I dunno some of them are cool, most are bad- same as always. I like the faceless rock helm for War at least. Ultimately, I think the ancient rigging/ skinning system they have for outfits is just out of juice for them to play with.
World of Warcraft: Current Year
- Thread starter hodj
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I dunno some of them are cool, most are bad- same as always. I like the faceless rock helm for War at least. Ultimately, I think the ancient rigging/ skinning system they have for outfits is just out of juice for them to play with.
Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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This made sense back when they thought it would be "war in warcraft, pvp!!!" and they wanted different races to be immediately identifiable so you knew if it was horde or alliance (although this went in the dumpster with the introduction of Pandas). But class silhouettes seems limiting if they are going down that route
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Sorry, I was talking about mythic raiding. M+ dungeons have their similar, but slightly different challenges, as they are seen as an alternate power progression path, which at this point they don't really know what to do about them. Hence the reduction of the item level.
Here's what I think: The world first race has become a mutation of its own through incestuous inbreeding and self-selection, and become an abomination, and is therefore a major detriment to the health of the game in its current form. So, let me explain:
There is too much money involved, both external and in-game. The way the world first raids are presented has an influence on the community, and a lot of wannabe world first raiders follows the out of the box strategies like sheep. It normalizes buying gear and carries. Blizzard should not cater to that, at all.
Also, how much development resources (as in: developer time) are wasted on making a complete raid for the world first race, when everyone is just interested in the race at the last two or three bosses? Only for Blizzard to tune fights and fix bugs on the fly? I have a feeling that it has become an ego thing between Blizzard developers vs. world first raiders, to the detriment of the normal players,. Developers seem to be afraid to tune anything spec-related during the world first race, solidifying the community perception of performance of certain specs even more.
Should the game have harder content for this target audience? Absolutely, but don't make it the same content, but harder. Blizzard had the right idea with the Mage tower challenges, so why can't we get one or two specific super-hard encounters for the world first raiding crowd, and leave the normal/heroic raids to the majority of their audience? We had that already with Algalon, what the fuck happened?
I think there is an internal feart at Blizzard that only a few select players are engaging with that kind of content, and that they therefore can't justify the costs of developing that content to the bean counters. This is probably how everyone got The Maw + Torghast forced down their throats for power progression. I guess no one explained to them how this works at car companies, where they have super luxury cars (or brands) that never recoup their development costs, but are there simply for the halo effect.
Also, about that "game 1" and "game 2" discussion: At some point the game developers of "game 1" have to acknowledge that there is emergent gameplay and a certain metagame. This is basically inevitable, but I find it totally disingenuous to talk about how Blizzard has nothing to do with "game 2", when they leaned themselves into the community metagame aspect themselves with their own version of raider.io. They previously did the same thing with GearScore. Now you can't wash your hands of it, especially when you see it reinforcing toxic behavior in the community.
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You aren't wrong, but it appears they finally realized how much damage they've done to themselves to engage with game 2 at all. They literally have no choice but to flush that toxicity out, if they ever hope to have a "healthy" system again. If there is actually anything other than platitudes in that direction- we'll have to see. But I really doubt it. The cancer has roots too deep now.
Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I wouldnt be surprised if you could set up Group 1 as your every day subscribers that buy tokens/subs and Group 2 as the try hards that carry people, sub with tokens and sell BoE Equipment. Almost as if you could map the correlation of the two between the amount of Raw Subscriptions and Raw Token purchases. Subscribers are doing good, they introduce the Token. Token does really well and Blizzard starts to cater to group 2 more and more and cater to group 1 less and less. Like open world PVP - Once Group 1 has had enough of group 2 being catered to and quits (lack of content, poor design choices etc.), group 2 runs out of food to keep them playing and then they fuck off too. So now there is an effort to bring back group 1 but not much, if anything at all, is being done to cull group 2 thatll make group 1 want to continue to stick around. Theyve gotta do something about Group 2 and that mentality, but they seem caught in this loop of wanting their cake and eating it too.
We can ignore it and just play the game with friends, but if theyre making poor design decisions that keep us from playing with friends- or worse, make us not want to play with each other - then they have to realize how hard theyre dropping the ball. EverQuest's Krono is insanely toxic as well, but you can just fuck off to a guild that doesnt do that and play the game like you did back in 99 with all your friends.
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Heres something interesting - If you watch this (Its Asmongold hunter warping all over the map) you'll see all these pillars between islands and around the continent. So definitely got some puzzle jumping type of shit going. One of which pretty much confirmed what I was thinking with Arcatraz. It has a pillar half way up the mountain, but theres no good jump off spot to get that high near it. Going up there, you see what looks like an unimplemented instance zone-in area.
