f13.net

Here are my top 10... post your ideas!

Yes some of these ideas were implemented in and stolen from WAR... to bad WAR is knee deep in suckage.

1.   Guild Leveling w/ perks (ala WAR but better)
2.   Guild Tax rate
3.   PvP XP (with /xp off switch)
4.   Collision Detection in PvP
5.   Personal Ship "mounts"
6.   Ability to Fly in Old World
7.   Ship to Ship Combat (with multiple people manning cannons/guns/ballista)
8.   Some upgrade mechanism to take old gear (pvp and instance) and upgrading it in level (even if below par for level)
9.   5/10/25/40 man switch for raid instances... bring back 40 mans as optional (not forced)
10. Increased incentive to make people go back to BT, KARA, MC, BWL, Gruuls, AQ, et al. (/80 switch would be cool)

I'd kill to be able to set a guild tax.

There is a very well built and customizable/flexible addon that allows guilds to set up a tax system.  The name is escaping me for some reason, but I'm sure with some searching at Curse.com or google fu you could find it.

As long as it ISN'T mandatory that you have to do the old world content in order to progress, I agree.  Making the quests and rewards somewhat comparable to the L80 endgame wouldn't hurt and would give people some incentives to see and learn the old fights if they wanted to.  But mandatory 40 man raids, key farming, 1 quest item for 1 person progressed a week?  Sign me out ;-)

1.   Guild Leveling- would be very cool
2.   Guild Tax rate- nice idea but would just make guilds even more a pain than they are now
3.   PvP XP - I would like this but I don't pvp often enough to care much.
4.   Collision Detection in PvP - this is NEVER a good idea in an mmo
5.   Personal Ship "mounts"- I like it but there's not enough water yet to really justify it. there's beaches in wow but no real oceans.
6.   Ability to Fly in Old World - I don't know about this one. The teerain just wasnt built for flight travel so I'd be happy with faster ground mounts.
7.   Ship to Ship Combat (with  multiple people manning cannons/guns/ballista) - again, needs more water to be viable.
8.   Some upgrade mechanism to take old gear (pvp and instance) and upgrading it in level (even if below par for level) - A cool idea but one that would take way too much reverse engineering-
9.   5/10/25/40 man switch for raid instances... bring back 40 mans as optional (not forced) - you couldn't pay me to do another 40man raid in any game.
10. Increased incentive to make people go back to BT, KARA, MC, BWL, Gruuls, AQ, et al. (/80 switch would be cool) - same as above really.

Looks like a top 10 list.   :awesome_for_real:

Out of your entire list, I'd only remotely care about #6.  Of course, it's mostly a moot point as I don't care about the old world anymore. #4 is an absolutely horrid idea.

I'm bored, so here goes:  

1.  Soloable/scalable instances/raids. Unlike you, I want it to scale down to the basic unit of the game. I don't care if the rewards are heavily reduced, as long as there is some reward that isn't completely insulting.
2.  Housing.  I know it would have to be instanced, but it could be interesting at least as a diversion.  Plus you could add a new profession: carpentry!
3.  An appearance tab.  I'd rather look like what I want (as long as I have the items) without reducing my readiness to kick ass.
4.  Long class specific quest lines, similar to the Death Knight introduction.  Some sort of class specific reward (doesn't even have to be practical) but it ideally it would have some choice to differentiate among everyone that completed it.  This should be a personal challenge, not a popsockathon.
5.  If #1 is too much to ask, hireable NPCs would be nice.
6.  An end to the ever escalating badge system. Go back to one currency for heroic and raid boss kills.
7.  A /level option for someone with single/multiple level 80s.  If anything to just skip old world leveling, it sucks. I'd even pay for this.
8.  More fluff that is not designed by whomever did the jousting.  Housing would tie into this.  Make the Darkmoon Faire more alive.  Add racing.  Add some form of gambling with a token system.  (not gold, that could get out of hand)
9.  Removal of the hit and possibly expertise stats.  Can we replace them with something less stupid? It seems like their only use is cockblocking people from being a drain their first few times in Naxx or making gemming/enchanting more assy than they need to be.
10.  Drastically reduce the levels required for outland and Northrend flying.  This is less of an issue in Northrend due to the copious amount of flight paths, but I'd rather use my expensive flying sooner rather than later.  Also, Outland has a lot of really big zones that require a lot of "hoofing" it.

This is coming from someone whose playing situation is going to change rather drastically very soon.  I'd really love to enjoy WoW in small chunks without having to rely on others for more than just social interaction.  Reallistically, I'll probably just end up playing the SWTOR.

about the only thing that would get me back to WoW is if they added the ability to dual class.

Make a Druid.

_Siege castles like in Lineage 2. Guild gets a percentage of money earned from NPC deaths in that castle's zone. A virtual smorgasborg of castles. Player run castles should be everywhere.

_Text that 'clicks' as I type in chat.

_Gambling would be cool if loot could be used along with gold.

This would be  :ye_gods: in WoW.  The landscape doesn't have much "open" space as it is, imagine people trying to cram castles into it?   I like this idea in general, but in WoW it would be totally unworkable.

The benefit of these is so utterly dwarfed by the additional effort it would require makes them not worth it imo. We don't need 5 man raids, that's a stupid model, the 10 and 25 man options works fine in most ways (bar Blizz persistently treating 10-man raiders like 2nd class citizens).


