World of Warcraft: Legion

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White Haven
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Re: World of Warcraft: Legion

Post by White Haven »

In fairness, I do really miss the days when individual classes/specs had 'holy SHIT I want that in my raid' effects. Did it go too far? Absolutely. But I do concur that the relentless homogenization of classes that Bring The Player caused was a net negative.
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TheFeniX
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Re: World of Warcraft: Legion

Post by TheFeniX »

White Haven wrote:In fairness, I do really miss the days when individual classes/specs had 'holy SHIT I want that in my raid' effects. Did it go too far? Absolutely. But I do concur that the relentless homogenization of classes that Bring The Player caused was a net negative.
IMO, The homogenization is a side-effect of poor design by Blizzard being unable to balance mechanics and abilities in PvE and PvP. Even when Bring the Player was at it's peak, there was still fairly large differences among the classes in how they did damage, healed, or mitigated damage. Contrast "run you down" Ret with "Slowly drain your movement and life" Death Knight. They still walk a PvP/PvP tightrope when they just shouldn't have to at this point.

What happened was "PvP" and the removal of "leveling specs" (note: that was actually a good thing to remove because it was dumb). If every spec had to be viable DPS-wise, your numbers are going to equal out in a straight burn. The difference is health and defensives. So, blow for blow: if a Ret gets in a Mage's face: dead Mage. You have to control when that melee can do damage and how well the Mage can kite him. This means PvE must be balanced around PvP. You have to limit the damage Ret does when on target and limit/increase the amount of uptime they have on the target accordingly. The most hilarious example I love to beat to death on this topic is Tankadins in early-Cata after the buffs they had to have to survive PvE content making them monsters in PvP. Avenger's Shield's ability to interrupt is also of note.

They now have PvP templates, Mages have Hero (which I think should instead be baseline for all Tank specs if you have to balance around it) and the need to have buffs spread across different groups of your raid team is gone. Also, I guess Hunters still need to kite things since Mages and Frost DKs got gutted in this area. The joke in Cata was "We need buffs, just bring 5 Hunters with Drums." Like, a good Hunter MADE a raid team back then..... and there were so few good Hunters on Naz.

Anyways, in what way has Blizzard actually shown they want to "bring the class?" As far as I see it, "bring the class" really means "Prefer Mage, DKs and Locks need not apply." There's really not a lot going on I've seen where X class was actually needed, you're merely ranked on your Single-Target, Cleave, and possibly the ability to tank/kite a mechanic. It is just certain classes (Read: Mage) are just so much fucking better at everything and it's been this way for a while. Certain healers synergize with certain tanks better. But Warriors and Pallies don't care who heals them: DHs and DK tanks get lost. Bears do bear things just fine. Mages can still soak mechanics as good as any tank, meanwhile me losing my presences means I can do dick for soak and can't even sack RP to close distance with Unholy Presence.

Death Knights don't fit into the "Bring the Class" vision. Not a single spec offers anything another class can't do better while also bringing more utility to the Party/Raid. So, it was really just another checkbox on my list of reasons to quit. A shame, because Unholy is actually fun, even if I only feel cool when I'm mobbing gankers to death with ghouls.

Homogenization feels more like they wanted to make the game easier to balance and "balance" classes/specs they don't care about more than others. I'm harping on Mages here, but I look at the toolkit mine has and it annoys me. Yea, the damage abilities have been pruned, but man I still have loads of utility and iconic abilities compared to just my DK.
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TheFeniX
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Re: World of Warcraft: Legion

Post by TheFeniX »

Civil War Man wrote:That post was beyond baffling. It would have been less insulting if he had just said, "We're not going to buff Frost because I play Fire," because then at least no one could claim he was being dishonest.
Oh shit, I missed your post. I thought WH's kind of came out of nowhere, but I rolled with it.

