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f13.net General Forums => World of Warcraft => Topic started by: luckton on February 12, 2016, 03:21:58 AM



Title: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on February 12, 2016, 03:21:58 AM
Might as well start doing these conversations in annual threads, as the activity is about on par with the other Graveyard games. :-P

Anyways, the Q4 2015 report is out. Bliz isn't reporting sub numbers anymore (since that would just give away the whole game and declare the game essentially dead), but what they are reporting is still kinda bad news. They're looking to launch Legion this summer post-Warcraft The Movie release. That puts any sign of new content/retention stuff off until July/August, which is making a lot of people wonder why anyone is even bothering with the game anymore.

Aside from that, well, that's it as far as WoW goes. The Legion alpha rolls on, and the content coming off the test servers looks spectacular. Just wish we didn't have to wait another six months to get it.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Hutch on February 12, 2016, 03:55:21 AM
I read that there's going to be some kind of promo where you can win a free copy of the game (WoW) if you go see the movie  :awesome_for_real:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Kail on February 12, 2016, 04:45:04 AM
Yeah, because the movie has such broad universal appeal it will surely draw in a lot of new fans.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on February 12, 2016, 05:04:51 AM
Reactions from those I know seem generally positive for the movie. They may be onto something here with the promo tie-in to help boost sales of the expansion after a year of drought. Giving away the base game is not a big deal, considering it's value is essentially zero after a handful of expansions and so many years on. Hell, we should be offered some money back after they took Naxx out of being the final tier for vanilla :P.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on February 12, 2016, 06:15:02 AM
They're looking to launch Legion this summer post-Warcraft The Movie release. That puts any sign of new content/retention stuff off until July/August, which is making a lot of people wonder why anyone is even bothering with the game anymore.

Aside from that, well, that's it as far as WoW goes. The Legion alpha rolls on, and the content coming off the test servers looks spectacular. Just wish we didn't have to wait another six months to get it.

This was a known thing for at least the last 4 months. It finally destroyed several of the remaining 25-person raiding guilds on my server, some of which stretched back to 2005. The remnants have reformed but a LOT of people I know who had 10+ year accounts and the trophies to prove it unsubbed. I doubt they'll be returning.

I don't even fire the game up for random bullshit anymore. The slog to get the legendary stuff combined with the content drought has proven to me the game's good as a nostalgia visit but will never be the contender it once was for my time.

Still, even though they've stopped reporting subs the game is still profitable and has hundreds of thousands of more subscribers than its next-closest competitor. Are there any non-free MMOs that can still claim over a million people, much less several million?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on February 12, 2016, 06:36:32 AM
IF ATVI drops back down to 20 again, I'll pick it back up. I think the company was VASTLY overpriced around Christmas and if you sold then, you slaughtered the competition.

That being said, they don't need WoW anymore and it's obvious. Their MOBA and Hearthstone and D3 and even the stupid SC2 stuff make them more than enough in the Blizzard realm. And then they have the other Activision stuff that just prints money.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on February 12, 2016, 07:46:59 AM
How is D3 making them money? Seems it's just an overall expense since there's no P2W layer like the other games. You can't even buy more stash tabs or skins and XP potions like their competitors in that sector.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on February 12, 2016, 07:49:16 AM
Console sales + decent patch improvements that draw in new people.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rasix on February 12, 2016, 08:11:24 AM
Anecdotally, I'd say their free-to-play options are drawing people into their pay offerings.  My nephews started as HearthStone players, but ended up buying into WoW and D3 out of brand loyalty.  And since social gaming extends to their social circles, I'm sure a similar thing is happening with their friends. 


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Sir T on February 12, 2016, 08:21:28 AM
I read a while back an article that speculated that blizzard are operating on a 3 month strategy for their games, meaning that they are thinking that people are going to be sick of their games after 2-3 months. So just when you are tiring of the game you are playing right now, they will suddenly pop up with a new expansion for ANOTHER Blizzard game, so that their playerbase will move to another one and be back to enthusiastic and willing to spend.

So the strategy is that you will be moved via carrot from one game to another, all the time spending your money yo blizzard. If you are a player who is only interested in ONE blizzard game, then fuck you, because your game will be moribund for 8 months of the year. They want you moving from game to game in a circle, all the time shedding money. Hail Blizzard.

I haven't seen anything to say this is not inaccurate since then.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on February 12, 2016, 10:13:27 AM
I find that I still want to play WoW, and I'm excited about the new expansion. I just have zero desire to play right now. Could I jump in and farm old reps and content and such? Sure, butI'm really kinda burnt out on them. So I keep reminding the part of me that wants to play now that it'll be a lot better once Legion gets here.

I'm looking forward to starting fresh with a Demon Hunter.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: kaid on February 12, 2016, 11:28:33 AM
Anecdotally, I'd say their free-to-play options are drawing people into their pay offerings.  My nephews started as HearthStone players, but ended up buying into WoW and D3 out of brand loyalty.  And since social gaming extends to their social circles, I'm sure a similar thing is happening with their friends. 

Also they are doing a great job of cross game promotions of get this for x game and get fun stuff for Y game has gotten a lot of WOW players I know to try heathstone and heroes of the storm.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on February 12, 2016, 12:18:21 PM
D3 is making money on new users and expansions. And as ppl said, they are trying to cross tie cosmetics to all products now.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azazel on February 23, 2016, 02:54:45 AM
So is flying added back properly in Legion?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on February 23, 2016, 04:08:57 AM
They're taking the idea they spawned in the last WoD patch moving forward. You're grounded until your max level, explored everything, found enough world treasure drops, and built your rep with the NPC groups. The recommended course of action is to just grind out the meta-achievement with your main so that your alts can fly around while you level them.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on February 23, 2016, 05:13:08 AM
It's really just easier not to give Blizzard my $15.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rendakor on February 23, 2016, 05:21:39 AM
It's really just easier not to give Blizzard my $15.
This right here.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azuredream on February 23, 2016, 05:36:01 AM
I never understood what was wrong with the BC/WotLK formula.  Grounded until the last couple zones, with those last couple zones designed around you having flying.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Hutch on February 23, 2016, 06:01:25 AM
I never understood what was wrong with the BC/WotLK formula.  Grounded until the last couple zones, with those last couple zones designed around you having flying.

Nothing was wrong with that formula. What was wrong was the whiny, pissant argument that flying trivializes content. Which is horseshit, but once the WoW devs bought into it, well. Here we are.

I suppose that walling off flying behind a meta-achievement is better than no flying. But they fixed something that they didn't need to break.

How many subs did they lose during WoD? 5 million? 6? Oh I guess they're not publishing those numbers anymore  :grin:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Lakov_Sanite on February 23, 2016, 06:24:17 AM
Do you guys even remember how hard it was grinding the money for flying back when bc first came out? Shit, having to just do one meta achievement is a non issue.  It's not like Onyxia keys or black temple attunement were any harder.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Draegan on February 23, 2016, 06:44:20 AM
I liked the game more without flying in WOD. Overall, I didn't really like the game anyway so my opinion doesn't really matter.

Not sure why I'm posting this.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Hutch on February 23, 2016, 07:17:05 AM
Do you guys even remember how hard it was grinding the money for flying back when bc first came out? Shit, having to just do one meta achievement is a non issue.  It's not like Onyxia keys or black temple attunement were any harder.

I didn't put any more effort into the 5K that fast flight cost, than I did for the 100 gold that I needed at level 40 in order to buy the slow ground riding skill.

At level 40, Blizzard hadn't invented dailies yet  :grin:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rendakor on February 23, 2016, 08:32:38 AM
Do you guys even remember how hard it was grinding the money for flying back when bc first came out? Shit, having to just do one meta achievement is a non issue.  It's not like Onyxia keys or black temple attunement were any harder.
I didn't play BC to max level, but getting money by playing the AH has never been hard. I had ~300k personally when I quit towards the end of Cata, after buying epic flying on 10 toons of my own and probably 20 more guildies plus all the BOE epics we could get our hands on. Even in vanilla I had thousands of gold just from buying cheap greens, DEing them and selling the dusts.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azuredream on February 23, 2016, 08:49:51 AM
The only thing that was crazy expensive was the 280% flying. The shitty 60% was cheap.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on February 23, 2016, 11:31:27 AM
Yep, and even shitty 60% speed was faster than 100% land once you counted dismounts/ stuns/ obstacles.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Setanta on February 23, 2016, 10:17:53 PM
They're taking the idea they spawned in the last WoD patch moving forward. You're grounded until your max level, explored everything, found enough world treasure drops, and built your rep with the NPC groups. The recommended course of action is to just grind out the meta-achievement with your main so that your alts can fly around while you level them.

And this is why I doubt I'll buy the Xpac. I couldn't bring myself to do all this crap this expansion and unsubbed when they limited flying and increased grinding to fly. I hate rep grinds and flying has always been a small pleasure I got from the game.

Post WoD, my mantra has become "If you have to work in a game, it's not fun - it's a second job"

Screw that


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azazel on February 24, 2016, 12:47:26 AM
It's really just easier not to give Blizzard my $15.
This right here.

Yep. I'll continue with this particular formula.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azazel on February 24, 2016, 12:49:07 AM
Do you guys even remember how hard it was grinding the money for flying back when bc first came out? Shit, having to just do one meta achievement is a non issue.  It's not like Onyxia keys or black temple attunement were any harder.

Yes I do. It goes under, "been there, done that shit in the past already, I already have a job so fuck you."


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Setanta on February 25, 2016, 01:00:47 AM
Yes I do. It goes under, "been there, done that shit in the past already, I already have a job so fuck you."