I agree with most of your points but these two I would raise some comments on. Scalable content is a nice idea in principle but wouldn't work in practice. In part this is due to the huge variation in classes abilities to solo stuff. A solo instance that would be challenging for a Mage would be something most DKs, Paladins and Feral druids could do semi afk for instance. The other problem is that designing complex and varied fight mechanics for solo players is very hard. Soloing old instances normally involves completely disregarding fight mechanics, rather than adapting to them. So overall I think this would greatly diminish the experience. I sympathise with the desire to see content, as a 10-man raider I was locked out of almost all higher content for most of TBC and all of vanilla; yet I think solo is pushing it too far.

As for stats. While hit is a hassle for DPS (while expertise has a cap, it's not something you have to strive for as hard as hit) the game is already significantly homogenised and running out of stats fast. If you remove hit and expertise you'll get several classes who only need a single stat, and you are edging closer to a broad 'BE MORE POWERFUL!' stat that applies to all classes. I realise this is hyperbole but I prefer added complexity in stats and gearing, although it could be made more intuitive;  personally I feel if anything we need more stats, not less.

Eh, I don't know.  Expertise is alright, but hit rating drives me bonkers.  Its so obviously a cockblock stat and nothing else.

As it stands we are looking at what:  Hit , Expertise, Defense, Dodge, Parry, Critical Strike, and Haste ratings.   I've probably forgot something.  Thats aside from things like spell power/attack power and normal attributes. Of course, those don't all apply to every class, but I'd be just as happy on, for instance, my mage, if hit rating went away and I could just worry about Haste and Crit.   

You know, I think part of my problem with hit rating is that it doesn't do anything to my numbers.  It makes me more likely just to hit something, not to do more damage (spell power), not to double (or 1.5x) damage (crit rating), or do damage faster (haste rating), but I need it just to not see the word "miss"  I know thats incredibly valuable in terms of raid DPS/spread sheeting, but in terms of in - game satisfaction, there is almost no other stat that feels as ho hum at hit rating.

1) An appearance tab
2) Housing
3) An appearance tab
4) More items that level with you; obtainable at any level
5) An appearance tab
6) More Bind on Account items
7) An appearance tab
8) Ability to send fluff BoA items across servers
9) An appearance tab
A) To be able to not be repetative on odd numbered responsed by implementation of such.

Most of that I don't expect.  I just really want an appearance tab so I had to fill space.

This is why I say it could be more intuitive. It's the least visible stat in terms of how it improves your character, yet for almost every class it offers the greatest immediate increase in DPS. This is only noticeable if you are using addons like recount though, which aren't baseline in the game.

I'm not wholly against canning hit, it's just that there need to be other stats in my view. In part to allow characters to develop in slightly different ways, and in part to offer some level of challenge/complexity. As it stands now, classes like Ret Paladins more or less exclusively stack 1 stat, and I'm sure mindlessly stacking a single stat doesn't make the game more fun.

...AND FACTIONS. My Horde-side Murky bad decision still haunts me.

AS IT SHOULD.  :oh_i_see:

True enough. Maybe islands off the coastlines with castles on them? Floating hunks of land like Dalaran? What can I say? I'm in love with the idea of sieges.

You will never, ever, ever get one. I realized this in the thread where we were discussing some upcoming MMO and turning off the shoulders was discussed.  It's not about you, or what the players want.   It's about the branding of the raiding game style.  If you let people turn off armors they think are ugly, you dilute the desire to be those players. Mentally you begin to strangle raiding.   While you may be fine with this, it's one of the core game experiences now, so there's no way they're going to be fine with doing away with it 4 years into the life cycle.

An appearance tab is the worst thing ever. Now I know people want to look how they like but there are tons of clothes and armor options out there for people who take the time to look. The only problem is you can't actually pve or pvp while wearing them but im fine with that.  As soon as there's an appearance tab overriding armor you will have to not only read the stupidity of others in your chat logs but also witness it in its full glory.  

Edit to add: I played city of heroes and the robo-hedgehog was the coolest tiny scrapper ever but when i realized items meant jack squat and it was just bashing mobs until max level, it did get boring.

1. Expertise is exactly as valuable as hit per point in raids, aside from the crazy rounding errors.  When grinding it is twice as valuable (dodge + parry).
2. Almost every single class in the game has a "make stronger, rawr" stat.  The break-even points for attack power / spell damage stats versus % modifiers such as crit are effectively unreachable for the vast majority of classes until (at best) the end of the expansion cycle.

This is pretty dependent on class. Obviously setting aside casters and hunters, for any melee class that does a significant amount of damage via magic attacks (enhance shamans and frost DKs come to mind immediately, maybe ret paladins, I don't know about the other specs of DK) hit will do more than expertise (assuming you are behind the mob obviously).

It may be that only warriors and (probably) rogues benefit exactly the same from expertise as hit, thinking about it. And that's assuming rogues don't still have some lingering poison type attacks that use spell hit and can't be dodged, as I believe was once true?

EDIT: Oh duh, and ferals, they are probably in the warrior column being all hits and bleeds.

You are me on the inside. Only less of an asshole than me. ^_^

An appearance tab is never coming. Ever. Put that one out of your minds. Housing is probably never coming either because they've had ample time to do it and have just said "Fuck it."

However, I could see them doing boat combat just because they love vehicles and the next expansion would involve the Maelstrom.

