f13.net

A bunch of malcontents decided that whining on the forums about gimp warriors 24/7 wasn't enough and they decided to have a mass protest on Argent Dawn. This resulted in server problems and a reboot to fix them.

Aftermath (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=1088073&s=blizzard&tmp=1#blizzard)

Earthen Ring just got rebooted. People were saying that the Eastern Kingdoms weren't working because of a similar event.

I was one of those banned (three hours).

Lots of fun.

They consider your appearance at the event 'griefing.' Personally, I consider your web presence to be 'griefing.' You are quite the attention whore though, aren't you?

Anyone that participates in these things is a fucking moron.  Suck it up you goddamn pussies; the only thing you're doing is cornholing their number one problem (here's a hint, it's NOT YOU).

Are warriors really that bad off? It's high praise that if I let anyone into my group for an instance, it's going to be a warrior first and foremost.  Being the only plate/tank class on the entire horde makes them more valuable to our 3 person tandem than even a friggin priest.

I've had a warrior to 32, and my brother's warrior is now 25. What we have noticed is that a warrior is one of the poorest solo classes in the game (priests lose that distinction as they approach 20). What we have also found is that the warrior is one of the best team classes around. With me to heal him... he's a beast. The only thing holding them back now is being a little light on killing power, and having a lack of "oh shit!" abilities to get out of bad pulls from time to time (1 ability every 30 mins isn't enough to be equitable). Some rage tweaks would also not go astray. But overall, they are a great class outside of the solo arena, and even there it only takes some patience and care to solo them through most content other classes can solo.

Also, crashing a goddamn server is never excusable. They should have given you more than 3 days for inflicting that sort of grief on the server population. I also find it HIGHLY retarted when blizzard has SPECIFICALLY stated that the next patch will be aimed at addressing player concerns with warlocks and WARRIORS. So yeah, what did you hope to achieve, get Blizzard's attention? You already had it. Be a griefing little drama queen? I think that is more likely.

EDIT: I thought it was bad at 3 days, but 3 HOURS? WTF?

I love playing my warrior.  I got a mage to 20, just didn't do it for me.

People who participate in these are about the level of those who sign intarnet petitions, IMO.

I like my warrior, but the fact is I don't compare particularily well to other classes in effectiveness in general play. Our specials are lackluster (some would say piss-poor), the rage system is a millstone around our necks, and our tohot percentages are screwy to say the least.

There's plenty wrong with the class and it does need attention.

Now, I could really care less what the warriors as a whole do in the game to draw Blizzard's attention. Really. Yah, so AD went down <yawn>. Cry me a river. Some few people got a 3 hour suspension. Big deal. Same same.

Blizzard has announced--O-ffically mind you---that the class isn't performing up to their expectations. That's good enough for me. I recall how lackluster EQ warriors were the first year and it took about 4 months or so for a fix and another month or so for continued tweaking (then an expansion to make them the overpowered game-breakers they've been ever since...adside from some real and short-lived balance during PoP). The warrrior plays well enough for me to get by and have some fun. I can wait for some needed changes.

Now...instead of being assholes here on this forum, I'd advise the most effective course: ignore the dimbulbs. Any of us that played Diablo knows what Blizzard fanbois are like. Ignoring the anguished gnashing of clueless teeth is the best course. We also know exactly how long it takes Blizzard to change anything. So patience is a virtue in this case (a necessity, more like).

So, Rasix, put your ass away and behave.

Patience is a lot harder to find when you're paying $15 a month. And I think that's the problem here. Waiting five months for a patch on a game with no monthly fee is one thing. Waiting five months in an MMOG is $75 and with the leveling curve, you'll probably max out even if your class is gimped.

Oh I know they're a bunch of clueless fucktards who wouldn't know what balance actually meant if you tatooed it on their foreheads. I wont even touch a forum thread that implies it's about "balance" or if it's a general thread that has the word "Paladin", "Shaman", or "Rogue" in its title without also having "video".

The problem is though, how do you ignore people when they crash your server (I don't play on any server that got hit though)?

How about no? Really, I basically said what you said but with dirty words.  These people need to suck it up and just wait; they're still goddamn useful if a bit underpowered.  This kind of crap annoys the hell out of me. Is it going to be a *yawn* when other pissed off dipshits start taking down realms? Hey, troll racial traits suck, I better go ruin someone's playing experience!

Here's one for the road: eat shit and die a painful death, you smurf looking, drizzt dry humping, floppy eared, cat mounting, night elf.

Ha ha I find it quite funny actually. It's pretty amusing that gathering in one place is "griefing" and can crash the server. Democracy in action or something like that.

Blizzard gives basically zero feedback on their message boards. Maybe they should consider doing that. The protest was successful. It got a response. Forum threads do not get responses. The protest accomplished what it was supposed to and Blizzard is tacitly rewarding that behavior.

It all boils down to Blizzard completely ignoring their forums.

Yes, it is. But you can do this to any mmorpg really.  Protests in EQ took down servers.  They did the same in UO (well, in UO you could fart into the wind and it'd take down a server).



They need a stronger forum presence or one that at least knows an inkling of what's going on. They do respond, but not often enough for most people's tastes.  But is a "we're looking into that", "good stuff is on the way", "you're wrong, it works like this" really going to satiate these frothing fanbios? Other companies have gotten roasted when they've promised the moon on their forums and Blizzard seems very hesitant to go down that path.

