Cracks starting to show?

[Lakov_Sanite]

I'll stop being the wow fanboy for a little bit here. It seems increasingly more apparent that blizzard is muddling up their own game design. Part of it is simply mudflation but it seems like they are haphazardly slapping on fixes/changes to not only their game but their online services like battlenet that they are not able to keep up the same level of quality they have had in the past.

Take for instance this change to the battle rez system.


Maybe it's me but this just feels slapped on and as if they aren't sure themselves how it works now. Having been levelling a hunter recently(got to level 29 I think) got a fresh new talent point and put it into trueshot aura. Oddly, I didn't see a buff so I went to a trainer just in case I had to train it, nope. I then look at my talents and it says "trueshot aura available lvl 30" so now, I could spend a talent point for an ability I couldn't even use for another level.  Is it game breaking that blizzard would do that? no.  Is it sloppy and the kind of thing a newer player would focus on? completely.

[Paelos]

As I've said before, this expansion has the potential to be my own personal ToA. I played that expansion for a day in my DAOC heyday, realized the game wasn't for me anymore, and quit completely. The way I feel about this expansion is different though. I'm getting to the point now where if they want to reinvent the entire game from the ground up, I'm not really excited about relearning how to play 5 years after the fact.

[caladein]

I could be imagining things, but I remember the battle rez limits being talked about very early on.

Also, the TSA thing looks like a bug.  The minimum level on the skill is 25 according to Wowhead, but you can't actually buy it until 39, and you're saying it's not available until what I assume is 40 (and not 30).

[Lantyssa]

For some reason WoW feels the need to turn every expansion into a significant overhaul.  That they were touting changes this time a year before they had even designed them was a bad sign.  Sooner or later it's going to end up an NGE-level fiasco.  It's not another MMO that is going to bring WoW down, it is themselves.

I know the arguments that they coded themselves into a corner, but maybe their design should have considered that from the beginning since every expansion has raised the level cap.  It was poor planning then, and three expansions later they still haven't figured it out.

[ezrast]

Can't wait for the boss encounter that force-kills the OT at 50%. Hope you got your raid comp right!

No, I don't think they're quite that stupid - although I don't know why because Razuvius-25 empirically disproves me. I think they're desperately trying to minimize the amount of non-easily-calculable DPS (or whatever) contribution a player can bring to the raid; there was a blue post not long ago about how they didn't like players rushing to change specs because of a 2% theoretical increase (and then bitching about being "forced" to relearn their class) so I guess they're probably trying to convert every possible class benefit that isn't your personal rotation into a non-stacking raid-buff-type thing. That's why they took the crit requirement off of the shaman crit buff, the mage damage buff, etc, which I thought made them less interesting.

The trueshot thing sounds like a bug, but who knows - Imp Revenge is available at level 39 while Revenge is trainable at 40. I think the old talents always gave *some* benefit when you took them, even if you didn't have all the abilities they affected.

[Rendakor]

The battle rez change makes sense, even if the implementation feels a little wonky. MMOs have always had problems balancing long cooldowns with progression raiding; when Brez was on a half hour cooldown, do you just wait 20 minutes after a wipe for it to be back up? Is there any point to attempting progression content without ALL of your cooldowns available? Also, why wouldn't you want to stack druids so that you have as many Brezes as possible? You could easily justify taking 4 (bear, cat, boom, tree) to a 10m, which gives you an exceptionally large margin of error; this wouldn't even gimp your raid that much anymore, since there aren't nearly as many stackable raid buffs to manage as there were in 3.x.

Now, there's an argument to be made that Soulstone shouldn't have a longer cooldown since it's a worse ability. Previously you put the SS on the druid (brez) unless you knew someone was bad/lagging/undergeared but still important. Now, the fact that you need to guess which retard will stand in fire should at least grant it 10m cd.

Every other long cooldown has either been removed, or nerfed and given a shorter cd. The brez problem, however, is unique to WoW; most other MMOs either allow all resurrection spells to work in combat, or give all healers a gimpy one that does.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Yes, it was indeed level 39 I put the talent point in and couldn't use the ability until 40. Actually, I needed to re-train my talents because putting that point in bugged my character, gave me an extra talent point to spend but the point already spent in TSA had become useless at 40, not even working until I re-trained.