Yea, this has become old-hat annoyances. Blizzard doesn't give any decent information about their thought process when it comes to handling the game. Which is "fine." But what becomes "less fine" is when they actually break from this, their posts/tweets/QAs tend to be one of the following:
1. Extremely condescending in that they know better than you do, so shut up. They get like this even with the lore, such as Metzen throwing a hissy fit we were all being big meanies to Green Jesus.
2. Act like what is going on is completely the opposite of what's actually been happening: A mountain of evidence pales in comparison to their secret logs they claim to have that no one else is privy to.
3. (the Frost Mage comment goes here): So amateur hour and random to be considered Customer Satisfaction suicide. It's like if you came to the conclusion DKs need to be nerfed because one /spit on you: yea, don't go TELLING people that's why you're doing it. Keep that shit in-house.
4. (semi-related to #2) Lies and half-truths, such as how CRZ kept "accidentally" getting turned on in Legion zones even though it was shown that CRZ was a planned addition to Legion all along.

Another "Greatest Hit" was that they didn't have enough logs to determine that Frost Mages were weak, so they were holding off on buffs/nerfs. That would be because no one was fucking raiding as Frost because it was so bad. This wasn't just limited to Frost Mage, but other classes that saw piss-poor raid representation. EDIT: Obviously all the logs from the year-long beta were missing because the dev team ran out of toilet paper one night.

Honestly, if I had known about this "Bring the Class (no DKs allowed)" and "CRZ in Legion zones" bullshit: I never would have bought the expansion, even though I did enjoy the leveling.
It's right up there with when he said that they basically felt that GC's "Bring the player, not the class" philosophy was a mistake. Because nothing made organizing a raid more fun for a guild than forcing members to reroll or recruiting mediocre players because they needed exactly X Warlocks, Y Shamans, or Z Warriors to clear a specific boss.
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Civil War Man
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Re: World of Warcraft: Legion

Post by Civil War Man »

White Haven wrote:In fairness, I do really miss the days when individual classes/specs had 'holy SHIT I want that in my raid' effects. Did it go too far? Absolutely. But I do concur that the relentless homogenization of classes that Bring The Player caused was a net negative.
I don't agree that Bring the Player was a net negative, or at least I wouldn't place the blame for the current state of the game upon Bring the Player. Thing is, the whole goal of each class/spec having unique mechanics that make them important to the success of the group, while admirable, doesn't work in WoW's design space. It was able to work, after a fashion, in Vanilla because raid groups were so huge. Back then you could potentially fill a 40-man raid group with 5 of each class available to your faction at the time. Hell, you could have gone out of your way to include one of every spec in the game, and once you did that you'd still have 16 open slots. It wasn't optimal by any stretch of the imagination, but it meant that you had a high probability of having at least one of every class in your raid, so the design team could plan encounters with that expectation.

That stopped working once they shrunk the raid sizes and increased the number of available classes (including making Paladin/Shaman available to both factions). Instead of averaging 5 slots per class like in Vanilla, raid sizes dropped to 2-3 per class for 25 raids, and 1 per class for 10s. And with Monk and Demon Hunter, it's down to less than one raid slot per class for the minimum raid size. In that environment, it is much easier to build a raid group without certain classes even if you don't intentionally exclude the low-performing classes. In that design space, you have to make sure that the critical effects are not unique to one class, and the effects that are unique to one class are not critical to completing the encounter, because you cannot reasonably assume that any given random raid group will have a particular class/spec in it. For an example, see how they changed the Instructor Razuvious fight in Naxx when they went from 40 to 10/25. In Naxx 40, you were pretty much guaranteed to have Priests, so you had them mind control the students. In Naxx 10/25, you weren't guaranteed to have Priests, so they added the mind control orbs so other classes could perform that task.