Actually no, at least for cats.  Hit and expertise are pretty far down the list of desired stats, from what I've read.  Cat attack speed is so fast that misses don't seem to impact their dps nearly as much as a slow swinging class.  A significant portion of cat damage is white or DoTs (the DoT ticks don't miss).

I am perplexed by their seeming obsession with vehicles, I think its just terrible in 90% of the cases.  I do agree that the Maelstrom seems like a probable candidate for another expansion pack though.  I honestly hope that they don't go for naval combat though.  If they go with Maelstrom, the likely thing is that they would add water mounts, which might be fun, but stay away from the combat on them, or boats, please! (And for us druids, epic aquatic form!)

My list in no particular order:

1. Reduce the level cap on flying to 58 in Outland and 68 in Northrend. Or hell, remove the level cap from all mounts entirely.
2. Add a Sons of Hodir tabard; they figured out that BC repgrinds sucked, then put one in WotLK anyway.  :uhrr:
3. Allow flight in the old world, or add a 280% speed ground mount.
4. "Hide Tabard" display option please.
5a. Remove item drop style quests from the game, or
5b. Make all item drop quests drop quest items for all group members.
6. Armor dyes.

Appearance tab won't happen, as much as I loved it in EQ2. I don't find Hit and Defense caps to be that annoying, either. I don't find any of chargerrich's suggestions necessary or helpful (except old world flight).

Yeah, I assumed that casters / hunters / freakish hybrid dps were excluded.  I should have specified "physical", I think I intended to, I don't know why I didn't.

Apparently poisons still use spell mechanics.  So yeah, hit > expertise for rogues...  I think, the different coefficient from hit rating -> hit % for melee and spell along with Misery / Imp Faerie Fire are fucking with my brain.  A number of the developers at Blizzard need to eat shit and die, because this is all horribly convoluted.


I really don't see how attack speed affects anything.  A quick look over at Elitist Jerks suggests my mode of thinking is not incorrect.  The sparse druid data suggests that hit and expertise are very high priority and roughly equal value, and the similar attack frequency (two daggers, ~1.8 speed +/- poison procs) of mutilate rogue builds leave me scratching my head as to how people figure attack speed makes any difference.

1. Mentoring down, OR sidekicking up, OR /level to, like, 60 or something.
2. Instances scaled to be doable with 2-4 people.
3. No instance locks - hell, I'd even settle for soft locks where you can enter a raid many times but only get gear from it once.
4. Scrap the auction house and replace it with something more like EQ2's.
5. Scrap the LFG system and replace it with something more like CoX's.

edit for Sheepherder: oh yeah, 6. No race/class restrictions. Knew I was forgetting something.

Not mentioned previously:

1. Playable dwarven shaman.
2. Playable undead paladin.
3. Another hero class to make up for the fact that we didn't get one in TBC.

I actually love # 1 and # 2 on your list.

The ability to 5 man Nax, Ulduar or even solo some older stuff (with greatly reduce rewards) would be very appealing.

Housing was on my draft list but assumed I would flamed all to hell so I took it off  :grin:

Insto level 60 button would be good, but I think Blizzard wants to hold on to the classic stuff as long as possible.

I love # 4!
I hear LOTRO does this exceptionally well (never played myself) and since Blizzard has started down this path, we might actually see some truly epic quality BOA type living items.

Sorry for back to back to back replies but this thread is so interesting to me  :grin:

Armor Dyes would be a great compomise from an appearance tab (I agree that will not happen) but unfortunately I am not sure Dyes are possible either. I remember reading a blue post from at least 2 years ago where this was addressed. It was said that the way the art is coded would not allow the changing of the colors via any sort of dye mechanic. Like I said it has been a while so perhaps (hopefully) this stance has changed, I would love to be able to dye armor (even though that would mean 80% of your server would be clad in black)  :ye_gods:

Are we just interpreting the numbers differently or are you seeing something I'm not.  Taken from Elitist Jerks:


Hit and Expertise rate below Agility, Armor Penetration (since the buff to it), Strength and Crit.  The attack speed thing was just my guess as to why, but I suppose statistically it wouldn't make a difference over time.

No, I UNDERSTAND the significance of +hit.  I know the DPS upgrade is there, and I know it shows up in WWS reports, meters, etc.  What I'm saying is, its just plain unsatisfying for me on a non-min/maxing level.

Why your Gryphon can't fly in Azeroth (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2727982515832160523&hl=en)

Yes I had heard this before but had never seen it until that video.... :ye_gods:

Too bad... talk about looking behind the curtain!  :cry2:

Yeah there's lots of unfinished areas and clipping issues in major cities due to what seems like attempts to prevent people from having to render the whole city for performance reasons.  Still, all it takes is some (ok, a lot in fairness) invisible walls and a change to how cities are displayed when viewing from outside/above.  Not impossible by any means, it's not like they have to go and put something in all that unfinished area (yet).   :oh_i_see:

Look at it a bit differently.

The reason people want flying is because it feels like it takes forever to get anywhere.

Speeding up mounts (outside battlegrounds) to flying speed would solve that - basic mounts at 100%, epic @ 280%.

If they do that they really need to take another look at the basic flying mount too.  I'd hope for a bump to 150% speed or more (100% bare minimum).  Paying 1000g and a 40% speed decrease just for access to a Z-axis is one of the most  :uhrr:  things I've ever seen in the game and I can't believe it's still this way this far into the next expasion.

I'd sign on for all of these.

I recently leveled a rogue to 29, though, and it's kind of sad to me how empty the old world is.  Outlands too.  Would be nice if it was somehow useable. 