I'm of the opinion that 90% of the problems with the class are due to the fact that almost every warrior in the game is too stupid to use defensive stance with a shield. I can't count the number of times some douche bag warrior has decided that he's going to 'tear shit up' and uses something like a 2h pole arm in beserker stance. Warriors need to realize what their job in groups is: To stand still and let shit hit them. They do pretty shitty dps even in the best of situations compared with pretty much any class in the game other than a pally or maybe a druid (havn't grouped with enough of these to really know). Now thats not to say they don't need some love. But they arn't even the worst class in the game.

As a night elf warrior myself, let me address this:

Roofle!

You can't let your chosen race stand in the way of appreciating a good insult.

No, it's about searching a real and open communication without placeholder answers.

Communication is again two-way and it needs a discussion. This discussion goes only from players to devs. They need to start discussing and offer their own feedback.

It's not about posting a long programmatic announce. It's about posting it, read the reactions and engage a discussion.

Jesus Christ.  What is this, therapy?  If the participants had gone out and bashed foozles for 6 hours instead they would have leveled and would already be 'more powerful'.  Jackasses.

Bah, hell with it, I don't have the energy today.

Suffice it to say the class needs help. I'm not much interested in "protests" or whathaveyou. I would like to have a glimmering of a clue what Blizzard is thinking in regards to rebalancing.

Personally, I think the replacement of "nexthit" attacks with instant attacks would go a long way in fixing a variety of problems warriors are seeing now.

And, yes, Blizzard is way too slow, but I simply don't see any of this happending quickly. I do want to see it happen, though. I'm also approaching level 60, so, yes, I'm not going to see much of this as a adjunct to leveling up gameplay.

I also believe that it's the point.

Too often the best answer players can receive is about "patch notes".

What is needed it to know *why* something has been changed. Explaining what is the point of view.

Too often the players go berserk exactly because they cannot understand the reasons behind a change.

Too often this is the consequence of a complete lack of communication. It happens when the devs not care about communicating their own view.

Drama++

My class is bettern yourn class so suck it Calantus!

Info from Blizzard about warriors here http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=589546&p=25

Scroll down a bit. It is a HUGE reply. Some good info, and some very good answers.

A-fucking men.

I have a priest buddy who won't group with warriors not defensive specced anymore.  They can't hold aggro and they're mana sponges 9/10 times.  Suffice to  say he's abandoned his holy-spec in favor of a shadow spec for leveling purposes because he wasn't getting shit done that way.

I would say you are both wrong about Def specced warriors. In a lot situations, Arms or fury specced warriors hold aggro better than def specced warriors. With the way taunt works now, you have to have decent damage output to hold aggro, and Arms/fury can do that.

Now, im not saying def spec is bad. I think it will be the only way to go for main tanks in Raid instances, but for the regular instances im totally not sold on it.

Now, on the other hand, any warrior that spends the majority of his time in one stance is a bad warrior. They should be constantly switching stances to get the most out of all their abilities. So, a fury/arms warrior spending all his time in zerkerstance is not much worse than a def specced warrior spending all his time in def stance. Each has their place, and the talants just make different specced warriors better for different situations and when in different stances.

Priests excel in a group, no doubt about it, and shadow priests are the least group friendly priest there is. For PVP or solo, shadow is nice. But again, for instances and for group pvp, give me a holy/desc priest any day.

In WoW population terms 200 people is meaningless. You could organize a protest against poor color co-ordination of in-game pets and get that many people.

The warrior is well balanced for Elite PvE, where balancing rage is a good part of the challenge and discipline. And soloing is ultimately pretty irrelevant, since everyone will reach 60. But blizzard have placed a lot of emphasis on PvP, and there the warrior seems very limited. The latest post basically said the warriors strength is aggro management, that's great, but it's meaningless in PvP. No other class, including priests, is so shackled to PvE dynamics.

I don't agree at all, damage is not the best way of holding aggo. Defensive stance gives you something like a +60% aggro bonus to all attacks (before the +aggro talent is considered), and a huge bonus to aggro from specials (re. sunder armor). Not to mention the 10% mitigation bonus. In an instance I would only leave defensive stance if I have to hamstring, and I hate sacrificing rage for that.

It would be nice to have mortal strike mind you. But being able to through in a couple of stuns and shield blocks represent mitigation, which is a warriors primary job in an instance.

Amazing, they finally got a dev response.


Gee it only took them like 3 months to admit to the problems Indalamar of Nurfed wrote extensively about right after the "awesome" Warrior changes where they completely changed how taunt worked. I guess that's progress. I wonder how long it'll take them to actually "fix" this problem?

Well, if other players quit, like I did, then it's high priority. I doubt the protest is the only reason they'd respond so quickly to this. 3 months isn't very long at all. Some games have remained broken for years.

Besides, it's the most important class, not done right. A broken warrior has an effect on the game more than a broken warlock or overpowered paladin. They'd be doing themselves a favor by getting it out of the way now.

That dev post was extremely informative and he replied again today to explain that the perceived wrong miss ratio is just the result of compensations to mantain the system balanced.

The only weak spot is that this discussion focused solely on PvE. Many design choices work concretely because the warrior is intended as an aggro manager. But what happens when this basic trait becomes directly useless in a PvP environment?