And that's not getting into how "Bring the Class" unfairly punishes new or inexperienced players who do not have the luck or foresight to roll the "correct" classes, and forces guilds to either recruit players they may otherwise not want because those players did roll the "correct" classes or force current members to reroll to the correct classes.
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Re: World of Warcraft: Legion

Post by Darth Yan »

TheFeniX wrote:
Darth Yan wrote:This is the cutscene from the nighthold raid. Warning. MASSIVE spoilers.
Why are villians in WoW so replaceable these days? I guess Gul'Dan has already been offed once, but Garrosh was at least a threat and the Lich King taunted us and did things (besides being magic). Gul'Dan laughs like a cartoon villian, then dies to Edgelord Iliidan in some fanfiction *teleports behind you* levels of hilarity. Nice callback to BC, I'll give it that.

I don't like Illidan. That's not true, I actually find a lot about the character "cool" for lack of a better term. But Blizzard's "but thou must" beating (once again) the Kerrigan motif and trying to tell us "really not that bad guys" while showing us that he's an irredeemable monster is Blizzard SOP. It's old and tired and Blizzard continues to wonder (or I assume they do) why people are leaving.

Blizzard thinks they know how to write an anti-hero, but they are complete shit at it and can really only pull off generic fantasy cliches ripped straight from other IPs.
Lord Revan wrote:you can queue for mythics in the LFG tool you don't have to spam chat for that (tbh I like to make my groups but still I've had fun with the groups I've gotten and it didn't take that long to get one)
Try being an undergeared DPS with no friends (not me, I was a moderately geared tank with no friends). Besides, spamming "please God invite me" in LFG only serves to cut spam out of trade-chat. Mythics are just the new Cata Heroics, no reason they shouldn't be in LFD. Leave the Diablo 3 Mythic +2353246456 bullshit to Group Finder, but locking content behind another difficulty treadmill you have to actively find a group for is shitty on their part. The new dev team continues to show they give no shits about casuals.

I'm no casual.... but "whoops" and I am now because at times my kid might decide to get mad. Then I have to leave for a bit. Dropping from a LFD group costs them little. Dropping from a premade LFG group screws them. I don't like screwing people because I'm not an ass, so I don't do mythics. There are thousands of other players in the same boat watching as more story content is gated because the WoW dev team has showed that endgame is only for people who can dedicate uninterrupted hours at a time.

Otherwise, it's "go spam World Quests till you vomit."

Illidan could be better but I feel that if Xe'ra acknowledged his flaws and made him go a journey of his own it could work. Kerrigan ultimately worked because after Moros she does the right thing even when she has no incentive (she thinks raynor has abandoned her forever) and being willing to atone (she accepts the xel'naga power to make amends for what she's done) shows she ultimately does evolve over the story (hell better than in BW I might ad.) If Illidan had undergone character development I would be fine.

Gul'dan's death was appropriate. After two expansions of evil he sees it crumble into ash before dying at the hands of the being he sought to exploit in the same way he murdered Varian. Honestly it doesn't get more karmic. Gul'dan did a pretty good job (bringing in the legion, killing varian tirion and vol'jin.)
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TheFeniX
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Re: World of Warcraft: Legion

Post by TheFeniX »

Civil War Man wrote:And that's not getting into how "Bring the Class" unfairly punishes new or inexperienced players who do not have the luck or foresight to roll the "correct" classes, and forces guilds to either recruit players they may otherwise not want because those players did roll the "correct" classes or force current members to reroll to the correct classes.
It's even worse now. Even if you already have a 100 (or 110) to swap to: good luck farming all that AP quickly to get your artifact on par. It's not AS BAD for a different spec because at least there's the AP increase from research, but this doesn't change that you'll have to farm outside of raids to get that AP. Previously, you could just have your raid carry you through a few Flexs or normals while you run LFR in your downtime.
Darth Yan wrote:Illidan could be better but I feel that if Xe'ra acknowledged his flaws and made him go a journey of his own it could work. Kerrigan ultimately worked because after Moros she does the right thing even when she has no incentive (she thinks raynor has abandoned her forever) and being willing to atone (she accepts the xel'naga power to make amends for what she's done) shows she ultimately does evolve over the story (hell better than in BW I might ad.) If Illidan had undergone character development I would be fine.