Instead, everyone crams into Wintergrasp and Dalaran.

There is not nearly enough space in the vault for clothing in order to look how you want to look.

An appearance tab is greatly needed and desired by many.  But I agree that it will never happen.  (See above discussion on turning off shoulder option).

Happen or not:  Housing.

I'd definitely like this one, although it certainly goes into the 'never happen' pile.  The concept of classes being limited by race has always been retarded whether in AD&D or in MMOG's or in whatever game does it.  Remember back when 'Elf' and 'Dwarf' were character classes?  Class limitations by race are no less retarded.

It's one of the few things an old AD&D 2nd Edition holdout like me actually likes about 3E and beyond, that you don't have to invoke DM authority to remove race limits on class.  Your race is what you are, your class is what you do, and even if the typical X would never, ever, in a million years be class Y, player characters are atypical and are meant to be able to do whatever they damn well please, and that should apply to all types of games.

Koyasha, I agree with your arguement from a D&D perspective; however in WoW, as a descendant of Warcraft I-III, player characters are not atypical. You are simply soldiers of the Alliance/Horde, and this is reflected in much of the content. Set based armor which creates a unified class look, hard coded factions, etc. Every class/race combo allowed reflects not what one random person in the Warcraft universe might potentially do, but what could have been justified as a trainable unit for that faction in an RTS.

Yeah, I'm seeing that it's calculating relative value by plugging a druid wearing best-in-slot gear for a given tier into a simulator.  If you lurk around the sim threads a little more you will find that the beginning assumptions is something like ~1% short of the combined dodge/miss cap.  Also considering that druid DPS is ~33% autoattack you would expect hit/expertise to utterly destroy haste in terms of value, even with the 25% buff to haste.

EDIT:


I wouldn't go so far as Koyasha in this, but my two examples (dwarf shaman, undead paladin) actually work very well within the limitations of the lore (mountain kings + storm hammer throwing gryphon riders + earthen = shaman, Sir Zeliek = paladin).  Unless you want to argue that Holy Wrath is a death knight ability, but then you'd be a shortbus and it wouldn't matter.  One would assume the reason it's not this way is the original intention that some classes were faction specific, but then that got canned.  Human hunters could also be added to the list.

Yeah, its always been fairly obvious that the original world stuff was a lot of smoke and mirrors to make it look like a continuous world.  There have always been plenty of ways to exploit and get into those areas, most of which have been fixed by now.  They've come a long way since they built Azeroth and Kalimdor.

Well Haste is definitely the worst option aside from raw AP, but AP always comes in much bigger chunks than any of the other stats anyway.  Haste is something you tolerate, not something you actively try to gear for.  Armor Penetration is the one that got the big buff and suddenly became very valuable to cats.  I haven't played around with ArP yet since there are some weird threshold guidelines that need to be followed, from what I've been reading.

Yet haste is very similar to hit/expertise in value according to this sim.  Which should be a warning in and of itself, because it applies to 33% of the damage you do whereas avoidance reduction applies to 100%.  A stat with 25% more value per point which is inherently 77% worse should not have 84% of the value per point of rating.

Only some of the race/class restrictions have to do with lore.  There was a hard coded restriction on how many classes a particular race could be associated with.  Blizzard stated that the reason blood elves couldn't be warriors had nothing to do with lore and everything to do with that coding limitation.

I wouldn't hold my breath for it, but removing race/class restrictions is a fair bit more likely to happen than many of the other ideas in this thread.

11.  I'd really like it if tabards went the way of pet/mounts.  I hate having to delete them due to bank/bag space need.

I want shirts that do something. Like a cooldown where you can use your shirt to do a cool emote, or some kind of flashy spell. You never see them because they are under all the armor, so they might as well have some kickass effects.

EPIC SHIRTZ YO!

That's horseshit and we all know it, I imagine even you know it.

What tabards should be are simply tickboxes in the reputation screen.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45037 :grin:

Well slap my ass and call me Sally. I hope they put in more shirts like that which aren't TCG items.

They didn't want the new races to have more than six classes, it wasn't a code thing. And all the races that had 6 classes can now choose 7 with the DK, so even if it was a hard limit back then, it apparently isn't anymore.

I want gnome shamans so bad. :(

Also:
1) Obligatory appearance tab wish.
2) Obligatory housing wish.
3) Speed up the stupid basic flying mount, their current speed is fucking unacceptable.
4) Playable goblins.  :heart:  :heart:  :heart:

7. Nerf paladins.

 :awesome_for_real:

HOTFIXED.

Definite nod to this. You could add moving old currency items to the currency tab too (spirit shards, halaa tokens, scourgestones etc etc)


http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28788 is another.

Playable Goblins is the only thing that would get me to re-sub.

If we're going that route, goblins, naga, worgen, dryads, harpies, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten.  It's annoying to be in a fantasy world and always restricted to basic humanoids.  (Yeah, I know.  Visible gear makes it a headache the more races you have.)

Not EXACTLY what you want: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17730154175&sid=1

Hot damn, yay!

That is awesome.

Summary:
- Slow land mounts trainable at level 20 (currently 30)
- Slow flying mounts trainable at level 60 (currently 70)
- Slow flying mounts speed bonus increased to 150% (currently 60%)
- Cheaper training and mounts.

Epic flight, of course, is still a 5k cockblock, but at least they are allowing faction discounts now.