Someone needs to nail this quote to the dev's wall.

Diablo 3 worked out that grind does not equal fun, HotS got it, Hearthstone got it, Overwatch got it (so far)... so WTF is up with WoW devs?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on February 25, 2016, 07:07:45 AM
"Grind" is a subjective term, defined by each playerbase.

WoW dev's problem is the same as the playerbase it focuses on. Lots of time on their hands so a minimum 4-5 hours a day of activity is an ok and desired thing. It's simply the market they're serving. Why are the current people quitting? Not because of grind but because they're done with the current grind and want another.

They lost the casual playerbase ages ago when Cata hit and they cranked things up because raiders were badmouthing the game everywhere for being "too easy" in WOTLK. A decision has been made to serve the current players rather than chasing the ones who left.

The only way to win is not to play.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azazel on February 27, 2016, 10:33:19 PM
Strokes about "casuals" there are a bit too broad, methinks.

My wife and myself were typically worth about 4-6 months a year worth of subs, each. A couple of months at a time, then a rest for a month or three when the sameness sets in. We took a break in mid(?) Pandas, and when it was announced that the new expansion (Draenor 2.0 - whatever it was called) wouldn't have flying, it pressed my Fuck You button. The manner in which it was patched in hasn't changed my mind at all.

You're right though, I think in that the Devs and the hardcore both share the catass mentality, but I think that choosing to serve them and the myopic dev worldview that goes with it is what has driven off and continued to drive off the rest of us. They're not chasing us - they actually chased us off.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on February 28, 2016, 04:38:18 AM
Unlike others I don't put a line on casuals and hardcore at raiders and the level of content tried. I put it at time in game per day.  Casual folks still have binge days, but my hardcore are on a minimum of 4 hours a day, EVERY day.

They plan IRL activities around the game. They get upset when family activities drive them off. They spend hours at work researching strategies or the best way to eek another 1% effectiveness out. Camping 16 hours straight for that Rare mount?  Sure, why not it's the weekend after all.

I knew plenty of these people who thought themselves casual because they only hit the 2nd tier of raid content a few months after release and never got to Mythic before the next patch. They may not have even gotten through all of the Heroic bosses before that patch.  However they were decidedly NOT casual.

They loved the changes since WOTLK, though.  Their only complaint was content took too long to come and the expansions got buggier each release. WOD was particularly bad after a year at the end of Mists so they were at a breaking point.  The announcement of another year before the next expansion finally broke them.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on February 28, 2016, 04:11:32 PM
Do you think the increasing amount of time between expansions is related to the lack of serious competition in the current gen? I mean, there are still companies out there working on new and newer MMOs, and as some ambitious ones were released (GW2, Wildstar, Elder Scrolls) and carved off a chunk of the player base, has anything since MoP (or even Cata) been released that's made Blizzard say "oh man, we need to get out shit together"?

I think WoW stands as a testament to MMO gaming, and when everyone was trying make a stand in the oughts, such competition kept Blizzard innovating and improving. Now that they've reached what one could call it's apex, and all attempts to bring it down only made it stronger or had no effect, perhaps they've just gotten complacent with their position. I mean, the stuff coming down the pipe in Legion looks fantastic, but there just doesn't seem to be the huge "urge" to get it out as quickly as they once might have tried to do.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Draegan on March 02, 2016, 07:17:49 AM
Most online gaming is in FPS and MOBAs hence Overwatch and HOTS.

edit: I just checked Twitch and Black Desert Online is sitting in 12th place in viewers right now (fresh release) which kind of surprised me. MMOs hardly ever make it that high.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rendakor on March 02, 2016, 08:27:47 AM
Do you think the increasing amount of time between expansions is related to the lack of serious competition in the current gen? I mean, there are still companies out there working on new and newer MMOs, and as some ambitious ones were released (GW2, Wildstar, Elder Scrolls) and carved off a chunk of the player base, has anything since MoP (or even Cata) been released that's made Blizzard say "oh man, we need to get out shit together"?

I think WoW stands as a testament to MMO gaming, and when everyone was trying make a stand in the oughts, such competition kept Blizzard innovating and improving. Now that they've reached what one could call it's apex, and all attempts to bring it down only made it stronger or had no effect, perhaps they've just gotten complacent with their position. I mean, the stuff coming down the pipe in Legion looks fantastic, but there just doesn't seem to be the huge "urge" to get it out as quickly as they once might have tried to do.
I don't see how this is WoW's apex; subs have gotten so low they aren't even reporting them anymore. The devs aren't complacent as kings of the genre, they're maintaining a dying game because Blizzard has other sources of income. I don't think they ever considered their competition a reason to release content faster; they've always been their own worst enemy in that regard. People quit WoW because they've done all the things, not to play some other MMO.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azazel on March 07, 2016, 10:35:46 PM
Or because WoW fucked them off one way or another to a point of not coming back. There's lots of games these days that are online and offer some form of persistence as well.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Setanta on March 08, 2016, 12:02:33 AM
Or because WoW fucked them off one way or another to a point of not coming back. There's lots of games these days that are online and offer some form of persistence as well.

This pretty sums up my friends and guildies. We didn't stop playing because we ran out of things to do. We quit before getting flying in Draenor because the game is pedestrian and there are better online and offline games out there.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Koyasha on March 10, 2016, 05:18:47 PM
The lack of flying was kinda the last straw for me as well.  I came back last during early Draenor because of a friend.  I didn't even do that much of the new stuff for a long time - I entertained myself soloing old raid stuff, it was actually pretty fun.  But then there came the point where I started seriously working on the new stuff and realized they didn't have flight in Draenor at all, and after that I just didn't have much of any interest in going on.  I hadn't even done much of any of the zones, and in the end I never did because running around on the ground was too annoying.

Funny thing is, the engine can clearly handle aerial combat; there's several quests where they have some kind of aerial combat gimmick, and the engine acknowledges positioning well enough, not to mention underwater and aerial is basically identical except you feel like you're moving faster in the air.  So instead of denying flying, if they feel it bypasses too much challenge, they should have just started designing aerial combat that wasn't just gimmicks.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: cmlancas on March 24, 2016, 05:09:22 AM
Came back a week ago after about a two-month break, and it's really not all bad.  I didn't feel the pain of the flying gripes I saw here were, as the only place I'm really at is Tanaan Jungle.  It feels like this zone is created with your complaints in mind, because it feels like it has a ridiculous amount of flight paths right to the quest hubs.  At least it's not like it's EPL or something.  The only thing you can't do is fly around rare-farming, but who cares to do this unless they are grinding out their legendary rings?

With that being said, I quickly remembered why I struggle to stay involved in this game.  I have been raiding off and on since vanilla, and I inevitably hit the raiding wall of LFR->too easy, Regulars w/ PUGs->too easy, Heroics w/PUGs->insanely hard.  I just don't have the time in my life anymore to spend 9 hours a week smashing down progression bosses. 

TL;DR:  It's worth $15 if you're looking for something to do for three weeks.  You'll struggle to stay for more than six.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on April 18, 2016, 12:08:56 PM
Launch date for Legion confirmed: 8/30/16. (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/legion/)

/thread?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on April 18, 2016, 12:48:10 PM
November 2014 to August 2016. Around 2 years. Same as usual.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Fabricated on April 18, 2016, 01:11:52 PM
Why is this not in the graveyard yet?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Sir T on April 18, 2016, 01:34:27 PM
Same reason Eve isn't.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Mithas on April 18, 2016, 02:41:53 PM
I can barely muster a shrug at this point. For the first time in 10 years of playing I have almost no care to play even for a month.

On another note, there has been a petition circling encouraging Blizzard to develop "classic" servers so players can experience the pain in the ass joy of vanilla WoW all over again. Mark Kern (former Blizzard employee and Red 5 CEO) has said that he will personally deliver the petition to Mike Morhaime if it reaches 200,000 signatures.

Petition:

https://www.change.org/p/mike-morhaime-legacy-server-among-world-of-warcraft-community?recruiter=522873458&lang=en-GB

Mark Kern tweet:

https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/720971362748145664

If they get to 200,000 signatures I'm assuming Blizzard has to at least make a forum post about how they aren't going to do it right?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Kail on April 18, 2016, 03:14:02 PM
Why is this not in the graveyard yet?

It's still the biggest MMO in the world, though, is it not?  If we're tossing WoW in the trash, why even bother with an MMOG discussion forum?  Genre looks like it's dying, and it's not like anyone thinks Crowfall (or whoever) is going to pull in ten million subs and suddenly make everything amazing again.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on May 11, 2016, 01:32:11 AM
Legion Alpha is shutting down this week. Beta to go live Thursday. For the handful of you out there still interested, check your Bnet client to see if you got added to the Alpha/Beta, as invites and account flagging is going out now.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Evildrider on May 11, 2016, 01:34:13 PM
I resubbed since I hadn't played since Cata and apparently they gave me all the expansions.  I just used the 90 token on my Death Knight and a bunch of shit has changed over the last couple years.  I feel lost lol.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Fabricated on May 13, 2016, 03:33:32 PM
I have apparently been offered the Draenor expansion for free + 7 days of time.

Yeah, nah.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Setanta on May 14, 2016, 02:40:20 AM
Logged in - boosted a character to 90, logged out :D


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Morat20 on May 14, 2016, 03:18:47 PM
I have apparently been offered the Draenor expansion for free + 7 days of time.

