World of Warcraft: Current Year
- Thread starter hodj
- Start date
I agree with Kevin Jordan that they made wow classes and combat very lean and mean. Its good in once sens but boring for MMO.
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Leadsalad
Cis-XYite-Nationalist
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Lean in what era? Vanilla-TBC? Or Live?
Because Vanilla is the leanest it ever was, literal 1 button classes through half of the raid content due to system limitations (debuff slots) and mob design choices (fire resist/immunity).
Why would you ever bring a rogue in vanilla raiding when fury warriors exist if the content was tuned harder? Outside of pure gear drop limitations, you wouldn't. Why would you bring warlocks beyond the 2 you need for the key melee and mage damage debuffs? Why would you bring a hunter on alliance side with BoS existing?
Vanilla was not tuned around the meta because the designers were all new at this and the players were coming off of EQ, land of the auto attack and c-heal rotation. As players advanced so did the developers.
The design issue with heterogeneity between classes is that you then cannot design difficult content that focuses on small groups (see m+ high end meta) with classes that don't have AoE, CC, or interrupt (key abilities) as they will be excluded from said content.
Kevin sniffs his own farts a bit as well, I watch his channel and get into debates on it.
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Bondurant
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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It's not really breaking news that any criticism at Blizzard right now is being frown upon, whether you're last month CS hire or any senior lead.
Roadmaps are established months / years prior, unless you come with a quick-to-understand, quick-to-implement, cost-less-than-nothing idea, you're gonna get buried / tune out.
In my opinion, they have corporate "consumer must stay online" goals and their job is to tune that to whatever "the customers enjoy".
Their problem, I think, is they're being too defensive about community feeback for some reason, and unless there's so much outrage they don't give a fuck about forums, discords, streamers, influencers have to say. It's what we perceive as "we know better than you, please shut up now".
It's obvious Blizzard have access to metrics / feedback they're comfortable with. When influencers like Preach, Asmongold, Bellulard, top raiders, top arena guys keep telling them it's bad design / development, it's easy for them to squash that as "000_influencer is selling his opinion, who cares".
To be honest, most of them vanilla WoW developers didn't really have to deal with community outreach, they did their stuff corporate free, surely with passion, most of them were avid gamers, they didn't have to go through the company loops to please higherups, they gave their best and probably didn't care about anything else than making players happy.
And "making players happy" nowadays is a metric way more different and convoluted, with way more repercussions in a highly competitive market than before. A market where you can be the golden goose while updating your linkedIn.
Roadmaps are established months / years prior, unless you come with a quick-to-understand, quick-to-implement, cost-less-than-nothing idea, you're gonna get buried / tune out.
In my opinion, they have corporate "consumer must stay online" goals and their job is to tune that to whatever "the customers enjoy".
Their problem, I think, is they're being too defensive about community feeback for some reason, and unless there's so much outrage they don't give a fuck about forums, discords, streamers, influencers have to say. It's what we perceive as "we know better than you, please shut up now".
It's obvious Blizzard have access to metrics / feedback they're comfortable with. When influencers like Preach, Asmongold, Bellulard, top raiders, top arena guys keep telling them it's bad design / development, it's easy for them to squash that as "000_influencer is selling his opinion, who cares".
To be honest, most of them vanilla WoW developers didn't really have to deal with community outreach, they did their stuff corporate free, surely with passion, most of them were avid gamers, they didn't have to go through the company loops to please higherups, they gave their best and probably didn't care about anything else than making players happy.
And "making players happy" nowadays is a metric way more different and convoluted, with way more repercussions in a highly competitive market than before. A market where you can be the golden goose while updating your linkedIn.
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You have to remember that encounter design at first had just one or two gimmicks per fight. Also, no enrage timer. You could make a boss fight last 20 to 30 minutes no problem if you could keep your raid alive. 40 man raiding was seen more as a social experience.
This all started to change with BWL, and is also one of the reasons why Vaelastrasz is known as the very first "guild killer": The soft enrage makes your raid die one by one, so you are forced to optimize DPS. This formed the first "meta" in the raid game. TBC did away with such gimmicks and just had hard enrage timers.