A paladin has an higher survivability 'by design' to compensate the fact that it doesn't hold aggro as efficently as a warrior:

But in PvP?

I was wondering that too.

I can't see how a heavy investment in the protection tree is supposed to pay off.

Shield disclipline underwhelms me. A search on some high-end shields show about >50 damage reduction per block, which means >25 extra damage blocked which seems like nothing when compared to the hundreds of damage you'll be copping in the high-end PVE.

One-Handed specialisation is tasty, but hardly something you'd go deep into protection for.

Concussion blow is nice, but high-end bosses are immune to stun, and while it does help it's not anything that would pull me into protection outside of PVP and there I think MS is better.

Shield bash looks good, but again is not something that would pull me into protection except for PVP.

Improved shield wall is the first ability is see as being useful and something I'd consider shooting for if I needed some oomph against bosses.

Improved taunt sounds good, but most of the time you wont need it that fast with both mocking blow and challenging shout to cover your butt when the cooldown is on. And with a good group of non-retards helping with aggro you shouldn't need it regularly (only for unlucky crit runs and aggro-wiping abilities).

Improved disarm seems like not enough bang for your buck, and I'll be shocked if high-end bosses can be disarmed.

Improved sunder armor sounds good if it does indeed add aggro, but then it's hardly a tool for multi-mob aggro, and that is where a warrior sees the most trouble aggro-wise in a good group.

Basically I can't see going further than shield spec (for revenge and spikes), 1 point in shield block (for revenge and spikes), toughness, and defiance is really all that important for anyone but a dedicated raid tank. My brother is speccing for 31 arms, 20 prot (he'll either drop imp shield block or 1 point of defiance), and Imp Revenge is the only low-end talent I'd regret not taking in this instance. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I just can't see prot spec being all that fantastic, especially when compared to the offencive boosts arms and fury provide.

Also, if you haven't got tactical mastery and aren't switching stances regularly for abilities you are holding yourself back. If you go full prot for mitigation you'd be crazy not to switch for thunderclap at the very least (10% melee damage mitigation and AoE aggro? Sign me up). Whirlwind sure is nice too. Not to mention charge that is very useful against things you don't pull, or for anything if someone else pulls them for you to charge (people always site the chain-aggro mobs as being a problem then, but a single demo shout or thunder clap gathers them).

EDIT: My brother's spec also has cruelty in it, silly of me to miss that.

No, that's not the only problem. The most significant problem is that with large population MMOGs, this is about as good a place to spend your $15 on, so people are reluctant to move on. The fine dining experience doesn't exist in MMOGland. Well, it does to an extent with some MUDs and games with MUD populations like M59 and Clan Lord. As customers we realise that we're paying for TGIF gaming, we'd just like the staff at the door to set the expectation level before we sit down to wait.

However, when TGIF staff undercook your Warrior and make you wait for ages because they are short staffed, you don't march into their kitchen and piss in the other customers' food. Yes HRose, I'm looking at you.

You can be an arms/fury talent-specialized warrior and tank well, but you will have to use defensive stance and a shield when appropriate.  I think there is a mixup in the nomenclature.  Arms/fury guy who wants to run (as the only tank) BRD with his 2-hander in arms stance the whole time is a worthless fucktard.  Arms/fury guy who knows how aggro works, uses a shield most of the time and keeps everything locked on him is a great asset.

Personally, I think that the warrior's biggest weaknesses are PvP and soloing.  Mortal Strike solves these problems.  The solution is to make Mortal Strike a base ability, not a talent.  I say ditch Heroic Strike and replace it with Mortal.  

They should also let taunt work, if only for a couple seconds, in PvP, or add some damage-sharing skill, so warriors' defensive abilities aren't negated entirely by the TAB button.

As for initial rage generation, bring back inner rage from beta, nerf it to 25 rage or so.

The tactical mastery requirement is also fucked up.  They just didn't pull off the stances well at all.  At this point, I'd be tempted to let all abilities be used in all stances, and just use the stances for the base modifiers.

Those would fix 90% of the issues.  You still have the fact that most warrior skills are worthless to upgrade, and most warrior talents are shit.  But those are relatively minor.

 I wonder if they only got that very long, detailed and useful post because of that protest.  If so we can look forward to many more protests by every class every time a fringe group feels like they have been wronged (perpetually). You really shouldn’t reward bad behavior.

That said blizzard should have responded like that a long time ago. People are much less angry about things they know are wrong so long as you acknowledge and explain it.

I also think this would be great, and would address the issue I agreed with above (warrior forte being related to PvE).

They allow players to charm, fear, seduce, etc other players.  Taunt is a much less offensive form of controlling other players' actions than those, so I wouldn't think it's exploitable.  And certainly it's doable technically.

Amen, my brother. The only true protest worth discussing is cancelling your fucking subscription. Anything else is just drama queen attention whoring.

EDIT: Also, like every other "official" MMOG forum, Blizzard's forums are full of retarded assmonkeys like Hrose who can't understand why the devs don't pay attention to their special and unique snowflake selves. It's hard for devs who have real jobs to respond to the inane moanings of a mass of gibbering marsupials who think said devs have nothing better to do than placate their need for attention. It's also hard for devs to institute changes based on forum posts in any sort of a timely fashion, no matter how good they are.