Yeah, nah.
Same here. Was a little surprised. A free 7 day trial OF the expansion, sure. But the whole thing, free?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on May 14, 2016, 05:10:50 PM
They're desperate for people to come back. I haven't subbed since last October but I got a Beta invite to Legion. I haven't gotten a legit beta invite for an expansion since WOTLK, and I was given that by a friend of a friend who worked at Blizzard. A wave 1 beta to an expired account? There's too few people left.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rendakor on May 14, 2016, 05:23:11 PM
I have apparently been offered the Draenor expansion for free + 7 days of time.

Yeah, nah.
Same here. Wasn't worth reinstalling.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Soulflame on May 14, 2016, 06:34:45 PM
Oh, it's for free?

Huh.

Nah, not going to bother.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on May 17, 2016, 05:58:24 AM
They ruined the game too long ago for almost anybody that's left to care. The next step is to offer launch servers without any expansions, and roll back to the original game before all the Cata updates.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rendakor on May 17, 2016, 06:00:43 AM
I've said it before, but a progression server going from Vanilla to WotLK would get me back for a year or so.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azuredream on May 17, 2016, 06:45:17 AM
I'm not saying they'll never do it, but WoW would have to be on life support for that to happen. So maybe eventually, but I think Blizzard is adamant about "not splitting their playerbase" despite the fact that most people who would play on such a server aren't subscribed anyway. I'm also one of those people who would play on a server like that.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rendakor on May 17, 2016, 06:58:48 AM
Is it not on life support now?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azuredream on May 17, 2016, 07:48:34 AM
Right now it is, but I think Legion will revive it however briefly. I have no interest in the expansion but I think there are still lots of people who will buy it. Then it depends on whether people stay for longer than a month.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on May 17, 2016, 08:37:39 AM
Beta Report:

They've fucked up all the classes I cared about. Also, Hooray Pally status for nearly all classes. A total rework each expansion of just how you do shit.

DK is a mess and I have no idea what I'm doing. Plagues, boils, claws, wtf is this shit? Although removal of rune "Types" is a nice QOL improvement, I have no idea how to DPS anymore and there's no method to learn the new system in game. I'm past the days of researching forums to play a goddamn game I'm paying monthly for.

Hunter with melee is garbage and Beast Hunter is laughable based on a few hours playing with them. Didn't try Marks yet but I'm generally ok with the resoruces refreshing rather than the steady shot spam now. I just wish I knew why certain things were lighting up on my bar and how I get them to light-up faster. Mechanics are opaque and even tooltips don't help because I can see NO reason why Feral Beast lights up.

Demon Hunter is OP. That's to be expected with a new class. It starts at 98 and there's a little tutorial instance with backstory like the DKs have. In all it's a pretty fun class, though I'm sure it will get nerfed to hell.

Phasing is all fucked up. They say that it was working in Alpha so it must be the influx of people and it's having a hard time keeping track of things.

Nice QOL changes with cosmetics being saved to your UI instead of having to go to ethereals or stow shit forever. They must have realized just how much Database space they were using with void storage and people constantly swapping shit.

There's 20!! pages of toys now. Wow.

Varyin Wrinn is dead. VolJin is Dead. Yeah, fuck the game.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: angry.bob on May 17, 2016, 01:59:44 PM
A total rework each expansion of just how you do shit.

This more than anything else is what destroyed the game for me. Having to relearn my Paladin after each expansion because huge changes just for the sake of change really pissed me off.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Kail on May 19, 2016, 01:39:39 PM
I decided to give this a shot because Overwatch isn't coming out for another week.

First of all, Jesus Christ, Blizzard needs to get a team to come up with some way of bringing returning players up to speed.  This is a problem with a lot of long running games (League of Legends for example) but WoW is probably the worst I've ever seen at it.  I log in and spend maybe half an hour figuring out what buttons and skills do what.  There is no tutorial or guide or anything.  Well, there is a shitty overlay that tells you what the subscreens on your collections menu do, but in terms of like, what skills you're going to be using or what they chopped from your class (I guess you can still feed hunter pets, though I don't see any indication of what them being hungry means or how to tell how hungry they are).  I've got a million quests and my inventory is choked with garbage which I don't remember how useful any of it is.  This stuff isn't really a problem if you're starting at level 1, you have way more than enough time to learn how to use the one new skill they give you every hour or so, but starting at level 85 it's just a confusing mess of "I don't remember ANY of this".

And the "Story" is hot garbage.  I levelled to 90 and got the "Head to Draenor!" popup, so I figured why not.  Drop my Pandaland quests and fly over there.  It's like a half hour trip.  And when I land I am instantly attacked by level 90 enemies because I guess one of the horde outposts there is now evil and I picked that one to land at.  Thanks for that.  Anyways, I head over to the dark portal and talk to Khadgar, who says something like "we can drive them back" and I'm like "who, precisely are we talking about here?  The demons?  The trailer looked like we were doing something in the past.  Nobody told me anything about why I'm here now, they just said head for the portal and talk to Khadgar".  So we go through the portal and I have no idea WTF is even happening or why everyone is here but I guess we're in the past?  Or something?  And some orcs are bad but Thrall is here and he's good and so is the Alliance and we're buddies for now.  Or something.  I don't know.  I mean, at least Pandaria told you what was going on, "mists part, new ancient land found, go over there and conquer it" was the cutscene.  Warlords of Drano is just baffling nonsense so far.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on May 19, 2016, 02:04:07 PM
WOD is nonsense because that's where they fully embraced that you have to buy the books to fully appreciate Metzen's careful crafting of the lore. You know nothing of the story without buying books or looking shit up online. Just forget about it, it's garbage anyway.

Hunter pets no longer get hungry. If that's how long ago you played no wonder you're lost. Not that it's much better for newer returning players, since IDK WTF is up in beta at all.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on May 20, 2016, 06:26:33 AM
WOD is nonsense because that's where they fully embraced that you have to buy the books to fully appreciate Metzen's careful crafting of the lore. You know nothing of the story without buying books or looking shit up online. Just forget about it, it's garbage anyway.

Hunter pets no longer get hungry. If that's how long ago you played no wonder you're lost. Not that it's much better for newer returning players, since IDK WTF is up in beta at all.

Good, way to go full Metzen Blizzard. Exposition in games is for pussies. The fact he's never been held accountable for any of this mess is the reason the company is struggling to come up with anything decent in innovation.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on May 23, 2016, 04:38:50 AM
Something that Bliz is testing under-the-hood for Legion: The Action Camera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC2nzmN1M-4).

This actually looks pretty cool, even if it's something that's been around for a while in other games. To be able to bring it here to WoW, it may be seen a minor thing, but it can add a lot if used/configured correctly.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Hutch on May 23, 2016, 06:29:14 AM
What's new there? Is it the fact that the camera is over the shoulder?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on May 23, 2016, 07:34:24 AM
Over the shoulder is one. Another is target focusing, where the camera keeps your selected target at it's center, and zooms/pans around to keep both your target and you in the view screen.

Which is also demonstrated in the video.  :oh_i_see:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on May 31, 2016, 02:58:28 PM
My facebook feed decided to remind me that 6 years ago today I downed the Lich King with my guild. We were one of the first 5 guilds on my server to do it, but only like 300th over-all. Doesn't seem that long ago that WoW wasn't too awful.

 :why_so_serious:  :heartbreak:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Fabricated on May 31, 2016, 03:01:03 PM
I remember when I completed Lich King on fuckin normal with my guild, and then in 25-man in the guild alliance I was in.'

It was fun and good, and I enjoyed it. I'm still salty that Cataclysm destroyed my release-day guild.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rendakor on May 31, 2016, 04:11:58 PM
That was such a good encounter. It was tough (and long) but never really felt like the mechanics were bullshit like some fights.

My guild made it through Cata but we downed normal Deathwing the first week he dropped, and none of us wanted to grind Heroics just to replace them with greens when Pandaria came out so we just kinda quit. Some of the players drifted to our sister guild, but even that didn't last all the way through MoP.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on May 31, 2016, 05:27:54 PM
My guild made it until last year. The bullshit that was Blizzard's decision to not do any more content patches finally broke everyone.

It was already straining against the ego of the Raid Leader who wanted us to be Hardcore-Hardcore and had half the guild with him (coincidentally all college kids/ grad students or Shift-workers) vs. the leadership and folks like myself who have professional jobs and lives and were only willing to dedicate our 3 hours a night Tues-Fri. (Which is still a HELL of a lot of time.) 

The day they announced "Nope, no patches until Legion" though? The Raid Leader said, "fuck Blizzard" and dumped his 11-year account (he had the statue) and those who didn't quit with him fucked-off to more progression-minded guilds.  The guild is "still around" but only has 6-10 people who login regularly if the forum is anything to go by these days.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on June 01, 2016, 09:34:07 AM
I remember when I completed Lich King on fuckin normal with my guild, and then in 25-man in the guild alliance I was in.'

It was fun and good, and I enjoyed it. I'm still salty that Cataclysm destroyed my release-day guild.

