of Mechagon, now I have some grenades over there and such.
And for all that I still have spaces set between categories so I don't misclick. In Classic, especially in TBC, every goddamn button was in play on my characters and it was a mess to manage. Being a shaman in those days with so many totems, yikes.
If you pick your pvp talents it will never bother you about them again, whether you use them or not.
Edit - And I had very much picked out all my PvP talents so I dunno wtf the game was doing with that bug or what caused it.
Playing with the classic talent trees I know why they went with the cata talents to solve the power creep and other problems with that but the cata talents caused other problems
Part of me wants to play a shaman in classic to see the mess I played a affliction warlock then so I know the Ui gets messy then
If you haven't been playing since at least Cataclysm, it's nearly impossible to figure out what the hell is going on in the game. It's like you make a new character and go to Orgrimmar and hey, there's warchief Sylvanna, that's cool, then you start doing quests in Azeroth and they're telling you about Warchief Garrosh. Alright, oh now it's time to choose to go to either Burning Crusade or WotLK content. Hey now it's Warchief Thrall. Now you're choosing between Cataclysm or Mists, and once again new warchiefs. Or maybe old warchiefs? Also one is maybe evil now? Ok, now a troll's warchief for some reason? Are the alliance and horde friends or not? Am I travelling back in time to Draenor? Or is this alt-history present Draenor? What about burning crusade Draenor, has it been 'overwritten' or do both exist? Nothing makes sense and the game doesn't do anything to tell you what you need to know in order for it to make sense.
It's such a damn mess. And I don't think the devs realize that to new players, or returning players who haven't played in years, it feels like there may as well not be a story at all. It's like being dropped into season 6 of Game of Thrones and being told that you're only allowed to watch maybe 65% of the previous seasons, but you can't watch any of it in order.
Anyways that's my rant.
New characters start out at chapter 4, then they proceed to chapters 2 and 3, and when they're done with those they head over to chapter 4 part 2.
Well, at least that's how it was at the time. Now with the leveling redone again and the experience level of zones being flexible there's no kind of sensible linear order to anything.
They need to:
-Identify key story elements and craft a comprehensive MSQ story experience for the player that will give them the vast majority of the XP necessary to level a brand new character
-Rebalance all zones so that as a player levels from 1 to Max, they hit all crucial story beats
-Mark some zones as "story zones" and those zones will be the ones with the essential story elements and maybe some supporting side quests
-Rebalance non-story zones in such a way that they are still useful for leveling or questing in some way.
-They need to identify story elements that might not even be in the game anymore, such as the destruction of Theramore, and incorporate those back into the story
Basically, for the long term health of the game, they need to do a complete lore & story restructuring, leveling restructuring, and zone restructuring, and all of those things tie together and should be done simultaneously. They need to deliver a succinct story that is fun and engaging, and removes all of the fluff that was added over the years to pad it out.
It might even require some retconning and simplification to get it done, but at this point the story and lore is so convoluted and messy that a bit of retconning to smooth things out wouldn't be a bad thing.
I'm just curious, what would you all say is the amount of time a person should spend leveling a new character? Assuming a streamlined story experience? Is 20-30 hours a good amount of time? Too long for such an old game? What's the "sweet spot" for how long it would take to start a new character and get the caught up to current content.
I guess we should also consider the fact that at this point we know a level squish is coming. So for the sake of argument, we're talking level 1-60 here. How long should it take for a person to go 1-60, which would put them ready for 60-70 which would be new expansion content?
So....the Cata revamp? But bigger? And with people being loathe to sacrifice dev time from things like raids to get it?
It's even worse because in almost every expansion, the 'conclusion' to the expansion is hidden in the final raid of that expansion. And sometimes in multiple raids, which obviously are no longer relevant content anymore. You could, in some cases, go back and experience that content when you're 10-15 levels overleveled, but that means going back to old content to find out how it ended, in most cases after you've completed the next content. So not only do you start in chapter 4, but you have to pretty much finish chapter 5 and start on chapter 6 before you can go back to see how chapter 4 ended.
Don't even get me started on how nonsensical the allied race stories are. The Mag'Har's story starts during the epilogue of chapter 6, which you can't access until you've beaten most of chapter 8, and then once you actually unlock them, they start in chapter 4 before moving to chapter 2.
Who thought this was ok?
No, not the Cata revamp.
I'm talking about a complete story experience that delivers the highlights of every expansion, from Classic to BfA, all in one shot.
A person starts at level 1 and they are a nobody. They do some stuff and attract the attention of important people. They are given a couple missions that increases their rise in fame and renown. The story would be designed in such a way that a person levels from 1-60 (taking into account the level squish we all know is coming) and in that time, they play a complete story that takes them through Classic, to BC, to WotLk, and so forth.