Oh and you also see what looks like they took major zones from each of Azeroth's expansions and turned them into new zones in this expansion. Sort of like how we felt like DF's first zone felt like Grizzly/Fjord. Im a pretty big fan of all the different zones, but Blizzards Art Team has always knocked it out of the park.
We can ignore it and just play the game with friends, but if theyre making poor design decisions that keep us from playing with friends- or worse, make us not want to play with each other - then they have to realize how hard theyre dropping the ball. EverQuest's Krono is insanely toxic as well, but you can just fuck off to a guild that doesnt do that and play the game like you did back in 99 with all your friends.
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Heres something interesting - If you watch this (Its Asmongold hunter warping all over the map) you'll see all these pillars between islands and around the continent. So definitely got some puzzle jumping type of shit going. One of which pretty much confirmed what I was thinking with Arcatraz. It has a pillar half way up the mountain, but theres no good jump off spot to get that high near it. Going up there, you see what looks like an unimplemented instance zone-in area.
Oh and you also see what looks like they took major zones from each of Azeroth's expansions and turned them into new zones in this expansion. Sort of like how we felt like DF's first zone felt like Grizzly/Fjord. Im a pretty big fan of all the different zones, but Blizzards Art Team has always knocked it out of the park.
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Their environmental artists have always been very good. Rest of the game rarely holds up as well. But that vid only proves the point.
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Koushirou
Log Wizard
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That DK set so far is the only one that I’ve thought looks decent. But if those shoulders don’t occasionally open the fuck up and spew some breath or something, they’ve dropped the ball.
Speaking of balls, is there a single monk set without them?
Speaking of balls, is there a single monk set without them?
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TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Dk one looks like it should be hunter, looks like croc shoulders. Hunter (which i like regardless, but it looks like it needs a cape) looks like it should be monk with the hand guards being katars. It's just pointless griping tho. They aint changing artwork at this point. Unless you can sploit it to be racist or something.
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Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I feel like the Artists that used to make tier sets are just gone and havent been there for a while. Or theyre in small number now. It just seems like the current artists are still caught in the "Raid Theme" only, mindset and think very little about the "theme" of the class. Like you guys have just recently said, you cant really tell what armor belongs to which class. Except for maybe, as
Koushirou
pointed out, Monks and their balls.
That, or maybe the art team for armor is just burnt the fuck out and needs to be replaced.
Koushirou
pointed out, Monks and their balls. That, or maybe the art team for armor is just burnt the fuck out and needs to be replaced.
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jayrebb
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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My guess here is that a lot of their artist talent is gone, and they are mostly buying assets from third world country shops. I can somehow understand: no one wants to work their whole life with the limitations of an aging engine.
So why do the environments still look good? Because they have the art direction of all the old zones to lean on. From what I've seen of it, this also happened with Diablo Immortal dungeon styles.
And frankly, when creating landscapes and buildings you can get inspiration from real life, and at the same time you can't deviate too much from existing assets, or else the world doesn't look believable. Creating the 25th armor set for all these different classes however, that needs real creative input. Especially if you want the asset shops to flesh them out with a coherent art direction.
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Armor/wearables have mostly been bad since BFA. All this new stuff looks like pastel rocks or something, not actual armor.
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It's a shame how bad this company has gotten, when even the art team blows complete asshole you know it's time to throw in the towel.
Remember their are fan artist who have made better sets than current Blizzard could dream up for the low low cost of fucking free. If the company wasn't run by complete failure faggot retards they would have reached out and put all the top talent in their community to work. Between the add on makers, and some of the fan artist Blizzard has shot themselves in the dick by being arrogant turbo cunts instead of accepting these Chad's and their talents.
Maybe they can let another multi-billion dollar industry slip through their fingers like the MOBA market because they are retarded, but hey at least there are no more male/female avatars... God I hate this timelines and hope California falls into the fucking Ocean.
Remember their are fan artist who have made better sets than current Blizzard could dream up for the low low cost of fucking free. If the company wasn't run by complete failure faggot retards they would have reached out and put all the top talent in their community to work. Between the add on makers, and some of the fan artist Blizzard has shot themselves in the dick by being arrogant turbo cunts instead of accepting these Chad's and their talents.
Maybe they can let another multi-billion dollar industry slip through their fingers like the MOBA market because they are retarded, but hey at least there are no more male/female avatars... God I hate this timelines and hope California falls into the fucking Ocean.
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Furry
WoW Office
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