I'm still salty it destroyed both my release day guild and my raiding alliance. The guild held on for a while, but I checked and it has no activity as of this week. It's dead.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Fabricated on June 02, 2016, 12:22:52 PM
I know, I was a part of that raid alliance. :P


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on June 03, 2016, 11:28:30 AM
I know, I was a part of that raid alliance. :P

I'm forgetful in my 30s.  :why_so_serious:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Khaldun on June 15, 2016, 08:19:16 PM
Having last played in 2013, my daughter asked me to reup for a while to help her level 89 toon with my level 85 rogue. So I did, and that puts me in Mists of Pandaria. Instantly reminded of why I unsubbed--every design idea that was getting bad in Cata is worse in Pandaria. Rigid linearity, forcing me to play for a while as NPCs, acting like the appeal is the dull-as-dishwater narrative and aggravating characters rather than controlling my own toon and having my own adventures. I guess I can stick it out to get into Draenor and then Legion when it's out and help her some--gonna have to theorycraft again and find out where rogues are at now. But man. While a lot of the rest of the gaming world was either making better stories *or* making better worlds, here's poor old WoW as stuck in a rut as it's possible to be stuck.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on June 16, 2016, 06:16:19 AM
The whole narrative shtick is even worse in the Legion beta. The only nice thing is there's no established "Starting zone." You can pick any of the 5 zones to begin with. I'm not sure how you move on to the next one as i've only bothered to put in 3-4 hours total.

Having an Artifact weapon from the get go is also not as nice as it might sound.
1) Everything is balanced around knowing exactly what iLevel your weapon will be
2) Since you can't transmog Artifacts everyone is running around with this rare one-of-a-kind item.  :awesome_for_real:


In other beta news, having transmogs turn into an interface like Wardrobe is much nicer than the old "stow it and remog it" bullshit. Too bad I won't be paying for it. A too little-too-late change.

Oh, and as far as I can tell, yes, your Garrison is as abandoned as your Pandaria farm. Nice key feature, guys. Glad so much of the last Expansion revolved around it.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Khaldun on June 16, 2016, 06:42:28 AM
Basically going back into WoW is like discovering in perfect crystalline form why MMOs basically failed. I don't even think it's the time factor--it's that they're the opposite of "worlds". WoW is like the biggest, most complicated version of Dragon's Lair ever--the screen blinks, you pull the arcade stick, you get another scene. It doesn't feel even remotely free or open, and it feels empty of life or activity most of the time. All that building of visual space to no end. Will I ever be back in the three places I just went through this morning in Pandaria? Likely not, only if I made an alt, and for the same amount of minimal-as-I-can-be as the last time if so. Do I care about the creatures I'm seeing? No, unless I have to carve out their livers or something for a lazy NPC who is picking his ass while I do his laundry.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on June 17, 2016, 12:41:46 PM
I'm not going to nit-pick your points, as to each their own and its points we've all argued before. But to address this for clarity sake:

I'm not sure how you move on to the next one as i've only bothered to put in 3-4 hours total.

That's the nice thing about what's they're doing with the leveling this time around. You can start your progress wherever and whenever you want to. All of the quests, their rewards, and all NPCs involved all scale to your level. If you want to zone hop to hang out with friends one night and progress on the story in another zone the next night, it's fine.

To kick start in any of the five zones, you just get the breadcrumb quest(s) from your class hall mission table.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Hawkbit on June 17, 2016, 12:52:38 PM
Rigid linearity, forcing me to play for a while as NPCs, acting like the appeal is the dull-as-dishwater narrative and aggravating characters rather than controlling my own toon and having my own adventures.


In retrospect, there are two primary reasons I drifted away. One is the above, Vashjir was a somewhat cool zone, but roughly 1/3 of it was spent not playing my toon. It makes the alt experience terrible, as it's the same thing over and over every time I tried to play. The second reason is the dramatic changes to classes each expansion. It's as if they never really figured out a vision for what they wanted the game to be.

I've always wondered if they do any type of A/B testing during the design process. If they do, I would like to be a fly on the wall for that.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Khaldun on June 25, 2016, 04:17:38 PM
Having sped through Pandaria, I will say that it's possibly the worst expansion in the history of the game, at least for me. I hated every second of it. Warlords, in narrative terms, at least *starts* right: now I'm not once again apprenticed to some fuckhead NPC collecting toilet paper so he can wipe his ass, I'm hanging with the big dogs and acknowledged as somebody who has a few miles on him. That inevitably abrades some once you're out levelling, but they do a lot of small iterations right (treasures, silver dragons, garrisons). But on the other hand, the garrison thing is both genius and completely fucked up. It creates a feeling of physical isolation, but I'm still listening to 13-year old boys talking about their views of women and race and so on in /trade while I'm in my garrison, which makes the typical mouth-drooling dumbshittery even more alienating in a certain way--it has a kind of ghostly feeling, like an amputated limb. Like a game that was built around thousands of people being in the same world that doesn't know how to do that any more but also doesn't really know how to be a satisfying solo-centered experience. It's really interesting the specific moments where Warlords stops holding your hand and explaining what will happen next--those moments tend to teeter exactly on that point.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Evildrider on June 25, 2016, 04:39:38 PM
I actually had a bit of fun with WoD so far.  Probably the most fun I've had in WoW since WotLK.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Zetor on June 25, 2016, 07:48:18 PM
I'll grudgingly admit that the content in WOD isn't really bad (the leveling experience is pretty damn good compared to all other expansions), it's just that after you hit 100 and run a few dungeons, you're pretty much done unless you want to get in a hamster wheel that's not particularly interesting compared to previous expacs.

Oh, and the leveling experience thing? It's good until you finish Nagrand... at which point it goes full Metzen, because duh. :why_so_serious:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on June 25, 2016, 08:05:56 PM
Yep, WoD had a great leveling experience. One of the best in years and it was pretty fun during that.

However, at 100 you were thrown many, many, many grinds to do anything at all. None of them were compelling or particularly fun and the only reason I kept going was raiding with my guild. When that blew-up I stopped playing.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Evildrider on June 25, 2016, 08:30:12 PM
I just got flying, which was my primary goal.  Now it's just trying to build up some gold in case I actually buy Legion.  Part of me just wants an MMO to play though. 


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on June 26, 2016, 04:52:36 PM
If they can deliver patch content at a decent pace as opposed to rushing out the next expansion, Legion might just redeem a lot of things. They've got the leveling/questing thing down to a flipping science at this point, and the aforementioned criticisms of WoD are getting addressed with Legion.

End-game is going to be at least three raid content tiers. Aside from that, Bliz hopes to keep people coming back by adopting D3's methodology on two fronts:

- World quests (Adventure Mode): Randomly generated world quest/content that you can tackle at your discretion. No more daily quests hubs. All of the random quests you can do are on your map, their requirements, and their rewards are all on display for you to choose. Some quests will only be available for a day (maybe even a few hours?), while others may be week-long ventures. And it's every kind of quest they've done to date: regular quests, rare elite spawns, rare spawns, pet battles, outdoor PvP activities, world bosses, special dungeon activities, profession activities, and so on.

- Challenge/Mythic+ (Rifts): The dungeon variety for launch is already going to be huge compared to WoD and MoP; another lesson learned from those two. To add on to it, you can customize the difficulty ad infinitum at 110 by tailoring the dungeon's handicaps to your pleasure.

I know, I sound like a fanboy, but I can't help it. Legion's looking better and better with each beta patch.

From a lore perspective, look on the bright side:



Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Khaldun on June 26, 2016, 08:06:13 PM
Yeah, the turn over from levelling to 100, which I hit on Friday, to GRIND THE FUCK OUT OF EVERYTHING is brutal. It's actually kind of confusing--you see this beautiful big zone sitting there on the map but the game is saying, "Run some instances, get some shit that Khadgar wants you to get, um, do this thing and that thing" and nobody even mentions the jungle place. And the grind endgame stuff is especially brutal and unfun from what I can see. People can hardly be bothered--I joined some pugs and it was like everyone was whatevs, did we wipe, who cares.

The Proving Ground thing was interesting, though. It made me theorycraft my level 100 build in a way I hadn't really bothered during levelling. So that was helpful. Kind of well-designed for teaching basics of mob behavior in raids.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Zetor on June 26, 2016, 08:45:06 PM
Yea, Proving Grounds and Brawler's Guild are both great. Thing is, though, they were added in MOP, WOD just recycled their content 1:1... plus Brawler's Guild at least is going away for Legion (not sure about Proving Grounds).


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on June 27, 2016, 12:34:01 AM
Proving Grounds is "going away" in that it's no longer a requirement before you can get into Heroic dungeons. Bliz's justification is Mythic+ mode; you can't LFG queue for it anyways, so why require scrubs to prove their worth before getting into an auto-matchmaker for relatively low-difficulty normal/heroic dungeons? The good players will be forming groups of reliable friends/guildies...people they can trust to know what they're doing. As a feature that you use for theorycrafting and practice, it should still work, but no one knows if quick-access to it from your class hall will be there.

Brawler's Guild is officially "going on hiatus" with Legion launch. Whether it will return with new matches and content at some point in Legion remains to be seen.

And if you want to talk about recycled content, let's talk about how Blizzard isn't making any new PvP battlegrounds, and as far as open PvP goes, Ashran is getting reused for lvl 110. I mean, I'm not a PvP kind of player, but I imagine for the hardcore PvPer, no new content on that front may be a little disheartening. There also won't be PvP-specific gear anymore, and you have a whole new, separate PvP-talent system to learn. Bliz got tired of balancing talents around PvE/PvP together, so they just made two separate trees from each class.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on June 27, 2016, 03:27:10 AM
Yeah about fucking time therein.


Though I'm annoyed to find they took back the old pvp titles. I worked hard for that Knight-captain and the bone I was thrown of Bloodcaptain is a terrible title.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Khaldun on June 27, 2016, 09:55:42 AM
Also amusing in Warlords: pickpocketing is actually fun and vaguely useful. It's not that hard to get 5000 Dingy Coins in a couple of hours of tooling around Tanaan looking for silver dragons and doing quests.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Zetor on June 27, 2016, 01:44:22 PM
Honestly, luckton's last post made me somewhat interested in Legion. Then I checked out the changes and now apparently my resto shaman lost a ton of utility and has the rest of it locked up behind the pvp honor system, including things like earth shield? My survival hunter is now going to be a melee class with traps (wtf)? No longer possible to zoom out for battlefield awareness in large fights? etc etc. Dudes, c'mon.