Again, if the problem is so bad that you feel crashing a server or pissing and moaning on the official boards is productive, CANCEL YOUR FUCKING SUBSCRIPTION, ASSMONKEY.

Ask EQ that same question. Paladins in EQ are arguably more desired as a tank except in the most extreme raids that require a jillion hitpoints on the main tank.

Maybe it is some inherant way that healers, tanks, DPS classes exist within a "medieval" RPG/MMOG.

Warriors since the first day of EQ and now into WOW have been somewhat gimpy, aside from their meatshield duties. However the benefits of being a meatshield are not as visibly gratifying as casting or high DPS. They are necessary, and yet people always feel they are gimped in these games.

They should take a look at City of Heroes, which has attempted to branch out from these traps in their class designs. Tanks in CoH feel more useful than just a meatshield, and maybe it is because of the "shiny" that is their flame auras or other fancy powers. Many of the classes in CoH feel more more fun to play, simply because they are a different way of presenting the same old classes to us.

Whatever is the solution, MMOGs need to take a serious look at finding one. Warriors bitch about being outdamaged, hybrid classes bitch about not being as needed in groups (a.k.a. holy trinity). This happens time after time, in game after game.

How about giving us a new set of classes, instead of copying the same classes (and thus the same problems) from previous games.

I think I'll side with the resident UO fanboi and ask: How about no classes at all?

There are problems with that method too. I remember the bitching about tank mages. However a non-level profession based method has been proven to be fun, so who knows.

Whatever happens in future games, they really need to look at recurring problems such as with warriors and the "holy trinity" barrier and come up with a solution.

My point.

/agree.

If there are no classes, people create them, because people crave categories.  UO has its tank mages and dex monkeys, AC1 has its archmages, Og mages, extreme melees, etc.

The bad part about that is that usually someone comes up with a template that hasn't been fully explored/balanced, and it owns the world for awhile until things are nerfed.  It also tends to gimp newbies and even vets who don't have time to catass boards looking for the most recent discovery as to what's teh leetest.

Ya, just repeating it because Kageru mentioned he doesn't like switching it up because of rage loss and only misses hamstring. Plus you didn't mention tactical mastery. Without it a warrior probably would be better off in one stance.

I'd also like to add that I like the way taunt works in this game. It would be utterly boring alot of the time if a warrior could just hold aggro all the time. That goes for everyone: nukers, healers, and warriors themselves.

People invest that much into a game they start to get a sense of entitlement, and thus the protests. They want to change something from the inside without cancelling the sub. I don't think it's out of line to think like that. Sure you can vote with your wallet when the GAME isn't fun, but if you think one aspect is broken that's not a reason to just bail on it as a whole.

Then roll one of the many other classes that casts or has high DPS.  There are more than enough people who enjoy being in the meatshield role.  I do.  And in WoW groups, the meatshield role is, if anything, too frenetic and engaging.  It's a lot of fun.  I hate the "everyone has to be dps because only dps is fun" mindset that is so prevalent on the official boards.  I don't know if it's a diablo thing or what, but without distinct group roles the game becomes trivially easy, because effective group interaction is the only remotely challenging thing in these games.

What they need to do is make the "meatshield" role more viable in PvP, and a bit more effecient when solo.  They don't need to convert us into anothet DPS class, there are already too many of those as it is.  



Asheron's Call had fewer viable classes than Everquest did.  Skill systems lead to less character diversity, because balancing 1,000 possible skill combinations is many orders of magnitude more difficult than balancing 10 classes.

PvP taunt/meatshield solution:

Maintain an aggro list for players as well.  Your highest aggro opponent is highlighted.  Attacking another player triggers a damage reduction proportional to the distance down your aggro list that player currently is.  

Too late for WoW 1, since it'd totally fuck up the PvP balance, but it'd solve a lot of problems with aggro management being a PvE-only mechanic.

They had the opportunity to do that with stances but shot them to hell by making them minor flavour changes. All they'd need is 2 stances that greatly modify damage and aggro. Want to solo, pvp, or the group already has a tank? Well you can do higher damage in this stance (not as much as dedicated DPS classes, but enough to get by) but draw little aggro. Wanna tank? Use the tanking stance and your DPS goes down as your aggro increases. You could also put all the aggro/tanking skills on aggro stance only, and vice-versa if you had a cooldown on stance changes. But oh well, opportunity lost.

Firstly, screw anyone who contributed to a server downtime by concentrated whining.

Secondly, if warriors suck, why play one? I started WoW with two characters, a warlock and a warrior. I ended up disliking both. I play a hunter now and I'm happy, though it wasn't my first choice, nor second.

I guess to be a real mmog player I should have stuck with my warrior and whined about how I was building my legacy and other stupid tripe like that. Instead, I just tried new classes until I found one I liked.

I even 'wasted' a couple weeks playing the first couple guys to 23/24.

And if you spend five months at $75 playing a character you don't enjoy playing, you deserve to lose every cent of it. I call it the "SWG Combat Revamp Rule". I'll be back when you fix it, and I won't pay for the time betwixt.

Doesn't work.

You may cancel because you ran out of money, you don't have time to play, the graphic sucks, your computer exploded etc...

Canceling an account doesn't provide in any way a feedback.

Btw, I like my warrior and I was at the protest simply because I love that sort of stuff. I had a lot of fun before the server went down and many players on AD joined us in the tea party.