[Rendakor]

Talents bug after patches, WoW circling the drain, news at 11.

[Musashi]

Talents bug after patches, WoW circling the drain, news at 11.

[kildorn]

The brez change seems duct taped (if it's in the game, it should be in the UI), but I can see why. They're trying to make it so you don't take the new healing changes as "bring a lot of druid raid healers or locks for DPS, and woo abuse in combat rez!"

They took the cooldown from an hour down to something reasonable to prevent both "you never use it because maybe you'll need it later" and to prevent guilds from sitting around waiting for cooldowns to come back after a fight. This is just trying to prevent spamming very powerful skills due to their lowered cooldowns.

Personally? An in combat debuff on the caster of the rez would make me happy, or give the rez an in combat penalty (-damage/healing or something else to make it a non ideal situation beyond the lack of raid buffs)

[SurfD]

The battle rez thing honestly was actually needed, especially if they wanted to leave Rebirth / Soulstone at a low cooldown instead of the old 30 minutes.   I say this as a member of a guild which had a usual turnout of 4 to 6 druids and 3 locks for any given 25 man raid.

I mean, hell, for our first probably 6 weeks of doing Putricide Hardmode we didnt even bother with a proper "strategy" for dealing with the disease mechanic.  We just passed it to the nearest warlock, had them run off and die, then use a SS or BR and immediately got them back into the fight.  If for any reason we ran out of SS / BR (which was HIGHLY unlikely, even doing attempts every 5 minutes while learning the fight), we could always pass it to a shaman and just let them Reincarnate.

Stacking Combat rez mechanics allows for some really sloppy gameplay.

[dusematic]

WoW is weird.  I definitely went through a poopsocking phase on release, and have since returned as a casual participant for a few brief stints.  And for fuck's sake, the same people I poopsocked with on release are still fucking poopsocking 5 years on.  I've never been that into anything for that long.  I don't know how something, no matter what it is, doesn't get old after 5 years of 12 hours a day (or how these people are able to sustain that lifestyle post-college/whatever).  When I occasionally log in SC2 I still see them online with Real ID.  Never fails.

[raydeen]

I thought from the title that there were literal cracks starting to form in the world as a prelude to the expansion. I am disappointed. 

[Ingmar]

Yeah if they had left it alone you end up with some scenarios where it is actually better to let someone die and combat rez them because of the other changes to health/healing. By limiting the number of combat rezzes you can do in an encounter they make it a lot less attractive to stack druids and use battle rez as a sneaky cheap full heal or as an innervate.

[sinij]

WoW polish is certainly thing of the past.

[kildorn]

WoW polish is certainly thing of the past.

It is? .. because they didn't put in a UI indicator on a new raid rule?

[Tale]

WoW is weird.  I definitely went through a poopsocking phase on release, and have since returned as a casual participant for a few brief stints.  And for fuck's sake, the same people I poopsocked with on release are still fucking poopsocking 5 years on.  I've never been that into anything for that long.  I don't know how something, no matter what it is, doesn't get old after 5 years of 12 hours a day (or how these people are able to sustain that lifestyle post-college/whatever).  When I occasionally log in SC2 I still see them online with Real ID.  Never fails.

Actually it's nearly six years since release, way longer for the many who were in beta. I was in beta for about six months, played from release, had three raiding guild careers on two servers and left when the cracks started to show. In 2007.

[K9]

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

 

[WindupAtheist]

I said this last year and I'll say it now:

It's not that the sky is falling. It's sort of a "Muhammad Ali around like 1975" vibe. They're still the champ, they'll remain champ for the forseeable future, but they've lost a step. None of their missteps of late have been a really big deal, but they keep making them.

[Lakov_Sanite]

god help me....WuA is exactly right.

It's not that these are hideous mistakes but as said before it's like that are using duct tape.

[Nebu]

I'm not seeing a misstep here, only a fix for a broken mechanic. 

[Ingmar]

It is an enormous 6 year old piece of software. Of course you wouldn't do it this way if you were truly starting from scratch, but 6 years of balance changes in a game can eventually lead you to some odd places with certain abilities, especially when they have the kind of sacred cow status that battle rez and such have.