Kevin Jordan later acknowledged this: endgame raiding was driving the meta of the game, because it was the only player power/gear acquisition path (excluding the PvP vendor and the T0 dungeon sets) and so people started going this route. In hindsight, this made the hybrid tax a liability to those players, so they removed it in TBC.
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Remember when Ghostcrawler started posting on the forums and explained to players the reasons, how and why of their game design? He much later told the story that higher ups couldn't make heads or tails of it and later forbade him posting there altogether.
Rezz
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Combat Dagger rogue was pretty fun for a minute in Vanilla, and while it was pretty spammy (lawl what rogue wasn't?) it felt more "fun" than other builds.
Granted, same with pre-Protection tree not being stupid warrior builds. And I actually just mean build. Mortal strike, some fury for crit and all the defensive bonuses in the first couple of tiers of protection. GG tank/dps.
Granted, same with pre-Protection tree not being stupid warrior builds. And I actually just mean build. Mortal strike, some fury for crit and all the defensive bonuses in the first couple of tiers of protection. GG tank/dps.
jayrebb
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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I do. The Ghostcrawler era was interesting.
He was directly challenged and engaged constantly. It helped keep him on point.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how to play rogue well. Outlaw seems alright, but the other classes I've leveled just kill stuff a lot easier, bigger crits right at level cap, often better AoE, better survive-ability, etc. Granted I just hit 120 and my gear is bad, but I'm wondering how much better it's going to get with good gear. I'm trying to pick a main and having a hard time. Sub and Ass were just sub-par and ass when I tried them. Again, my gear sucks, I'm only doing solo PvE content right now and I don't know the mechanics of either spec well. It just feels a lot better as fury war to go in and smash stuff. Crits everywhere, good survive-ability, no need for tons of cooldowns or tricks to get it to work well. I like the look and feel of rogue more, but Fury War/DH/WW Monk/Enhance Shaman and even ret Paladin (only 101 so far) have felt a lot more powerful on solo PvE content. I guess Rogue starts to shine with great gear and in group situations or PvP content, but it just feels weak right now and I'm having a hard time enjoying doing world quests and such.
Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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Rogues are just not fantastic in 8.3, other than Assassin in PvP or speed clearing M+ as Outlaw.
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Penance
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Rogue might be teh worst at soloing hard content in this game. You can't really kite because melee, you don't really have sustain unless you have a shit ton of leech (or are specced leeching poison for assassin). However they are near the top for soloing world content (right after Druid) you can blaze through (stealth, mobility).
There are two main rules with Rogues, 3 if Assassin (never played sub much in BFA)
1. Never cap your energy.
2. Never over cap your combo points
3. (assassin) Never let your bleeds/poisons fall off
Rogue si an extremely spammy class. And if you can come to terms with it you can do amazing things with it. I think I"m going a different class for SL because I'm tired of spamming shit so much.
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Thanks, that made a lot of sense. Looks like I just need to get into the mindset of the class, learn the moveset better (and probably get some gear). I'd like to go assassin eventually, but we'll see how it goes. Having a lot of fun with enhancement shaman, but I hear they aren't that strong. Not sure how much all of this matters when I eventually reach endgame. I've done about 2 dungeons since I came back. The rest has been open world stuff. I really enjoy WoW dungeons though, so I'm looking forward to doing more dungeon content eventually.
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There are rotation helpers like Hekili, with most of them based on SimulationCraft scripts. If you are learning a new class/spec it may be a good idea to install one and go to town on a training dummy to learn the rotation and to build some muscle memory.
I think the first ones got popular with WotLK feral cat dps.
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Qhue
Tranny Chaser
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Rotation helpers? It always seems silly to me that a 'rotation' exists. Means that it's not really a strategy / rpg at all and more of a rhythm game with a fancy skin. I suppose its natural with the overall action-y speed of RPGs these days... Very different from the style of even Baldur's Gate type pacing.
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joz123
Potato del Grande
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This is the way MMO games have evolved. People were bored of the vanilla frost mage frost bolt one-spell pony, and so the players wanted that higher skill ceiling.
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