Those mount changes are good news. Are they removing the level 77 requirement on Cold Weather Flying? Without that, it will make the transition from Outland to Northrend much worse; as it stands now, you just have to wait til 77 to fly. Being able to fly 60-68 then having to walk for 10 levels would be terrible and bad.

Yea, there are certainly a couple examples that fit that they could add, but some things make no sense. Tauren warlock? Undead druid?  :uhrr:

I'd recommend you check out WoW Model Viewer, if it weren't impossible to download at the moment.  Most of the races are fairly complete as far as gear goes, including Naga.  The way Blizzard has handled different races and models is absolutely brilliant.

BLARG.  My warlock's almost to 67 now.  I guess I can wait until I hit 77 and by then this patch will be in so I can save some gold at least.  I don't see  anything about lowering Northrend flying.  If they were doing that, I'd just park this character at whatever level it was lowered to (70 would be nice).

Fake edit:


 :heartbreak:

Yeah, not lowering cold weather flying at all still makes my ass hurt. I never realised just how much I fucking hate just using land mounts until I tried to level a fourth character to 80 (the third one was practically by accident, being a protection paladin). I had 5 level 70's before I stopped bothering in Burning Crusade. I CANNOT get a fourth character to 77, let alone 80. I just can't.

I mean, part of it is due to dual speccing and the fact that our little 10 man raids have a real progression now. I don't NEED that many characters at 80 and I wouldn't have time to gear 'em all, unlike TBC where all we really had to do was Kara over and over (so it was a good thing I liked Kara). But not playing the alt game kills WoW quite a bit for me, it seems. I really only log in to raid these days.

Ooh and ogres!

If only for the dancing  :grin:

I am pretty sure they will not remove / lower the level requirement for Cold Weather flying until at least the next full expantion, when Northrend is not the new "focus" continent.

They specificly stated that flying in northrend was restricted because they WANT to force you to experience the content on the ground untill you have basicly reached a level where you NEED a flying mount to quest in the level appropriate zones effectively.

I went to ol' cardplace's bluetracker because I swear I read a blue say that and I think it was some time during Wrath beta, only to find this


Their justification was not 'lore' but balance.  I don't know if that's better or worse.

Best change.

yes Yes YEs YES YES!

I'll have what he's having.

Tell me a Warrior Ogre would not freaking kick ass?   :grin:

And I want some sort of demon class, like the doomguard (summonable lock pet, they are also in the hellfire green swamp). Yeah...

...that could summon gnomes.  Mean ferocious gnomes.

1: Appearance Tab
Don't tell me it'll never happen, I don't care, this is my want-list, I can want a laserpony if I like, doesn't mean I ever expect to receive one. Whatever the pros and cons you can fling at the suggestion's practicality, the simple matter is it'd let people be a hell of a lot more individual in appearance than they currently can be.

2: Housing
C'mon - Dark Age of Camelot managed this practically 7 years ago now, and there wasn't much wrong with their implementation - certainly nothing that WoW couldn't better with mounts being available so you can locate your dwellings quicker. I'd just love to have that feeling of guild community back again that I had in that game, where a whole bunch of us would buy up a couple of plots together, work on a guild house and out-do each other's gardens. City of Heroes' base-system is now unparalled in terms of MMO player-space customisation, though the costs to do so on an individual scale are still sadly prohibitive.

3: Faster ground-mounts
100% speed is all well and good for the bought mounts - it offers a significant boost from the 60% speeders and gets you going. Great that the level restriction has now come down to 40. But it's still relatively slow compared to what the engine can handle, considering the flying mounts can more than triple that speed. So how's about upping the rare mount/drop mount speeds to 150%? Give us a bigger incentive to beat Baron Rivendare, to unlock Anzu, to farm Zul'Gurub.

4: More Player Races
Ok, so this might, might be answered in the coming expansion, be it Maelstrom or Emerald Dream depending on your bets; but the simple fact is there's now far, far too many cool races in the game that we can't be. From Worgen to Tuskarr, Ethereals to Goblins, even Dryads and Naga, however unlikely they might be in terms of non-bipedal practicality and however likely they might be when it comes to the expansions, no player is immune from meeting a race they'd want to play.

5: Lore for the Masses
My main is a Priest. More specifically, a Shadow Priest. Quite possibly the least represented class/spec in the entire game, lore wise. Priests are just 'there', representations of a faith. Shadowpriests aren't even spoken about in hushed breath. We're like the wind. Which is, in its own way, a pleasant enigma - it's just one that'd be nice to be able to solve some time. On a personal level I see my Priest as untied to a faith and practical minded - more akin to Terry Pratchett's Witches. There's belief there, but Faith is a strong word. I have the power to move pain around (think Ben Hawkins from Carnivale), borrow minds and show those in need the way.
Warriors are also pretty passed over although for the most part they wear their lore on their sleeves. And their breastplates. And dripping off the ends of their weapons.

6: Quest Instances
If I'm being forced to hit up an instance to complete a quest chain, for all that's good and holy let me do it without being dependent on finding people to do it with me or hold my hand. When I enter an instanced dungeon, allow me to choose 'Quest' or 'Group' - the former reduces all mobs to non-elite status and removes 75% of them but also removes the top-end loot table for the instance, the latter keeps things as they currently are. I can choose to do the quests as a group and reap group rewards, or I can settle things myself in my own time and convenience.