Also, while there's no real pvp gear disparity anymore, you actually unlock pvp abilities as you gain 'prestige', so Xxséphiróthxz will now have some extra bullshit abilities he can spam at you instead! Though at least there's some potential counterplay for that.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on June 27, 2016, 01:56:28 PM
The hunter changes are the most infuriating and another great example of listening to the loudest forum warriors over having any sort of a clear vision of the classes. "Rexxar is a hunter and HE's Melee! I wanna be a melee hunter!"

Yup.

They also stripped a lot out of all the classes to further streamline the specs yet again. Hunters lost aspect of the Stun (Cheetah) turning it into a 3-5 second buff, traps are gone from everyone but survival..

Hell here's the overview page: http://www.wowhead.com/guides/classes/legion/hunter#abilities-marksmanship



Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rendakor on June 27, 2016, 02:43:09 PM
While playing an exclusively-melee hunter sounds pretty shit, I hated when they removed the melee abilities entirely and made them a 100% bow/gun class. I mained hunter in vanilla PVP, and my melee abilities were often surprisingly effective (not the least because they expected me to keep backpedaling).


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on June 27, 2016, 06:32:04 PM
They've always had a hard time trying to balance three ranged specs with Hunters. A pet-friendly spec and a not-so-pet friendly spec were easy, but two not-so-friendly pet specs was hard. Making Survival a melee-spec serves a lot of purposes; it allows them to easily fit ranged pet-friendly skills in Beast Mastery, ranged not-so-friendly pet skills in Marksman (they did try experimenting with Marksman being a non-pet spec completely, but it didn't pan out so well with a chunk of testers. The option to go "lone wolf" is still there, but can now be picked up at level 15 instead of 100), and pet-friendly melee stuff for Survival. Yes, it sucks when you're used to one way of playing already, but this is pretty par for the course with Bliz every expac now. At least in giving up the yearly-goal, you'll stick with the playstyle a little longer before they change things up again.

For Resto Shaman, yeah, Earthen Shield got relegated to a PvP talent. And some stuff got culled. What you may not have seen is the Earthen Shield Totem (http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=198838/earthen-shield-totem) talent they added at the lvl 75 tier. Also, every class is getting culled in some form or another. What isn't being advertised as much is the revamped talent trees, which give a lot of active and passive options, and the active and passive options you're going to get from your artifact weapon. In the case of Resto Shaman, you'll be getting the Gift of the Queen (http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=207778/gift-of-the-queen) spell.

I have no qualms about loosing Aspect of the Stun. It should have died in a fire a long time ago, or at least been disabled after the first hit by an enemy against anyone under the influence of it.

Finally, regarding the camera nerf, here's a sample of what's happening (http://i.imgur.com/sQVcynC.jpg). You be the judge of whether it's a loss to you or not.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: SurfD on June 27, 2016, 07:12:48 PM
And if you want to talk about recycled content, let's talk about how Blizzard isn't making any new PvP battlegrounds, and as far as open PvP goes, Ashran is getting reused for lvl 110. I mean, I'm not a PvP kind of player, but I imagine for the hardcore PvPer, no new content on that front may be a little disheartening. There also won't be PvP-specific gear anymore, and you have a whole new, separate PvP-talent system to learn. Bliz got tired of balancing talents around PvE/PvP together, so they just made two separate trees from each class.
I  think they shy away  from  more PvP battlegrounds because BG's arent really where they have been drifting for the focus of PvP for a while. Legion does get two new Arenas from what I understand, as well as the complete overhaul of pretty much everything mechanically in regards to PvP.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on June 27, 2016, 08:52:08 PM
Aspect should have been switched to a "turn it off" yes, and that's all that needed to happen. Now Hunters have a longer CD run boost than other classes and no passive 20%. 3 min CD for a runspeed boost? It's fucking stupid. Ask priests how much no passive boost sucks running back from wipes.

It's no more difficult to manage 3 ranged specs than it is for Mages, 4 specs for Druids, or two healing specs on Priests. It just takes more vision than, "Fuck I dunno, they have a bow and some pet. Fuck 'em there's a few hundred we need to thin 'em out."

Are you seriously trying to argue the camera thing isn't a nerf? That nothing was lost? Fantastic, go play in 1st person mode then. It's the equivalent camera loss from the new max. Surely not noticeable at all.

I mean, for fuck's sake, you made me do Photoshop.
(https://db.tt/YItx8voo)

No need to keep defending bad decisions. We know you love the game, even after all the shit thrown on you.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Zetor on June 27, 2016, 10:48:16 PM
Honestly, I'm sympathetic to the entire thing with differentiating the three hunter specs yada yada.

BUT. In my mind, there were three things that differentiated hunters from caster dps: 1] traps 2] doing mainly physical damage at range and 3] pets (mail armor isn't a differentiator, cf ele shaman or even boomkin). So far these three things were represented by all of the specs to some degree... except now if you want traps, you MUST go survival (melee), if you want pets that are more than a sideshow, you MUST go BM, and if you want to pew pew at range with any variance to your shots, you MUST go marksman.

My hunter's been SV ever since I created the char in WOTLK*, and it's been consistently fun in each xpac. Sure, there were a few changes, but it had a distinct flavor that wasn't available via MM or BM, like the ability to layer traps, and (this was huge for me) the entire "lock and load" idea of getting free explosive shots when someone is caught in a trap, which was both fun on a gameplay level and highly thematic. Now I guess it's sort of like a fury warrior in mail armor and a pet? White Lions in WAR sucked, man. BM never appealed to me, and I don't see anything unique in MM anymore (expecting to go with the lone wolf build due to no more mend pet). The fact that Lock and Load is now a random autoshot proc instead of a consciously triggered proc off a successful trap is pretty telling on its own.

* I did play a hunter briefly in vanilla, but never got him past level 30 or so... and back then I definitely wouldn't have gone SV (lacerate, lol). But that's vanilla and the era of worthless specs for ya.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Zetor on June 27, 2016, 11:19:58 PM
Double post, but I didn't want to put this mini-rant together with the hunter stuff.

So yeah, hunter's out, but my main was a resto/ele shaman anyway. I look up a few ele gameplay videos, it actually seems pretty decent! Thing is, though, with the way artifact weapons level up, I'll be leveling the offspec artifact weapon of my shaman, which means I'll have to grind for some unknown amount of time at 110 to get my resto artifact to a functional state. Leveling as resto seems like a horribly bad idea, with single mobs taking over 30 seconds to kill while my ele shaman can probably 3-shot them. I guess I could level as ele and spec switch to resto before turning in quests... nope.avi. Why can't healers have decent DPS when soloing? It's not like tank DPS is bad (if anything, it looks like prot warriors are bursting things down pretty hard, and blood DK aoe is ridiculous as expected), or DPS classes have zero options for self-healing / damage mitigation. Other games solved this problem long ago (Warspeech for LOTRO minstrels, Cleric Stance for FFXIV white mages). But I guess my resto shaman has to cast Chain Lightning 14 times to kill that group of 3 linked trash mobs while doing regular questing.

e: okay, I did some more reading and apparently it's not 100% doom-and-gloom if this (https://healiocentric.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/legion-beta-leveling-as-a-healer-the-surprising-result-i-cant-explain-and-you-wont-believe/) post is to believed... most of artifact power comes from consumables, so just stash them while leveling in a DPS spec with a DPS weapon, then dump them into the healing artifact weapon at 102 (also start doing dungeons at that point). Also there seem to be massive diminishing returns after artifact level 13, so leveling the off-spec artifact to that point is also an option


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: SurfD on June 28, 2016, 02:06:30 AM
Eh, Personally, other then "ranged physical damage" instead of "ranged magical damage" (and even that isnt much of a thing any more for some hunters pecs), I always thought the main difference between Hunters and other ranged classes was always mobility.   Evver since they removed the Cast While Moving talent for warlocks, hunters have been the only class that can pretty much put out 100% (or damn close to it) of their DPS output while on the move.  I mainly play BM, and I dont think I have a single ability in my entire tookit that can not be used while moving.   Which is pretty damn broken imo.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azuredream on June 28, 2016, 03:19:24 AM
Playing a private server made me realize I really like how simple vanilla is. I liked my rotation being Shadow Bolt spam. I liked that Blizzard didn't design specs around specific rotations. I liked that raids were less about execution and more about preparation. In PvP, fights were much more like rock paper scissors because everyone had such limited options but over time they just started giving every class everything. CC, mobility, and defensive CDs for everyone. Classes used to be so much more distinct, and not just the abilities, they would have their own reagents and their own class quests. Do they even do class quests anymore?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Khaldun on June 28, 2016, 09:21:30 AM
I think this is one of many design cul-de-sacs that Blizzard got trapped in as early as the first expansion. The more they saw balance as the major issue to tweak between and within expansions, the more that argued for class homogenization. Every single difference between classes that made a difference became suspect, because it might represent asymmetry and thus imbalance. This gets stoked further by a perception that their main clientele are the kind of forum warrior/theorycrafters who complain bitterly about small differences in DPS/healing/tanking metrics across class. Homogeneity not only drives towards 'balance', it makes the game cheaper and easier to live manage--it's much less complicated to figure out what's going on when a class ascends up the charts of popularity or effectiveness.