Every account cancellation form I've seen in the last 2+ years has had a feedback box.  I would be surprised if Blizzard's didn't.



Did the other people on the server have a lot of fun?

They have one, but the word limit was very low, if I recall. Not enough to explain more than a generic complaint or two.

Sure, what they didn't like was the lag. But the lag isn't required in a protest. It really was a gathering and I'm sorry it wasn't possible without being a bother.

So yes, we caused a (minimal) disservice. A moment in the history of the game where the servers already go down happily without the need of protests. I'm not happy that we caused lag but it wasn't also directly the purpose.

I was wondering why I never see other warriors switching to one-handers and shields + defensive stance when in groups. It doesn't make any sense. Unless your two-hander does absolutely insane shit, your extra damage and lack of hate generation isn't going to help. The fragile classes are going to die, and then YOU are going to die because your stupid ass has no healing or backup.

Also: Am I the only person who thinks Slam is utterly, totally worthless?

Wouldn't it have been easier to write an oddly worded 150,000 word essay on the problem and post it here without paragraph breaks?  It's never failed you in the past.

I don't have in my bars both Slam and Heroic Strike. I really don't know their sense and I'm curious if someone else uses them.

This is just complete hearsay as I haven't tried it myself nor seen it done, but apparently slam does have a use. From what I hear if timed well between swings of a really slow 2-hander it adds appreciably to DPS due to either avoiding the effect of its timer, or abusing how it resets the melee timer. I'm not completely sure on the details, but some swear by it so maybe there is some use for it if you make the conditons happen.

Doesnt slam disrupt a caster during a cast?

I dont know, but sounds like it might.

The intent of slam makes sense. Take a massively damaging weapon with a 3-4 second swing and, with talents, turn it into a 1 second swing. A massive upgrade in DPS. However because it has a cast bar it only really works when you're not tanking, which is of couse the only reason warriors get group invites. Likewise because you're immobile during the cast it's limited in PvP too. So while nice in theory it simply doesn't have much of a role in practice.

You don't need to switch stances to do thunder clap when you're instance tanking. Demoralizing shout costs half the rage, generates more aggro and probably mitigates a lot more damage too thanks to its duration. It also doesn't have the 4 target limitation. Both are spammable.

I do have tactical mastery, but only as a pre-requisite to anger management (30% slower rage loss out of combat). The difference between an incoming 5 pull when you have half a tank of rage, as opposed to starting off cold, is just massive. And part of that involves not blowing rage (by stance dancing) before you suddenly discover you need it.

The essence is pretty clear to me, as to others in this thread. The first is that attempting to balance PvE and PvP in a single rule-set has never worked. The second is that the rage mechanic is balanced to be a limitation (so that a warrior has modes) in PvE. It's too slow and too limiting when fighting a human opponent. And yes, mortal strike needs to be a baseline ability. Paying 31 talent points so you can finally get an ability to turn rage into damage (heroic strike is awful) is a design flaw. I believe in beta it was 11 points deep in the arms tree, a much more reasonable position.

However the pain has barely started. I fully expect battlefields to end up being a "skirmish line" as rogues  try to flank and the ranged classes duck in and out of firing range. A warrior attempting to cross that line, to engage in melee, can expect to meet such a volume of focused fire, movement inhibiting effects and crowd control that any HP or AC advantage will mean only a couple of seconds life. And his chosen target can mitigate much of a warriors threat through using the tactic called "run and dodge". Of course this doesn't show up in duels.

Demo shout and thunderclap stack, spamming demo shout only resets the timer. Also, initial rage is little issue with imp charge + blood rage. But I can see your method as a valid one to take if it's your preference, so shall we call it difference of oppinion?

As for the skirmish line effect, that happens to some extent already during the Hillsbrad shuffle that constitutes the closest thing to battlegrounds WoW has right now. On the other hand, co-ordinated charges offset this by a large degree (though it seems the purpose of the charges is to get mages into IAE range, but I digress), so as long as you are with guildies/friends you wont have too much of a problem. Joining up at random will quite possibly suck though. The best hope is that the quests Blizz says they'll include provide people enough incentive not to just setup skirmish lines and stare at the enemy.

EDIT: One more thing, a 1 sec timer is CAKE to fit between most mob's attacks if you've been a caster any length of time. And caster mobs wouldn't be the slightest challenge to time. Useless when multi-tanking of course, but might still have a use as a soloist or an offtank.

Or maybe it's because they're more useful as a meatshield?

So I'm in the reactor and we get pincered between two mobs of Freakshow. TPW except for my flame tank.

I drop the new auto-hit area taunt, run away from the reactor, turn on Tough and Blazing Aura and just kinda stand there as about a dozen boss-class mobs pound on me with hammers and sickles. Everyone else staggers to their feet, runs out to get radiation shielding, runs back in and polishes off the bosses.

90% resistance to damage and/or a significant dodge rate means your average tank can hold up under a massive assault without breaking down.  Toss in the instant-effect defense buff and healing inspirations and you can hold the line while everybody else gets up and shakes off resurrection stun.