7: Toggle Shoulderpads on/off
Seriously, Blizzard. Fuck off with the tomato vines, the picket fences, the lumps of space debris, the ten foot tall giant golden rods, the massive flaming faces, the angel wings sprites (sprites! You wankers !). Let me turn that ridiculous shit off. I cannot conceive how cloaks can cause more player offence.

8: A Laserpony
Look, I said I fucking wanted one, didn't I?

What is a laserpony?

Speaking of old instances...

So blizzard spent $%&* tons of time developing say Molten Core and Black Temple only to now see them be ghost towns. Would it not make sense to do "something" to make all that development, art and creativity be more utlized?

Why not add a /80 switch to make some of the more epic raids "on level" and tweak the stats of the items ALREADY in those database tables a little more usable? The gear does not have to be as good as Ulduar 22x level gear, but you could certainly add some logic to /80 BT which would add X% to the boss stats/level and then have them drop level 200 NAX 10 equivilent gear.

Take it a step further and then have a few NPCs that would take the badges from these older instances and convert them to emblems of heroism or valour (or any future level emblems) on a X for 1 ratio (2,5,10 whatever is balanced).

So what am I missing here?

You don't need to know what it is to want one.







It's a pony. Made out of lasers. Laserpony. Laser. Pony.

Not much.  Chances are more work goes into the random fluff outside the instance with the more modern patches than the instance.  You could probably build instances on a monthly basis if they weren't committed to justifying it's existence beyond "Look, loot!"

IIRC there was some community outcry when WotLK launched with only a recylcled raid. Naxx wasn't that bad since many of us hadn't even been inside at 60; but 90% of the players I know farmed MC to hell and back. I never want to set foot in that zone again, and would rather Blizz focus their development time on NEW content, rather than rehash old content. I understand that you think it would be very easy for them to do so, but I counter that it would still take some time, and I would rather that time be spent elsewhere, even if it would not result in the same quantity of content being made available.

The bleeding edge were mad because they had done Naxx when it was a 40 man, which required MC and then BWL being farmed to hell and back for gear to even think about setting foot inside.  Most of us were never that good years ago, so Naxx was essentially new to over 95% of the population.

I have one simple want and that's a Warlock specific flying mount.  Have the felsteed, have the dreadsteed, now I want a fucking winged demon minion to call my own.

You got her at 20.

Say it with me, all.

Pandas.

Pandas.

Paaaaaaaaandaaaaaaaaaas.

A good point and well made. Now make her fly dammit.

I wouldn't mind getting one for my paladin for the same reason.

amending list to just want a laserpony

Are you saying this is a bad thing?

I lol'd.

Which?  Blizzard churning out "look, loot!" instances, or (what they are currently doing) and including terrible dailies, a bunch of new shitty looking weaponry to mudflate tradeskills and heroics, and going off on weird tangents with their own lore?

Because at this point I really don't need any more dailies.

Instances require an absolute fuckton of art time, is my understanding.

Except you don't actually need to make new art for every single instance.  If they doing it at all correctly they will have all the major rooms and hallways on their interior sets broken down into a bunch of small chunks which are sized and shaped so that they can be recombined in a number of different configurations, so that each set could technically be used to create a number of instances.  If I had a working version of the model viewer I'd actually check it, but assuming that this is the case the walls, floor, and ceiling of a dungeon like Scholomance could easily be less than a hour long job to actually assemble with things like tables, chairs, books, and other clutter scattered around taking up the rest of the work day.  People would bitch that it looks like Scholomance / Maraudon / Shadowfang Keep, but then you could realistically have a fresh new instance out every month, without requiring any time from the model and texture artists (who can work on the next big project).

LOL I will have to mount her and see what happens  :ye_gods:

Class specif mounts for all would be really nice... in addition to standard ones that anyone can have.

Warlock - As mentioned, some form of flying hell spawn demon to ride (or maybe a mean looking gargoyle)

Mage - An energy infused falcon or something along the lines of a phoenix

Paladin - A form of angelic golden winged and armored noble griffon

Priest - Similar to paladin but more flowing, tapered and sleek. Less rugged and more majestic

Rogue - A large jet black cross between a snake and a large raven

Deathknight - some epic looking bone dragon (I know they have one but it looks puny)

Warrior - heavily armored, slow animation (same speed just look lumbering) war hawk

Shaman - I see this one as more colorful, like a cross between a teradactyl and tucan sam   :grin:

Druid - new flight form that is more... epic. Full blown large eagle!
 

My ret pally says to tell you he wants an armor-plated black pegasus.

Have you ever flirted with or blown her a kiss? :drillf:

Hahahahahahahahahaha.

Think of all the weird bugs that crop up each patch with no particular rhyme or reason, things that make no sense whatsoever.  Each one is another indication that WoW is held together with baling wire and spit.  Anything they change can, and often does, break other shit.  Even little stuff like orc shoulders suddenly getting incredibly small after one patch.  I mean, come on.  How does that HAPPEN?  :drill:

We're lucky instances that were made 4+ years ago still work, frankly.

My DK wants a skeletal war griffon.
Oh, wait....  :drill:

I doubt WoW dungeons are built with prefabs. Some things, like candeliers and such props, are prefabs but not the overall geometry. They're far too irregular to make that worthwhile. Naturally there's a fair bit of copy and paste, but the end result isn't a structure of prefabs. They're stored as homogenous meshes, which can be seen if you open one with a model viewer. My bet is that they're completely hand-modelled and textured, then imported, then decorated with doodads, clipping walls and doors using their in-house tools. It gives them maximum artistic flexibility.