Everything about the game in that sense is being designed towards being more streamlined, more predictable, more easily managed. But the rough edges and quirks are to some extent one of the sources of the charm of an MMO, at least for people interested in exploration and "worldliness".


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on July 01, 2016, 04:51:01 PM
Class quests are making a huge comeback in Legion thanks to Class Halls and Artifact weapons.

Also, new expansion tech continues to blur the lines between why we even bother having realms in the first place:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20745655899#1

Quote
With Legion on the horizon, we wanted to let you know of an upcoming change that will open up additional grouping opportunities for players. As of the expansion pre-patch, players on North American, Latin American, and Oceanic realms will be able to group together in the open world no matter what realm their party or raid members are on. Players will also be able to see all available groups within the Group Finder, regardless of realm. This update will make it easier than ever for people to play together and group up for adventures like the new World Quests in Legion.

Additionally, reset timers for recurring in-game activities such as daily/weekly quests and raid/dungeon lockouts will be updated to a single unified lockout time of 15:00:00 UTC (8 a.m. PDT / 1 a.m. AEST) for all North American, Latin American, and Oceanic realms. This change will make it more convenient for players, as you will only need to keep track of one reset time. Weekly resets will occur on Tuesdays (early Wednesday mornings for Oceanic realms) at this time.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azazel on July 01, 2016, 05:14:19 PM
What better way to hide a shrinking playerbase without folding servers? It's actually quite smart and makes it less likely for people to leave because the game is becoming a ghost town.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Evildrider on July 01, 2016, 06:32:50 PM
Zul'Jin is a ghost town Alliance side.  When I do see people in chat or in world they are all French Canadian.   :oh_i_see:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on July 01, 2016, 07:19:26 PM
I imagine by WoW 8.0 they'll have found a way to say "fuck it, realms are dead" and just let people create 20 characters max on one big pooled server.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Zetor on July 01, 2016, 10:03:03 PM
Speaking of which... is there any point in playing on a PVP server at this point? World PVP was sorta fun in vanilla/bc and sometimes WOTLK, but since then it's been basically just a guarantee that you'll get ganked and camped a few times during leveling by max-level people, and the mandatory daily quest / grinding area at max level will be extra annoying.

I wish Blizz offered a one-time opportunity for guilds to move between server types, I know my guild (those that are still interested in WOW, anyway) would move from PVP to PVE in a heartbeat.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on July 02, 2016, 06:56:33 AM
Class quests are making a huge comeback in Legion thanks to Class Halls and Artifact weapons.

Also, new expansion tech continues to blur the lines between why we even bother having realms in the first place:

If WoW were to launch today we wouldn't have realms. Distributed computing is a far, far different world now than it was 18 years ago when they were developing the server architecture.

(WoW was announced in 2001 here's the gameplay trailer so they had at least a few yars dev at that point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzM9lRWtETE)

The only reason they keep them around is the playerbase still views Realm-name as a part of their identity.* Even though I haven't played since October and had a two year break before that I'd feel a loss if Alleria were to be merged into nothingness. Then you'd have people losing their names on top of it so they'd just fuck-off rather than come back. Happened to my wife now that the Islamic State has ruined the handle she used for 20 years. Stopped her playing entirely, she says it's not the same and she misses the name.


*Well that and the sweet, sweet character transfer fees.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on July 18, 2016, 11:05:56 AM
The Legion pre-launch patch goes live tomorrow. So long, Garrisons!  :awesome_for_real:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Ginaz on July 18, 2016, 02:26:19 PM
The Legion pre-launch patch goes live tomorrow. So long, Garrisons!  :awesome_for_real:

Garrisons aren't going away, they just won't be the source of gold they once were.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on July 18, 2016, 02:26:52 PM
Same diff.  :awesome_for_real:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Soulflame on July 18, 2016, 06:51:41 PM
Yeah.  It's MMO logic.  There's too much shit to do, so you focus on the most optimal tasks.

If garrisons aren't the most optimal way to earn gold, they will be largely ignored.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on July 18, 2016, 07:05:50 PM
Factions,for example, haven't gone away. Nor has the endgame content for all previous expansions. When's the last time you went and did your Shattered Sun dailies? Or ran to Pandaria to farm your crops? (And that was just the last expansion.)

Garrisons are dead, like your farm. Long live the Class Hall.. until the next X-pac.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Ginaz on July 19, 2016, 05:33:50 PM
Oh, man, melee hunters! :heart: :heart: :heart:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Evildrider on July 19, 2016, 07:56:06 PM
Oh, man, melee hunters! :heart: :heart: :heart:

here come even more Drizzzzzzzzts   :awesome_for_real:


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Hawkbit on July 20, 2016, 07:10:49 AM
I only managed to get one of my characters to 100 in WoD, the rest are stuck at 90. If I wanted to get a few of them to 100, is there a quick, non-pay-boosted way?


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Xanthippe on July 20, 2016, 08:00:20 AM
There's a medallion that boosts xp gain. Usually sells for 3k to 4k on my server. Personally, I just sell mine.

If you have a boost to 90, better use it before buying Legion, or it goes away (I found out the hard way). Or maybe it went away in the last patch. I don't know if it goes away because I now have a boost to 100 for buying Legion or because of yesterday's patch. EDIT: My 90 boost reappeared, so I now have 2 boosts, one to 90 and one to 100 (I never used the one I got last time).

Rested xp and questing is the only way I know to get from 90 to 100.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on July 20, 2016, 09:46:02 AM
Once Legion hits they'll sell boosts to 100. The CE sold with a L100 boost to begin with, didn't it?

Other than that, yeah, grab some of the XP potions from your garrison, use the medallion and your Heirlooms. You've got a grind ahead of you.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Hawkbit on July 20, 2016, 10:35:47 AM
Thanks. It appears the best bet is stick to my 100 hunter or just not play. Shame; I have no desire to go through any guided WoD quest experience again.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: dalien on July 20, 2016, 03:16:03 PM
If you happen to have Draenor flying unlocked on your account you can level alts 90-100 pretty fast by just flying around and picking up treasures.  Get the Handynotes addon with the Draenor treasures plugin, it shows everything you haven't collected on your map and removes them as you collect them.  10k-40k exp per treasure and you can sweep them up pretty fast (protip: swap in stables for your large garrison building so you can loot everything while mounted).


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on August 01, 2016, 04:07:25 PM
WoW Legion: Extended Preview Trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnjGw9ZL3QQ)

Basically it's a 2.0/remixed/extended version of the first "Feature Overview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6CWue7voA0)", but now using end of beta footage and finalized stuffs.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on August 19, 2016, 01:00:07 PM
Dumping this here, as it's info that covers the overall grand plan in the short to mid-term future of WoW this year and next. From Fatboss.tv, an interview with Bliz regarding Legion, patches, and everything in between:

https://www.twitch.tv/fatbosstv/v/84480726

Notes taken from MMO-Champ:

Quote
Patch 7.1
-Patch 7.1 has three major pieces: Karazhan, a small raid, and additional quests in Suramar.
-We will get a lot more detail on Patch 7.1 after Legion launches.
-Patch 7.1 was announced now to underscore the team's commitment to patch content as part of Legion.
-Karazhan is a Mythic dungeon (not Mythic+) with a weekly lockout.
-Karazhan is a long enough dungeon that some people might do part of it one night and then come back to finish it another night.
-Patch 6.2.3 was a pretty successful patch for what it was, mostly a systems patch that revitalized existing content and gave players a reason to revisit stuff.


New Dungeons
-The old dungeon structure didn't give the team a good way to add dungeons that fit into the existing ecosystem of dungeons without stepping on the old ones.
-When ZA and ZG were introduced, they gave better loot than the older dungeons, so people went from running a diverse set of dungeons to running just the troll dungeons.
-With Mythic+ dungeons and Warforged/Titanforged gear in dungeons the team can add new dungeons that have a higher baseline difficulty and rewards that coexist the existing dungeons.

Raid Release Schedule
-There will be a blog post coming out in the next few days that has the full raid release schedule.
-The schedule will be similar to previous expansions, where everything is closed for the first three weeks, then Normal and Heroic Nightmare open, the PvP season begins, and Mythic keystones become available
-Nighthold is an early 2017 raid, towards the very beginning of 2017.
-In Warlords, it felt like Foundry came out too soon in relation to Highmaul for a lot of guilds and raid groups. The top end raiders were ready for it, but tons of other players were still working on it. Foundry came out and they felt rushed into that.

Mythic+ Dungeons
-The world first type raiders will be playing a lot the first few weeks of raiding. Instead of doing five split clears they may end up doing lots of Mythic+ dungeons, which isn't the end of the world.
-The average group will probably play through all of the Mythic keystones in the group and that is it. That might take 12 - 15 dungeon runs, which is longer than most guilds raid in a week.
-It would be easy to add a hard weekly lockout on Mythic keystones to prevent people from farming them for loot, but that would lead to people logging in on Tuesday, doing their Mythic run for the week, and being done.
-With keystones, if you log in later in the week and have a fresh keystone ready to go, people will be lining up to run the dungeon with you.
-Currently rewards cap out at Mythic+ 10, which rewards gear that is roughly on par with Heroic Nightmare gear. The real reward comes from the weekly chest, rewarding the mythic raid gear.