My experience has been that the healer/tank/mage "holy trinity" does tend to assert itself when dealing with archvillains and/or giant monsters. But when fighting everything else, the tank might need some buffs, but not the constant attention of a healer. The healer takes care of everybody _else_, because grabbing aggro off of an incoming horde is not an instant thing, and given that a lot of mobs have AoE or cone attacks, even if something's attacking the tank it can splash onto everybody else.

--GF

Brucing time.



It's a much more effective message than crashing a fucking server because your mommy didn't hug you enough, you jackass.




Yes, it does. It says, "Your product is unsatisfactory. It is not worth my money or my time." There is no more effective statement than taking money out of the hands of greedy assmuncher developers who release games they KNOW are being released too early.



You love griefing the fuck out of 1800 other people who pay the same amount of money as you to enjoy the game. You love causing service disruptions just because you didn't get enough developer attention to feed your inferiority complex. Got it. Just wanted to make sure we were clear.

You like being a griefer on a MASS level, with all the other attention whores.

You are not a special, unique snowflake. Your ideas about game balance DO NOT MATTER TO ANYONE BUT YOURSELF. Just like my ideas don't matter shit to anyone else. But I only inflict them on this "community," which can choose to read them or not. You decide your ideas must be inflicted upon paying customers.

You are a cockgobbler.

First off, I do not agree with crashing the server.  I do not agree that stopping other people's playtime is worth the attention you got.  It isn't "right."

However, I am not so sure quitting will send the correct message either.  I used to be of that camp thinking that is really the only way to make these companies think.  You have to hit them in the wallet right?

Well, that certainly does send "A" message, but I'm not sure it is focused enough.  I mean if you are really disgusted with the game, then you will quit regardless.  You probably won't be back either, no matter how many improvements are put in afterward.  Even if you do come back it will be with a totally different attitude which will limit you to a few more months before you quit again IMO.  

I think there is a big difference between coming into a game fresh with a "Hey let's see what's in this game" as compared to a "What have you done for me lately" attitude.  Once the first feeling has gone, you just don't ever get it back with the same game.

I think we all know this deep down and try to hold onto that feeling for as long as we can.  Thus, we try to improve the game by putting in suggestions or brainstorming ideas with other gamers, etc.  We do this until we just can't stand it anymore and up and quit.

Now, once we do quit along with several others, the suits take a look at the numbers and try to figure out what is happening.  From that point, they make big decisions like staffing of development vs. art vs. bug fixes vs. marketing push vs. .....you get the idea.  

Basically, the minor little content or gameplay issues get buried at that point.  You don't really care anymore and the suits don't either.  They just want to get some money back.  For some games that has been, "keep things as they are and just raise the price" ( a la UO.)  For others, this has been, "completely change the direction of the grouping system and make it more solo'able" (a la EQ2.)

Little issues like Rage production from a warrior to make them a viable solo'er or group component just get lost in the wash.

My advice is to just keep using the forums and other communication options.  Eventually they will fix your issue.  It just won't ever be on your timetable.

Heh.

Official forums are a worthless wasteland of stupidity that sucks developer resources, developer bandwidth and developer money and will NEVER produce anything worthwhile. They are full of self-important, attention-whoring little twats like Hrose who all think their ideas are better than anything else the developers can come up with. They provide an easy means to gathering more self-important twats together to do things like this stupid protest, which ends up costing the developers MORE money.

Developer-community feedback is best accomplished by the developers hand-picking people out of the beta community and other prominent players, listening to their feedback, and then disregarding the stuff that makes no sense. You do that away from the frothing masses. Giving the frothing masses a voice just makes them overestimate their importance.

The importance of the frothing masses? $14.95/month. The masses are entirely too easily led. And as I always say, in the abscence of true leadership, the masses will follow whoever has the loudest voice.

Isn't this sort of giving in to the might of the uberguilds? If not, what are your standards for selecting "prominent" players. I would think the players best known in the game would be the biggest catasses burning through the stuff the fastest. That doesn't really represent how the casual player thinks the game could change. Nor does it really represent how the class corrections either.

I hate the uberguilds with a passion. But they DO know class balance issues. They DO know how shit works. And they are rabid enough to catass the fuck out of your game through multiple characters, no matter how boring the grind.

They shouldn't be your only resource. But you will NOT find casual gamers on the official forums either. Most stats I've heard about forum use is that about 1% of all players of any MMOG will post on a message board about the game. Which means the casual player isn't being heard AT ALL. They float in and out of games without ever giving their opinions. Chances are, you could pick 20 random people who don't post on the game's boards and get all the casual player input you'd ever need.

You have to design for the casual player from the get-go if you give a shit about them. Trying to retrofit casual player interests into a game is just as bad as trying to shoehorn open PVP into areas where people actively camp for experience.

Just an aside, somewhat topical..

I grouped with a warrior that throughout BRD used only his massive axe.  I'm not sure he was switching stances or anything, but he kept aggro pretty decently.  However, the mobs tore through him quicker than if I was main tanking.  Having 5 mobs hit you all at once while you wack away without an additional nearly 2000 armor just seems assinine.

Twice near the end, we wiped. One I had an ankh and saved use losing all of our progress.  We wiped again probably 10 pulls later to the same type of group.  The priest was off by just a second on healing his ass which was being torn to shreds.  Once the warrior goes, a the remaining shaman, hunter, priest and druid don't stand a chance of holding up.  