I think that's also what makes them cool in a lot of ways. I'd rather just run Utgarde Pinnacle three times, with all the custom work, etc,. than run cityofheroes_warehouse layouts 1 to 3 once each.

Exactly. Prefabs look like prefabs, i.e. horrible. Humans are too damn good at finding patterns.

Another thing I would like is the return of the Karazhan-like rep/quest stuff. You're going to run those instances a billion times anyway, I liked having a quest series and rep to go with it. It's not something hugely important, but I liked it. It's the only kind of rep grind I don't mind at all.

Hunter - Catchable mounts - The ability to ride any of our pets, to include the flying ones like vultures and wyverns and stuff.

I still want to be able to tame a war giraffe! Those Barrens giraffes would kick face!

Morrowind and Oblivion both use prefabricated sections for construction.  You know, the games that crash when you alt+tab out.

Crashing on alt-tab makes perfect sense.  All the textures need to be checked to be potentially reloaded.  :awesome_for_real:

My point really was that all the weird crap that pops up in WoW is, to me, a sign that maybe some of the underlying planning is perhaps a bit shaky.  So hoping that they have a system in place, or that could be easily slapped together, to support that kind of modularity seems a bit far-fetched.  Of course, I'm wildly speculating about all of this.

But yeah, the reminder of the CoH warehouses... *shudder*.  Maybe Blizzard knows best after all.  :grin:

Only case that I know of, but : http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=17280


Is a tamable wolf for hunters and if you are horde, can get a riding wolf that matches.

I never really understood why anyone besides Horde Hunters went for those wolves - they've got a frigging saddle on them ffs. If you don't have access to the same model as a mount then really, what's the point?

Also: Rare cross-faction Wolf mount plz, Blizz. I'm sure Horde can have a cross-faction Elekk somewhere in return.

It isn't exactly that hard.  The model artists just need to build to a standard for any given architecture type, like the size of room segments or the dimensions of a door, and chances are the shit like door size for any given tile set has a standard anyways.  I'm also dubious as to the claim that almost everything is of single-piece construction, I wouldn't be surprised if Blackrock Spire was actually build out of modular room segments, and if I had a working version of the model editor or some export tools for Blender I'd go look at it.

The drama this would invoke would be highlarious.

Elekks are the worst faction mounts by a long long way.

Pics.


Now, this doesn't prove anything in itself. But looking at the second image, that hardly looks modular. Rather, that looks like a space partitioning that exists purely for performance reasons (ironically, this seems to help little... :grin:)

However, saying either of those was built by arranging prefabs is just crazytalk. That's just not a result that's feasible using a library of building blocks, no matter how large a library. Neither are places like Wailing Caverns, Hellfire Ramparts or Lower Blackrock Spire. They all have winding, elaborate layouts that, despite sloping floors, varying ceiling heights, overpasses and walls leaning all possible directions, never look disjointed. Blackrock Spire looks cheap, but that's rather due to its concept than its execution.

There's plenty of reuse of geometry within each major model, but that just makes sense. Producing hundreds of small to tiny prefabs for each instance doesn't, because they never get to reuse them outside that model.

I've purposefully gotten to exalted with other factions on all my Draenei, and will on all future Draenei, just to avoid riding an Elekk.  I don't care if I have to run for ten levels when they lower the requirements.  I will not use one.

You people are broken, Elekks are awesome.

1. All of Dalaran will be memory resident no matter where you are in Dalaran.  Blizzard probably knows this, so I doubt it's for performance.
2. Choosing (mostly) exterior architecture when we are talking about interiors without any exterior geometry makes me wonder whether you're a troll or have never played around with an editor.  In case you're the latter: usually segmented prefabs are used for interiors, or at the very least at a much larger scale for exterior work.
3. Breaking building pieces into small sections is precisely what makes it re-usable.  Ergo, in a hypothetical situation where they did the argument that it isn't re-usable fails.
4. Do you know any alternate download sites for the model viewer?  My internet cannot download all 3.8 MB of it before server timeout.  Fuck that's retarded. :uhrr:



 :grin:

EDIT: Link was broken.

I don't think they're awful but the only char I actually want one on is my Gnome mage for the shits and giggles aspect.

But yeah, the Horde can swing if they think they'll get the Mechanostriders any time soon  :why_so_serious:

Talbuk are the best mounts. It's a shame they are a PITA to get now.

Yeah, I finally catassed my way into a Talbuk and Netherdrake on my DK.  If you rally want one, go to the ogre camp up in the mountains, not the one at the ring of blood.  There's still a lot of people running around the ROB area for the quests there and factioning up so you'll always have competition.  At the mountain camp I say maybe 2-3 people when  I spent about 4 or 5 hours collecting the beads while unemployed.

They are? I got mine in a few days of all-out Ogricide. I stuck predominantly to a cave in the valley, the respawn rate fed me ogres constantly and they were fun to fight, great exp (I did it while questing in Nagrand) and had amazing droprate for the hand-in rep beads too. Then again, my main is human so I've got the 10% extra repuation going for me but I never felt like it was an unpleasant grind. I love my Talbuk to bits, well worth the effort.