Legendary Items
-There is a little bit of tuning still to be done on the legendary items that are outliers.
-There will still be some items that are the best and some that are the worst.
-The legendary items are a chance to try out interesting effects that aren't just a damage throughput increase.
-If you are someone that never sets foot in a raid zone, getting a legendary item should still be exciting for you.
-There are some legendary items that are amazing in a raid over a long fight that aren't as useful for a player that is just soloing in the world. A more utility related legendary might be a huge deal for that player.
-There are plans to add more legendary items as the expansion progresses.
-The team decided not to start out with a system that allowed you to target a specific legendary item.
-As more are added, there will be some threshold at which there are so many out there that it feels like you can't reasonably expect to get any of the specific ones you want. At that point being able to target certain legendary items will make sense.

Artifact Weapons
-The team will avoid nerfing a spec from being a little too good to the worst so that you don't feel that all of your Artifact progression was a waste.
-Artifacts are something that will continue to grow and evolve so that Artifact Power matters for the entirety of Legion.
-Classes are balanced against each other without Artifacts or Legendary items. The Artifacts and Legendary items are then balanced against each other separately.

Melee vs Ranged
-In Mythic+ dungeons melee do really well thanks to their cleave and mobility compared to casters that have to stand still.
-Melee may be a little stronger in Mythic+ dungeons while ranged are a little stronger in raids, which is fine as long as the gap isn't too large.
-The team doesn't want to solve the melee vs ranged problem by making life boring for melee and making raid mechanics that don't target them at all.
-The community doesn't do a great job when something is 1% better and they claim it is the only viable option and everything else is garbage.

Ability Pruning
-You prune a plant to guide its growth in new directions that are hopefully more aesthetically pleasing. It is removing stuff to make room to add new stuff.
-One of the themes of Legion class design is to emphasize strengths and weaknesses of classes.
-A lot of the things that were removed were removed after looking back at classes over the years where the class designers had taken the easy route. The team was coming up with a new set of abilities for an expansion or needed new talents and asked themselves what that class needed. If a class wasn't very mobile, they gave them a talent row with mobility options. Players thought this was amazing and what they always wanted, but that led to a lot of homogenization.
-In a world where no one has weaknesses there are also no strengths.
-In Legion there is now room to add interesting utility, especially for specs that feel like they don't bring much beyond their throughput.
-Bring the player, not the class was a reaction to the hyper regimented raid structure of Burning Crusade where buffs were party based and synergy was more important than anything else.
-The team would like to get back to a place where if you are a PuG leader, you are looking at your raid comp and saying, "We could really use a Hunter, let's look for a good hunter", rather than "Let's look for any ranged DPS, especially the flavor of the month that is 2% better and thus is the only viable one". Obviously this isn't the case literally right now, but it is what the team is thinking about and would like to move towards over the course of patches and future content.

Expansion Launches
-There is a lot that has been done by the server team and how the world is designed that will make the Legion launch smoother than the Warlords launch.
-Zones scale in level so the population will be distributed across the different zones.
-Under heavy load there will also be multiple versions of the same zone on the same server to make sure that server performance is okay and gameplay feels good.
-One of the things that caused problems for servers at Warlords launch, especially on the Horde side, was the Spyglass that was needed to start the Horde Garrison. It was only usable by one player at a time, which caused a bit of a bottleneck.
-The team hotfixed the Spyglass to be usable by multiple players at a time, but something went wrong with the hofix and then no one could use the Spyglass!
-Horde players in North America were all stuck there for a few hours until the team could fix it, resulting in a big clump of players all hitting the garrison at the same time, making server problems much worse.
-Everyone on the server was doing Frostfire at the same time, resulting in a laggy zone and even more players building up there, making things even worse.

Raid Structure and Rewards
-The current raid structure didn't change this expansion because there isn't a huge problem to fix. All of the raid structure changes in previous expansions were targeted at solving a particular problem.
-Classic to Burning Crusade changed because the logistics of 40 man raiding were overwhelming for a lot of guilds, players were a cog in the giant raid machine. "Your job is to dispel this one person and that is your only job in this giant 40 player group". It was fun for the raid leader to plan all of that out but less fun for the players.
-The introduction of 10 player raiding allowed the team to let more types of players and groups experience the content.
-Flexible raiding is probably the best raid structure the team has done and is working well.
-Three difficulties plus Raid Finder means that there is a raid difficulty for all of the different groups. Normal for friends, family, and PuGs. Heroic for guilds that are formed for the purpose of raiding, Mythic for the extremely hardcore players.
-Mythic needed a fixed size so that tuning could be done in a way that is satisfying.
-Being able to split the raid into groups that could go off and do a mechanic and assuming that the raid had one of every class was part of the encounters that the team wanted to design for Mythic, so the 20 player size felt like the right number. A smaller group size such as 15 players might have also worked, but that would have been tougher for the groups that were already at 25.
-The team was worried that LFR was growing too much in prominence in some ways, so they wanted to make sure that players were doing regular group raiding didn't also feel obligated to do lots of Raid Finder to complement that. The team probably overdid this in Warlords by removing Tier sets from Raid Finder, so they are coming back to Raid Finder in Legion.
-Most of the players that are raiding competitively will already have set pieces before that Raid Finder wing opens, so they won't feel obligated to go and do it when it opens.
-If you have been really unlucky and want your set bonus, this gives you another chance to go and get that last piece.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on August 22, 2016, 06:49:02 AM
What's a mythic dungeon? How does the new dungeon/raid scaling system work now? I have been out since early panda.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rokal on August 22, 2016, 09:44:56 AM
It's still the WoD raid difficulty system, but it's complicated because the names don't mean the same thing as they did in expansions past.

(http://i.imgur.com/vvSBvrd.jpg)

Instead I'll just tell you what they are now in reality rather than on paper.

All difficulties except Mythic raids are now Flex group size, which means they scale with your group size from 10-25. All difficulties except Mythic raids can be played in cross-realm groups with friends as well.

LFR is still LFR, an auto-formed group through the LFG tool.

Normal (aka the old "Flex") is slightly easier than "Normal" was in previous expansions, and is intended for PuGs or casual guilds.

Heroic (aka the old "Normal") is for dedicated raid guilds, and got increasingly harder as WoD went on. It got to the point where it was almost too hard for my raid guild, who didn't really have any issues with the "Normal" of MoP or Cata. Unsure how it'll be for Legion.

Mythic is locked at a group size of 20 and is for hardcore raiding guilds.


Dungeon difficulty had a bunch of changes.

Normal is for leveling. Dungeons scale to your level when you queue for them.

Heroic is for level cap. Very accessible, can be queued for via the LFG tool.

Mythic is the hardest difficulty available for dungeons. You need to manually form your group and it rewards better gear than LFR raids. The LFG tool does have a section to find other group members for specific content, searchable via category and keyword, which you can check out now if you want to run WoD Mythics or old raids, so it won't be quite the same trade chat spam fest. It's very handy if you are looking for transmog in raids that aren't soloable, etc.

Mythic+ is the replacement for challenge modes. If you played Greater Rifts in Diablo 3, you'll have an idea for what the mode plays like. The difficulty increases each time you beat a dungeon within a generous time limit, until you fail at which point you cash-out for the week. They reward raid-equivalent gear. There are also different modifiers each week, such as

Quote
Bolstering - Non-boss enemies will buff nearby allies' health and damage when defeated.
Raging - Non-boss enemies will enrage at low health, dealing double damage until killed.

It's a lot to digest and there aren't really any good guides about it yet. You can read a bit more about the modifiers here though.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20743006610#1

They won't be enabled on Day 1 Legion, in any case.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on August 22, 2016, 10:11:21 AM
Heroic raids got ultra-stupid in WoD and were what fractured my old guild. (What broke them was the "no new conent" statement.)

When Hellfire Citadel (the last raid) issued we beat our heads against it for weeks, only getting past the first 5 bosses after about two months. That's crazy-hard for a guild that's dedicated to raiding and is doing it 4 nights a week for 4 hours.

We'd struggled with Heroic Foundry and only barely got a kill on Blackhand before it opened up. (And had also struggled on the last boss of Highmaul for a while, never hitting Mythic for the dungeon.) Prior to that expansion, the guild had hit the final tier on all raids, including clearing Mythic on all dungeons in Pandaria.

Blizzard just upped the difficulty so much it killed the fun for a lot of people. I wonder about how successful Legion will be if they keep that same difficulty curve. It's the same problem you ran into at the end of Vanilla when only 2-3% of the population got to even see Naax. When you're tuning content for less than 5% of your playerbase, you're going to lose a lot of them and generate ill-will.

WoW's old enough they can't rely on people to keep coming back because they're the only game in town anymore.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Rokal on August 22, 2016, 01:16:37 PM
That story echoes what happened to my guild almost exactly. Struggled extremely hard on Heroic Blackhand (took 137 attempts for our kill) and barely finished it a few weeks before Hellfire Citadel launched. We finished Hellfire Citadel as well, but it was a long and unpleasant 5-month process. By the end everyone was miserable, and we won't be raiding as a guild in Legion.

This was a guild that, like yours, had no issues finishing the old "normal" raid difficulties in MoP and earlier expansions while the content was current.

It seemed like part of it was that they balanced Hellfire Citadel around everyone having the Legendary Ring, but whatever the case we felt the difficulty ramp in the expansion and it was much too much for us.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on August 22, 2016, 02:07:38 PM
I plan on doing LFR at most, and probably some dungeons as the primary source of content. We'll see how that fares with my small group. I'm not built for the raiding game anymore.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on August 22, 2016, 02:59:21 PM
Since they're actually including sets in LFR once more it becomes a non-shitty option again. I'll be doing the same thing, since I can't do 9pm-midnight/ 1am raids during weekdays anymore and nobody does things on weekends.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on August 22, 2016, 03:38:33 PM
There is also going to be an Order/Class Hall set that you can purchase after unlocking certain thresholds in your progress:

Helm - simple Order Hall quest
Wrists - Recruit 6 Champions for Order Hall.
Gloves - Honored with Nightfallen.
Leggings - Revered with 3 Broken Isles reputations.
Feet - Defeat the final boss of every Legion Dungeon.
Chest - Complete your Class Order Campaign.
Belt - Earn 50,000 Artifact Power.
Shoulders - Exalted with the Nightfallen.