[Azazel]

WoW polish is certainly thing of the past.

Well, until you try out any other MMO by comparison.

[Sjofn]

It could be prettier and I suspect it eventually will be, but this is another change in a long line of changes where I fail to see what the big damn deal is.

OH GOD I AM THE FROG IN THE POT AND THE WATER IS STARTING TO BOIL

[Rendakor]

Once they add some kind of UI indicator it'll be fine. Although I suspect an addon will cover the job nicely; I already use DBM-Spell Timers to track the casts of Rebirth, so simply seeing how many have been used in an encounter will provide adequate info for now.

[dusematic]

I said this last year and I'll say it now:

It's not that the sky is falling. It's sort of a "Muhammad Ali around like 1975" vibe. They're still the champ, they'll remain champ for the forseeable future, but they've lost a step. None of their missteps of late have been a really big deal, but they keep making them.

   

[Rasix]

Care-o-meter far to the left.  Nuclear clock hovering around 3pm.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Sure it's clunky and hamfisted, but isn't every change they introduce to raid mechanics?

Blizzard tends to follow this formula:
1.  Do some shit that might piss people off.
2.  Watch people over-react.
3.  Adjust.

[sinij]

WoW polish is certainly thing of the past.

It is? .. because they didn't put in a UI indicator on a new raid rule?

No, because they didn't bother (or couldn't) balance even simplified classes, railroaded all classes into single spec and barfed out half-assed systems, like rated BGs, on live. WoW moved away from successful formula - releasing stable, tested and derivative product. They now offering somewhat stable, untested, even more derivative product.

[sinij]

WoW polish is certainly thing of the past.

Well, until you try out any other MMO by comparison.

WoW is Corolla of mmorpgs - bland, unexciting but get it job done. You tolerate it only as long as its reliable and predictable.

I played other mmorpgs because it was exciting, I played WoW because it get its job done.

It now starting to sputter.

[Chimpy]

It doesn't matter, though.

They have made back their investment several hundred fold at this point. Even if they only sell 5 million copies of Cataclysm, that is 200 million bucks in box sales alone.

[caladein]

The talent system needed to be changed because the two masters it served, new shiny while leveling and end-game balance, were pulling it in different directions.  The only option was to move towards (quasi-)sub-classes.

[WindupAtheist]

Bugs slip through, some of their changes don't seem well-considered, so on and so forth. There are people just waiting for Blizzard to stumble so they can invoke the malevolent influence of Activision, and maybe they'll even be correct when they do so, but basically WoW is just getting a little old and starting to creak a bit.

Ali after the Thrilla in Manila. Greatest foes vanquished, legacy secure, years of victory still ahead, but not the bouncy kid who beat up Sonny Liston anymore.

[Azuredream]

This is just me, but I haven't really felt like they've made more missteps than they used to. I haven't been subscribed for a month, but that's just because having killed almost all the raid content and leveled up as many alts as I felt like there really wasn't anything for me to do until the expansion. But of course I'm coming back when Cataclysm hits, and everything I've seen so far looks great and I can't wait until it comes out.

[apocrypha]

People said the exact same thing before and shortly after TBC launch, and they'll say the exact same thing before and shortly after the next expansion launches.

Doesn't mean it's not true, but I don't think it's going to change much. WoW isn't suddenly going to lose 5 million subs. Some people will say "meh, too many changes, I'm out" and quit. Some others will say "Jeez, my mates have been playing this thing for 5 years and STILL spend all weekend playing it, maybe I'll check it out". Subs will fluctuate, but probably stay roughly the same over time.

Yeah, Cata is a lot of big changes, but even casually comparing it to NGE is ludicrous. It's not a ToA by any stretch of the imagination either. I don't know offhand what ToA did to DaoC subs in the end, but it was pretty (haha) cataclysmic.

[Simond]

Original pvp system. Retard rocks. Molten Core (all of it). Every bit of TBC content past the non-heroic dungeons at expansion launch. And so on.

If it's genuinely broken,it'll get fixed...eventually. I am seeing a lot of change-fearing as well, though.