Got my Nether Drake the other day, but I have to say I'm glad I waited till 80 to get it, it would have been much harder at lower levels - the mine, being the best place to get crystals and find eggs, is very mob-intensive and without a 10 level aggro boundary it could have been immensely difficult as a cloth caster. That said, I had a lot of luck finding eggs (best day I found 12 in total - a huge 3300 rep alone) so I shot from neutral to exalted in about 5 days. Hardest part was getting started, really - though I went the hard way around it in that I refused to buy an armored gryphon so I ended up doing the Sha'tari Skyguard grind which was considerably longer than anything else I've done so far. Nether Rays are pretty unique in the game though, so I still think it was worth it. I just need a macro now to swap between epic flying mounts.

As a druid, I've found it incredibly hard to make myself grind out flying mounts, since flight form is so awesome.   That brings me to my next point though, I really really liked the epic flight form quest line.  I think there should be more mounts attainable through that sort of questing.  That one required you summon a special boss in Sethekk Halls at the end (for the people that aren't familiar with the line).   Sure, if you make things open to people like that through a quest line, pretty much everyone will have one that wants it, which is really fine by me.  I guess if they want to try and make them more unique they could tack on some expensive parts of the quest.

Anyway, less pure grind and more interesting quest lines for mounts would be neat.

Did they change something? I thought you needed the Haala kill tokens to get the Talbuks from Haala, which were the only ones available to alliance.

That is what makes it a PITA from what i remember, since now, with the cap at 80, it is practically impossible to find someone who counts as an Honorable kill hanging around Haala.

There are 2 that come from Haala PvP, but there are like 5 that you get from being exatled with Kurenai.

ohh.

Shows what i know, i thought the Kurenai had Elekk and the Mag'har for horde had Talbuk.

Is this the rep-grind mount thread now? If so:

(http://xs140.xs.to/xs140/09240/mount_number_3292.png) (http://xs.to)

Yep, as a DK.  :grin:

Sheepherder, if you want to have a proper discussion, I suggest you don't try to deliberately misinterpret every word people say. I even wrote up there that it didn't prove anything in itself, but it's a pretty strong suggestion of how they build things. The troll call was classy, though.

PS.
I suggest having a look at this. About half way down there's a set of four images, showing part of the development cycle of Utgarde Keep. Particularly notice how neat the wireframe is, especially around the columns against the wall. It's almost as if they were modelled as one piece.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/features/dungeons/utgarde.xml

One thing I'd like them to do is take a look at leveling.  Not just making it faster (though that would be nice, too), but there are some classes which get reamed when they're levelling.  Rogues, for example, take huge amounts of damage and have no self healing except for consumables.  A lot of classes have huge problems at low levels, too.  Warriors are still doing nothing but heroic strike + rend for a looooong time, Priests have massive mana problems, and (as far as I can see) nobody has boosted dropped cash/quest rewards to match the faster levelling speed.

Well, I'll grant you the other ones fine, but I think this one isn't as big a deal.  You can make, probably, as much money as you would leveling normally 1-60 (without going out of your way to make extra money), in a single day at level 80.  The reason they have made leveling easier and easier is that after people have done it so many times, you just stop wanting to do it.  I think they need to keep making alts from scratch viable in order to keep subscribers actually.

Well, yeah, so as far as I can see, boosting the sub-60 income would make things easier on leveling players, while having few real negative side effects.  I don't see why forcing players to lean on an 80 to finance their leveling would be a good thing.  Tradeskills suffer from this, too (%#$%#ING THORIUM).

They've instead made all the big money items while leveling, much cheaper.

So I finally got the model viewer to download.  It only took a dozen tried, and a dozen minus one time-outs. :awesome_for_real:

I'd call that a segment, personal definitions may vary. (http://www.getdropbox.com/gallery/1143749/1/WoWMV?h=0925ef)

From the looks of things they may actually do all the building with small prefabs and then save the entire thing as a map file.  Then again, some of the folders have only the map file for the entire instance.  So it's entirely possible that no set standard exists, or at the very least that they have no standard for what parts they pack into the archives.  Then again, some of the artists might just do it the hardcore way and render their work extremely hard to duplicate or copy from.

Also, Naga look badass in DK T7 with an Armageddon.

Sheep that image link does not work.

Pics, please. I still think Naga are a very potential player race depending on how the next expansion goes.

They'll just make them the Scourge of the Sea and NPC only.  I feel confident predicting this since I would like to play a naga.

I would be willing to sacrifice the Naga if it means I could play a Goblin.

Fixed it.

Et tu Corvidae?

Okie, I'd like goblins, too, as you well know.  We should be able to get both and more!

Bah, you just want to /emote in a noo joisy accent  :oh_i_see:





...sign me up too.

I look forward to Blizzard adding Pandaren as a horde race.  :awesome_for_real:

Hell yes.

It should now, evidently the "copy link to clipboard" button doesn't work well under Firefox + NoScript even when Dropbox is whitelisted.


Same Gallery as before (http://www.getdropbox.com/gallery/1143749/1/WoWMV?h=0925ef)

Boots, cape, head, and quivers don't display right.  The tabard is a little malformed by the curvature of the model.  Otherwise it supports pretty much everything.

I have visions in my head of naga players being a noisy hissing nightmare, like when a hunter has a pet crocolisk.  

Goblins, though, I would be all over that.  TIME IS MONEY, FRIEND!

Well helloooo there!

They've had the ability to dress up Naga since Vanilla. Don't take that as any indication that they'll be a player race.

Indeed, but that's not exactly a new observation.  Case in point: appearance tab.