I'm not really liking so far how the end game instances are holding up.  Throwing 5+ elites at a group everytime just seems assholish.  I don't want every fight to be a five minute ordeal that's on a razor's edge of wiping.  I want something you don't need an optimal group of 5 for.  So far that doesn't look like it's going to happen.

I didn't want to tell the guy how to play his class, but I'm not sure people are understanding that what worked for 55 levels isn't really going to fly for the last 5.

And hand-picking players to hear is what? 0.001 of all player?

A private-only invite-only board is what 0.01?

The fact that on a forum you can only read from a small sample of the whole community doesn't mean that this sample isn't representative.

Also, it will ALWAYS be more representative than a place that is directly selected or piloted 'surveys'.

Actually, the forum being representative or not means jack and shit, since it will be filled with such a whining, bilious stream of verbal diarreha that nothing interesting or useful will ever get any attention.

You don't make a goddamn MMOG to be some automagical perfectly democratic socialist dream that pleases everyone. You make one to make fucking money. Good gameplay is job #2 to the job #1 of making a profit. Adding three bazillion whiny cooks into the development kitchen does nothing but ensure you'll be spinning your circles endlessly on the whine of the week without ever adding something NEW to the game.

Hmm..

I am kinda scratching my head over the whole warrior issues thing.  I really don't have an issue with my warrior, who just turned 45th level a few days ago.  I am on a PvP server and for the most part am predominantly spec'd in defence... 28 pts worth.  I have went up the arms tree and have gotten up the ability to swap stances with 15 rage.. which is all I need currently.  I will admit that the class is a challenge and some I have some issues with PvP, though most of that just revolves around the rock/paper/sicsors aspect and even then the group I am with has worked out some interesting tactics to compensate.

Different situations call for different weapon selections, combinations, and such.  For any instance run (unless as a group we are hitting an instance 4+ levels below us), I will only use sword and board.  I have zero issues soloing.  I have no issue taking two 43's at the same time.  If I can pick and choose the elite mob, I can take one equal level with just a healing potion to fall back on in case I get some bad misses.

I never played the main tank roll before and learning to control aggro was and can still be a challenge sometimes (mainly caused by other players getting cocky now instead of any miss-shot on my part), I in no way feel that I am underpowered.

As for the comment at the line issue for PvP, I agree.  To be honest though, that will always be the case if you have melee and ranged damage dealers.  What I would like to see, and would fix this issue as a standout would be to allow warriors to Auto-shoot the way hunters do, have it break on move (which is not the case for hunters), but at least provide the option to auto shoot for warriors instead of constant button mashing.

Webster, 45th Troll warrior, Spinebreaker

I'm loggin on to Spinebreaker and petitioning your name.  Dictionaries are offensive to me.

For sure I do not believe in democracy. It the fastest way to trivialize and stupidify everything, like what is happening for the television.

But my idea is about what I'd do myself. If I was a developer I wouldn't close myself in a room working on my own ideas full time. Instead I'd try to continue being passionate, discuss my opinions, throw tests at the players to see as they react, consider the critics and all the rest.

At the end this doesn't mean that the game is run by democracy, it just means that I believe that 'my' work would be good only if I'm able to draw from the vitality of the community.

I'm primarily arms as a warrior, and i'm dominantly in the 2H category. I don't go flopping around in groups a lot, so the defensive spec is pretty useless to me outside of the rare chance that I'm in an instance. The thing is that in this game the warriors aren't the best at aggro control and the defensive specs really suck IMO. There's no incentive to go that direction unless you know for a fact you are going to be grouped most of the time, and I know that I'm not. WoW isn't like DAOC in that respect.

Not a statistics buff, are you?  Random surveys are one of the least biased sample methods available.  Selecting from a pool of people who self-select from the damaged/bitchy end of the player spectrum is woefully biased.  This may be helpful.



OMG, is your alt's name Arnold Jackson?  I'm petitioning.

hehe.. yeah, I was trying to force "The Unabridged" as our guild name, but was out voted...

Well, hope you never get charged by a warrior that then hits you with concussion blow(which is stance independant).  Being stunned for six seconds is a pain in the ass... especially if your a caster and that is followed up by Execute.  Sunder Armor is a huge skill at the higher levels.

Damn I had been so good about just lurking, oh well one more forum to post in from work...


The warrior whine bandwagon went WAAAY too far long before this "protest".

I see all this stuff about tanking, yes they should be better tanks, right now Druids are one of the best tanks in the game (yeah you heard that right, more hp/amr then a pld, similar taunting powers to warrior).  Excepting a skilled defensive spec war, I take druid as the best tank in the game.

But I have a theory about all this crap u see on mmog forums these days.  We've been playing these damn things too long and all the asshats you guys hate so much have learned to do one thing:

Try to influence nerf/buffs in their chosen class' favor by starting petitions, holding sit-ins, starting massive threads, spamming the boards w/ nerf this, faking 1v1 videos where the warrior uses no skill and is using a weap he isn't at cap skill w/ ect ect ect.

I know I know, it sounds conspiracy theory but I'm serious.

In PvP the warrior is far from gimp.
They have the best combination of speed, both forms of dps (burst and sustained) and survivability of any class.