Gul'dan's death was appropriate. After two expansions of evil he sees it crumble into ash before dying at the hands of the being he sought to exploit in the same way he murdered Varian. Honestly it doesn't get more karmic. Gul'dan did a pretty good job (bringing in the legion, killing varian tirion and vol'jin.)
Kerrigan works because she may have been cliche, but she wasn't insulting.

Illidan is (and I can't think of a better or more fitting term) a fucking Edgelord in Legion. He was always an asshole, yet assholes can be cool. But what we get in Legion is a damned man-child with UNLIMITED POWAAAAAAA! He's buttburt his brother is cooler than him. He's butthurt his brother gets to make sweet sweet love to Tyrande (hey, I'm butthurt there too). He's butthurt he had to be a stupidly dressed Mage.

So, then we see he finds out he has to soul-suck his own people to fight back the Legion. But what really sells it is his rant after doing this: he has the audacity to bitch-out the people who are horrified at what he's become. It wasn't "I'm sorry I had to do what I did." It's "aw man, fuck you! I did what you pussies wouldn't do, so fuck you and oh yea now I'm leaving and taking my toys with me."

And Gul'dan.... he's already dead. I think that's why I'm unfair to him. Time-travel alt-universe shit is the laziness sci-fi bullshit out there, so I was over him the second he showed up.

But on the Starcraft vs WoW front: it's a lot easier to empathize with those characters because they are around all the time. I've "built" relationships with them. Even relevant WoW character do nothing until the WoW team needs them. This same thing is going to happen (again) with Jaina: she's just going to show up and "do stuff" and all our character interactions are going to solely concern her "do stuff." You'd think we could do a little less bear-ass collecting and a little more Role-Playing with relevant lore characters.
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Re: World of Warcraft: Legion

Post by Grumman »

Fuck CRZ and fuck Barthilas. Every single fucking day, I run into at least one of these assholes being an asshole. Whether it's corpse-camping in zones half their level, squatting on the Darkmoon Faire portal with the biggest mount they can find or killing questgivers and flight masters, I have never seen anyone from this server who was not going out of their way to ruin the game for everyone else. And Blizzard just leaves this problem to fester, of course.
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TheFeniX
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Re: World of Warcraft: Legion

Post by TheFeniX »

So, mobs scale to iLvL now in all Legion content. The ability to remove a ring (or anything) to drop your ilvl down to around 850 to get to the low point of the scaling was quickly patched. It now scales to max ilvl.
Finally, there's the natural question of why we didn't patch-note this. It was not to be deceptive; we know it's impossible to hide a change from millions of players. But the system was meant to feel largely transparent and subtle, just like level-scaling does if you don't stop and really think about it, and so we did want players to first experience the change organically
I don't think this was subtle at all, provided he isn't lieing. Look, I'm not saying things should always stay the same for the sake of staying the same, but saying "you're getting bored of trivial content because it's trivial" is some idiotic reasoning. Not only do players now have to deal with trash mobs that aggro non-stop since there's no level disparity, they now will be fighting them at nearly launch levels of toughness and TTK. This isn't really what I would have signed up for in an MMO.

For one highlight, before it was patched: dropping your ilvl from ~900 to 850 would cut mob health by a third. Yes, I know DPS increases aren't linear, but one of the reasons I quit was due to grinding mobs down as a tank just got fucking boring. And worrying about nabbing too many as a DPS was even worse since the graveyard layout in Legion is fucking awful.

I don't really know where they come up with bullshit like this. There is nothing "fun" about this. Why did the WoW dev team forget about fun?

Also of note, if you started AF research up in prep for the new patch, you are locked out of the near-instant "catch-up" mechanic they added with the latest patch and instead have to wait for the current research to complete. You are locked out of the new content until you reach 25. From reading, GMs that helped out certain players have been punished by Blizzard.
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