And the goal would be to hit all the high points of the story and major plot beats. The important stuff. Like for example, the Wrathgate scenario in WotLK. And the fall of the Lich King of course.
What I'm proposing isn't a Cataclysm event. What I'm proposing is a complete retelling of all of WoW, but in such a way that the story flows together in a logical way, the quests and plot all make sense, and a brand new character is given a complete experience on their way to level cap.
Edit: And along the way, it will fix all of the weird time skip, fragmented, and disjointed storytelling that exists right now. The idea would be to preserve the WoW story, but fix all the problems with the new-character experience along the way. They would fix all of the phasing issues, so that all the half dozen horde warchiefs aren't showing up at random times, when the story doesn't make sense for them to be there, and so forth. The idea here is just to straighten the timeline out, and tell a comprehensive story along the way, and fix all the back and forth wackiness that currently exists.
There's the problem they're having. With every expansion, the new player experience gets more and more disjointed, but to go back and fix it would be a herculean effort that would essentially take the place of an expansion leaving existing players with an almost completely abrupt cessation of what is more or less a predictable dev cycle.
Here is the problem none of that makes money. People burn through leveling so fast and everyone is constantly parroting “the real game starts at end cap” that not a lot of people really care. At which point people start complaining there isn’t a raid to do and unsubscribe . Hence the “ can’t do x without sacrificing a raid tier” meme. For what it’s worth I do agree with you and something like that as well as the public trial and execution of the writing staff would go a long way to making me actually care about the franchise again I just don’t see it happening after how much people complained about cataclysm.
If you have enough gold between your characters on a single server for a token's current price, you can also log in to the character select screen and directly buy a month of game time from there without actually entering the game, with the gold taken directly from your characters.
Which is why the solution leads to "let players skip as much as possible". That's why Ion is talking about a level squish, if you fit everything into 1-60, you can level up to 50 on Cata revamp content and then do the last 10 on any expansion, for example.
The problem with that of course, is it basically abandons attracting new players to the game and pretty much just tells people that only the newest content matters. This would mean that if Blizzard cares about their story, they'd be better off making more self-contained stories that don't rely on the history of what has come before in the game and would be better off just giving new players a way to go directly to the new self-contained story and avoid the complex mess of all the various wow stories to date. One approach that may result in less effort required is to just turn the different expansions content into Volumes (as in book volumes) and let players pretty much choose which volumes to play, making them as self-contained as possible. There would still need to be some effort required, but not as much as the MSQ method that Lucascraft suggested above.
Really they just need to write stories that’re less reliant on a “corrupt” villain and everyone else being a dumbass
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
If I had my way the level boost experience would basically be the default way to experience the game. That's certainly the way I already recommend that people play it. You don't really need to see the scorpion-killing origins of your character, just give them a backstory that they are already an accomplished adventurer. I'd like to see the old world zones kept up to date with modern content, not preserved as newbie zones forever.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Blizzard doesn't have to fix anything, players don't have to play in a specific order to "get it." Nobody has to do anything.
The stuff that comes from scrapping, that's certainly true. Herbs still sell for a fair amount and Osmenite Ore from Naz is pretty pricey.
Yes it fixes a few of my major issues with them. They got rid of the looks half asleep if you look at them straight on and they looked like rabid chihuahua from the side. Their muzzles are more tapered now and they don't have the weird side snarl. The change is not huge but the overall effect is a lot more appealing than the previous insanity.
Ore in general is the one thing that holds up price wise. A lot of professions need it in large amounts and you don't get nearly as much of it from scrapping as you do cloth/leather/gem stuff.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
The bejeweled one was harder for like first 3 says until people complained it was too hard.
It's easy now, was harder right at patch release (doable, but actually took some thought).
Yeah, rather than just be "eliminate X number of Y colored runes" it was "match 5 of Y colored rune at once" which was tricky given the size of the board.
And once people realized that the best way to complete it was to keep restarting the quest until they had the solution right under their nose, it got changed quick.
I also misread what the quest wanted, i thought it was asking to make 5 matches if save color without any other color matches in between, i.e.
3 red times 5, and if you do 3 red 4 times then a 3 yellow then 2 more red, that's fail. Which is way harder, again, due to board size.
A single row of 5 is way easier, though it takes thought. It's also faster than the current solution, though the current is completely brainless, and you can get it just by completing matches as you see them if any color, eventually you'll do enough.
Most of you probably know about the one quest on Mechagon where you help a Goblin build a gun, and the reward is a 12 hour buff for a new temporary power. Shoots the gun a few times, actually respectable damage and huge knockback.
After getting it one of the bosses, some hog, was available, so I went to join everyone in fighting it. I was thinking "tee hee, I'm gonna use my gun on it," and just as I did, three people unloaded on it with theirs. And it was a nonstop knockback parade of this poor boss just getting massively disrespected by all of us. The fight took longer as a result but I mean, damn, that was worth seeing.