But if blizz fixes all of these "issues" at once?  Jesus I will not be enjoying being a cloth wearer.  As it is now a warrior that gets on me unloads a hamstring that I can not remove and gets to start the beatdown.  In any warrior fight I'm going to get crit'd for 300-700 two times at a minimum depending on the quality of their items.  At my level buffed (which is never thx shaman) I have almost 3k hp which is ALLOT for a priest.  But I get dropped fast and hard by a warrior, and killing a warrior is no joke.

Casters are really fucked if Warriors get even half of the boosts they are clammouring for.

Why can't they just change taunt?  The issues are pve not pvp.  

The class has broken skills maby more then others but I'm just so sick of this whiney warrior nerf/boost politics shit.

I'm in two minds about the warrior protest. I don't really support it, but blizzard brought it on themselves by their silence. One of the blizzard forum monkies posted the thread "warrior <3" or some such and got almost unanimously trashed by the readers of the warrior forum, in a thread running to 20-30 pages.

Now normally forums are a turbulent mess of whining and counter-whining. However when you see a section of your population strongly unified, and openly hostile, it's time to consider expressing some sort of response. Even if only "this is the way it is, deal". In Blizzards case the guy never posted again in his own thread, and Enoyls, the guy who nerfed the warrior class at the end of beta, has been missing in action since launch (I even wonder if he's moved on to another project within blizzard). This leads to a feeling of desperation in some of the user base, of which the protest was a symptom. And it worked (which quite possibly sets a bad precedent) since they got developer response, albeit from one of the flunkies.

Blizzards silence, sluggishness and invisibility is generating a "lack of faith" in their user base.

You should have kept lurking.

Or just the small percentage of trolls and frothing fanbois that frequent the boards.  Really, we just went over this.

The essence of it being that forums are not the complete picture, something self evident. However they may be indicative and they are populated by those who are likely to set the "tone" within the game. It is still in blizzards interests to counteract such trends.

Of course if blizzard has been doing statistical polling of a cross-section of the user base, or an important sub-community, and has firm evidence that the forum activity is a false indicator clearly they are correct in ignoring it. However does anyone actually believe blizzard is doing that? And even if that were the case posting a "we are happy with how things are working" would close the issue.

This is your evidence for warriors are in bad shape?

You realize that EVERY single class board has a shit-ton of giant threads where they lament the woes of playing xxx class under the oppressive regime of blizzard's horrible abuses.

We're talking:
Rogues - believe that vanish is so broken they can hardly play, complain about pally's because they can't auto gank them.

Mages (one of the best GvG classes) - still have some broken abilities but also whine about all these nerfs from before 80% of them were even playing the game.  Hell I saw them petition to get invisability back.

Priests (THE best 1v1 class) - We had a "priest improvement thread" where somebody suggested AoE sleep.  Also the priest board has been awash in whines since they "Stealth nerfed mind soothe OMG waaa" its a fucking PvE spell...

The only class I've seen have a massive whine thread that actually was just about broken abilities was hunters of all classes because their main buffs are so bugged its rediculous.

I think you should stop posting if your so blinded by the grand injustices that have befallen noble warrior players that you use the worldofwarcraft.com main board as citation that there must truly be a problem.

I would have been more convinced if your evidence came from foxnews.

Well that's a problem.

In my perfect world, Blizzard creates a couple of shards called 'Elite Realms' where all of the damage and hit point numbers are proportionally multiplied by 5, then only advertises them on the official forum, bleeding those ninnyhammers off of the real servers.

Actually the PvP servers did a pretty decent job of filtering.

And a few days ago this was addressed by Blizz. Screw the fanbois who want Blizz to respond at their (the fanboi's) whim. Just present your facts and shut the hell up and let Blizz respond or not.

Anyway, yesterday it was reposted as a 'sticky', so I'll link that (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-warrior&t=85008&p=1&tmp=1#post85008) and not the original whine thread.

In short: the stuff that needs to be fixed is being worked on, the rest is called out as bullshit or explained. After listening to SOE dick around riflemen with the promise of a combat revamp that's still not around after a year and a half...warriors need to shut the fuck up.

Yeah, but really, most MMOG customers need to shut the fuck up anyway.

Yeah, remember the forum outrage over Iolo in Ultima 6? They nerfed the shit out of him, and Dupre was way overpowered and really needed the nerf.

Ah, the days when people played games more than they bitched about them. I blame Lum, of course. (;))

Nice new Watcher avatar, Sky.

Another baldy.  Everyone looks like that actor, Dim Vessel.

I agree. Now we need someone with Ego, the eater of worlds, as an avatar.

Brilliance.

Weird, I just read the Powerless trade and didn't know who the Hell that guy was, so I went and looked him up.

Now I see him everywhere. Pvponline's last couple of comics included him too.

Yeah, I *hate* forums where people bitch about MMORPG's. I hope I never end up posting on one.

What If....Conan had travelled to modern day NYC?

I used to read a lot of What Ifs as a kid, and I did just see Uatu on pvponline's strip. Since there was a bald thing going on, I went for it.

Maybe in between good Marvel film releases (which would probably be X-Men 3 and Spidey 3, maybe DD 2) we can get a Watcher-based flick with Vin Weasel!! I bet it'd be right up there with the punisher, hulk, and (I'm guessing) FF.

Don't pick on Vin.  He's at a career low-point.

Ack!  Goose abuse!

Eater of worlds.....there are only two that I know of.

Galactus is one.

My new avatar is the other one. She is doom incarnate.