The suits are pretty much re-colors of MoP Challenge Mode suits, so if you missed those, you can now get the knockoffs.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Paelos on August 23, 2016, 07:45:09 AM
Currently I'm making doing invasions and running legacy raids for transmog options. So there's that.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Azuredream on August 23, 2016, 08:53:28 PM
I'm really impressed by whatever technology they used with the invasions to make them scale to everyone's level. I think there are some hiccups where the scaling is broken but for the most part it works really well. I'm not sure if they've been doing it for a while or if it's new, but I hope they use this tech more going forward.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: ezrast on August 23, 2016, 09:45:18 PM
Yeah, it's pretty cool that they managed to adopt the exact tech that City of Heroes had in 2005.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Ginaz on August 23, 2016, 09:46:45 PM
I'm really impressed by whatever technology they used with the invasions to make them scale to everyone's level. I think there are some hiccups where the scaling is broken but for the most part it works really well. I'm not sure if they've been doing it for a while or if it's new, but I hope they use this tech more going forward.

I believe all of the new Legion zones will work like this.  Elder Scrolls Online is doing something similar for all of its zones in October, too.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on August 24, 2016, 06:21:17 AM
Yep, you can start in any zone in Legion and it scales as you level-up. Makes things a bit more interesting as you can't just go back to old zones and slag things to get achieves/ missed treasures.

Yeah, it's pretty cool that they managed to adopt the exact tech that City of Heroes had in 2005.

Yeah, it's about time. Though Blizzard always gave the excuse they had more complicated stats than other games, and for the most part that was true. Now that things have really been homogenized down to one primary stat and Crit, Haste, Vers, Mastery they were out of excuses.  Now if only they'd extend it to old content so you don't have to raid/ run only the most-current dungeons.


Oh and speaking of Missed Treasures - IF you're going to play Legion and don't mind gameplay spoilers read this!

Everyone gets an artifact weapon. That weapon works like some of the old Final Fantasy skills systems. You accrue points, you buy nodes, the artifact gets more powerful. The item level however, only changes by sticking relics into three slots that unlock by running quests related to the weapon.

These are important to know. Why? Because the nodes are largely useless for leveling once you've got the weapon. You won't unlock enough of them as you go through quests and find treasures because you get only 10/ 20 "Artifact Power" at a time from the items you find. Plus the nodes increase in cost each time you unlock one.

The first is free via quest, the second is 300 AP, the third is 325 and it goes up from there in increments of 25. You can't move on to the next node until you've fully upgraded the one preceding it in the tree.

I was 102 when I got bored of Beta and I'd only gotten enough points to unlock one node and level it up one step. At that rate I might have gotten 3 or 4 nodes by the time I hit the cap if I *really* hunted for Treasures instead of just picking them up as I leveled.

However: At the endgame you get a bunch of quests that give you tons of artifact power. Since the system is meant to be an endgame system and power is focused there. Sucks for anyone starting late or alts, right?

Wrong: Blizzard has implemented a system called "Artifact Knowledge" that gives bonuses to these items and quests. You unlock the ability to research at level 108.  Each level gives a bonus to any Artifact Power you find, up to 24,900% at the cap.

http://www.wowhead.com/currency=1171/artifact-knowledge

SO! if you hold-off and do NOT pick-up treasures or start those quests until after you have a few levels of Artifact Knowledge under your belt you'll see HUGE gains in the amount of nodes you can unlock.

There was an exploit (just patched) that made the treasures 'upgrade' to your current AK level if put in void storage. They patched that out, but the treasure items are still affected by it.  So if you can delay gratification a bit, you'll be able to unlock things a lot better.

Those 10-50exp treasures become much more valuable if you have even just 3-4 levels of AP, and the quests which grant thousands of AP as a baseline are ridiculously more profitable with levels.

With Legion going live in a week I don't expect this to be changed soon. I do expect it to be changed once Blizzard sees the results of the first few large groups doing it. As always with Expansions the early birds will reap the rewards.

Of course nothing says you have to Min/ Max this way. I just wanted everyone to know so nobody felt feel cheated when they found out later.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on August 24, 2016, 09:41:25 AM
/snip

Hate to rain on the parade, but Bliz is apparently playing 4D chess, and continues to be a step ahead of you lot.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20748135380?page=5#post-91

Quote
The fact that Artifact Power rewards from quests and treasures now scale with Knowledge is not a bug.

We started off the design of the system thinking along the exact same lines as many of the posters in this thread: We figured that we should make sure that one-time AP rewards did not scale, or else the "right" answer might be to delay completing key quests or collecting any treasures until you had higher Knowledge. And that didn't sound like much fun.

So we spent the first half of beta with all repeatable AP sources (world quests, item drops, missions, etc.) scaling, and all story quests and treasures flat. We added multipliers to things like Suramar or Order Campaign quests that tried to incorporate a likely expected Knowledge level at the point where players would get to that content. So, for example, finishing the third chapter of the Suramar campaign awarded a flat 10k Artifact Power, since by that point we expected players to likely have a ~14x multiplier from being around Knowledge Level 12, and we wanted to make sure that the reward still felt meaningful to that player.

But as we were actually playtesting extensively and getting into endgame ourselves and going through the Artifact Power and Knowledge progressions, we realized two things:
Artifact Power isn't a limited resource. There's always more available. There are world quests popping up every few hours, dungeons that can be repeatedly run, and so forth. And regardless of what we did with one-time sources, the vast majority of a player's AP over the course of the expansion would come from repeatable sources.
Even trying to account for an expected "par" Knowledge level, any time you came across a non-scaling reward that was aimed at someone with a lower Knowledge level, it felt pretty bad. Stumbling across a zone side-quest you'd missed and getting 100 AP from it when you needed 70k for your next trait felt like a waste of time. Opening a treasure to get 25 AP when you needed 300k for your next trait felt insulting. The system we'd set up actually encouraged trying to front-load all your AP while it still mattered (e.g. doing a full world tour to collect every treasure possible while still at Knowledge Level 1, since if you waited they'd no longer be worth the time relative to other activities).


So we started changing it. The first step was making treasures and level-up quests scale. That helped, but we still found that someone who delayed doing much in Suramar beyond the initial Friendly unlock, and instead focused on other content (dungeons, world quests, etc.), found all the rewards in the zone incredibly underwhelming once they got around to doing those quests. So just over a month ago, we also converted those rewards to be scaling sources.

Now, we haven't had a new client build since then, so community sites and datamining likely still show the values of the old items. That Suramar Chapter 3 capstone reward mentioned above is not a 10k AP item that gets multiplied by Artifact Power - that'd be pretty crazy. It's now just a 750 AP base item, which will give around 10k AP when you get there if you've been keeping up with your Knowledge.

It's not necessarily intuitive, since at first glance it seems like an obvious flaw in our system that if you wait until Knowledge Level 20 (a month and a half longer) to complete that quest, it'd give over 70k AP instead of 10k. Aren't you "wasting" 60k AP if you don't do that? The key here is that everything is relative. That Suramar quest capstone reward is equal to ~5 world quests. It'll be equal to 5 world quests if you do it ASAP; it'll be equal to 5 world quests if you do it two months later. And it'll contribute roughly the same amount towards whatever trait you're working on at the time.

Finally, it's also worth noting that the biggest one-time sources of AP are the Order Hall campaign, and the Suramar campaign. From a pure min-max perspective (probably the mindset most associated with the competitive raider), you really don't want to delay turning in either of those. The former leads to unlocking your third Artifact relic slot; the latter unlocks additional repeatable sources of AP (new world quests) and eventually access to the two Mythic dungeons, for an extra two Mythic clears each week.

tl;dr: Just get Artifact Power when you find it, as you find it. Enjoy the rewards and the immediate benefit, and you aren't hurting yourself in the long run.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: Merusk on August 24, 2016, 09:53:49 AM
I'll note that post was made only 5 hours ago, AFTER this became a big topic on multiple sites. Note that they say it's not in the beta build yet but we're less than a week out. I'll wager because they've only just realized the problem.

Amusing, but at least it's being worked on. My info was current as of last night when I decided to post it here this morning. As I said it was a public service. There were HUGE gains you'd lose out on if you didn't do it the above method.

Also: Since they didn't even realize the void storage problem until a few days ago, I'm going to call bull on the "just over a month ago" part. That AP knowledge exploit thread is dated August 9th. That is the ONLY blue comment on it and it only happened after /r/wow and some other sites started focusing on this topic after the Void Storage exploit was fixed.

In the reddit thread someone posted directly to that AK exploit thread saying, "great you've fixed that but what about this?  Suddenly we have a blue post about a fix that's in a secret patch that just hasn't been deployed.  :oh_i_see:

 Very little is coincidental in Blizzard land.


Title: Re: The "WoW in 2016" Thread
Post by: luckton on August 24, 2016, 10:08:22 AM
At least it looks like they're trying to up their "we actually give a crap" game.  :grin:

Now if we can just get Khadgar reigned from epic questing... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrRYDzuwa-Q)