Druid Preview is Up

[stray]

I have a mage.  I've been owned very badly by druids coming out of stealth, so I know they can put out rogue-like damage you have good gear and spec for it.  And against druids you can't poly or root them  : /.

I guess the grass is always greener and all that.  But I'm leveling a druid right now, and hopefully he'll be close to 60 by the expansion.

I'll admit that Mages are at a disadvantage, but it isn't because of rogue-like damage per se. Cat form has the speed to disrupt casting well, and Druids in general have all the means to negate a mage's control (very easy to shiftshape yourself to an oom state against a mage however). As far as damage potential goes though, you're lucky if you can achieve 85% of what a Rogue does. You'll also never get anywhere close to a Rogue's dodge rate, or have all the goodies that makes a Rogue a Rogue (i.e. poisons, kidney shot, gouge, sap, etc......At least not yet). Cat form, in my experience, is best in spurts and opening moves, but never a substitute for a rogue.

Not that I don't like my Druid or anything though....It's cool. I accept what they are. I'm just itching for a class that dishes out heavy burst damage and can still heal -- and the Shaman is it. I'm also a sucker for anything Lightning based (in all games) ;).

[Typhon]

I may as well be Stray.  I'm also a druid eyeing up the shaman.  I played a Thane in DAOC for the lightening.  hmph! I'm not a special snowflake?!?!

Only thing causing me some uncertainty now is the flight form.  it's so damn cool.  If they retro-fit flying back into the main world, druid might be the class for me (but the lightening!).

[stray]

Heh, yeah, I played a Thane too. Didn't get far though. 

[Triforcer]

I may as well be Stray.  I'm also a druid eyeing up the shaman.  I played a Thane in DAOC for the lightening.  hmph! I'm not a special snowflake?!?!

Only thing causing me some uncertainty now is the flight form.  it's so damn cool.  If they retro-fit flying back into the main world, druid might be the class for me (but the lightening!).

I don't think its possible to retrofit flying back into the original world, absent a probably-years-away total graphics revamp.  Word on the WoW boards (from random forum monkeys, admittedly) is that the buildings/terrain simply isn't designed to be viewed from many angles (ie, except for flightpaths, if you were directly above Ironforge you wouldn't see anything.

[Merusk]

Yep, I saw the actual 'blue post' about that, so it's not just random forum monkeys playing telephone game.   They said they did a lot of visual tricks with the mountains and the main cities, things that don't look right at all if you can actually fly around.  Makes me want someone to develop a model-hack for zones not just player characters, so I can see for myself.

[Xanthippe]

I'm suspicious.  Stuff looks ok when we fly over it on the flight routes.

How hard can it be to revamp the existing zones on the parts that don't look ok?

[Dren]

I'd be happy if they let us pick up the flight zones with our flyable mounts/forms.  That way we could pick them up and drop out of them anywhere we wanted.  You'd just have to run to a flight line to access it.

If we can't have that, I wouldn't mind having to start at a flight path, but be able to drop anywhere before the end.  That would still help on travel times a lot.

The flying mount ability should allow you to do this (early take offs and landings) so newb chars would still go the traditional route, etc.

[Morat20]

I'm suspicious.  Stuff looks ok when we fly over it on the flight routes.

How hard can it be to revamp the existing zones on the parts that don't look ok?

According to the Dev post -- "hard". It's mostly the cities. Giant chunks of them don't exist. They're tricks to save draw distance. Since cities are where people congregate, they did what they could to minimize graphic needs there. It's like on TV shows when they show a window but the stuff out the window is merely an image showing the proper perspective.

From the camera's angle, you see out over a city or something. If you suddenly allow the viewer to get a look from the actor's perspective, you'd see all the edge.

From what I recall, the flightpaths actually have large swatches of such images. (There's a technical term for them, but I can't recall). If you had free flight, you'd be running into walls with towers and such painted on them, where you thought there was open sky.

To fix it, they'd have to go over vast swatches of the game and actual create terrain and render it, and totally rework some of the cities.

[SurfD]

There is also the problem of people flying out over "undeveloped" tertitory (off the north and east edges of EPL for example) or over the wedges of space between zones where there simply isn't anything there.  Stuff that looks fine from the ground, for the exact example mentioned above.

an actual perfect example of what they would have to deal with can bee seen in the form of http://mapwow.com/  which is basicly the world of azeroth, as visible from the sky.

I mean, look at the mess that is the Eastern kingdoms around Stormwind.  All around stormwind is empty terrain, north is a HUGE chunk of blank, featureless, textureless area.  Same with chunks of area around the Burning Steppes, and adjacent zones as well as all that stuff to the east along the coast.   The whole world map is covered in places like that.

If you want to see it for yourself, you can also roll up a Hunter or Shaman, and level up to Hawk Eye / Far Sight (shaman get far sight at around level 10 or so if i remember correctly), and then go touring around.  Drop it on your hot bar, and start targeting the tops of mountains and places, then click it again and target somewhere farther away.  I managed to get pretty deep into the textureles / featureless areas N/E of EPL while standing in LHC.

I can also tell you that from "outside" Orgrimmar doesent exist.  There is a clever, though trickey way to scale the cliff off to the right of the main gates, that lets you get up on top of them.  And all you see from up there is a featureless open pit, which roughly corresponds to the city layout, with a sunken area farther back in that i believe is the Cleft of Shadows.

[Kail]

I'm suspicious.  Stuff looks ok when we fly over it on the flight routes.

How hard can it be to revamp the existing zones on the parts that don't look ok?

Aside from what Morat and SurfD have said, notice how high you're normally flying with your mounts.  There are a ton of times when you're very, very close to the ground (often within five meters or so) and very few when you're actually high off the ground.  When you're that close to the ground, most of what you see is going to be the same as what you see on the ground, but the higher up you get, the more stuff you'll be looking over that you can't see from anywhere else.

Plus, there are issues with the Lore, if Blizzard is even pretending to care about that anymore.  Gilneas is supposed to be south of Greymane Wall, which is currently imapssable, so there's nothing there (the wall backs onto a flat plain which drops into the ocean), so they'd either have to add in the place, or explain why it's fallen into the ocean, or whatever. The Devs used steep cliffs and walls to limit where players can and can't go; I assume that part of the reason they don't want flying mounts outside of Outworld is because some of those walls are important; players shouldn't be able to pass them for some reason (be they technical reasons or for balance/design reasons).

[Typhon]

I believe that they created many parts of the world that were not intended to be viewed from above.  I never believed it was because, "we never knew how much people would like to fly".  That's pure crap.   I think there were/are two reasons - 1) the engine had issues if they were 3D-faithful in highly trafficked areas 2) they didn't have enough manpower to complete the whole world and wanted to block easy-access to those parts of the world.

Seem like good reasons to me.  I'm just hopeful that at some point they might revamp the old girl and keep flying in mind.  Seems like they could also add some lore to create "no fly" zones... not like the wizards don't have access to magic.

[SurfD]

As i suggested, take a look over mapwow.com.

there are LOADS of places where there simply IS NOTHING THERE other then plain flat geometry.  No trees, rocks objects of any kind. No textures either.  Just flat expanses of blank, monotone polygon.   They are everywhere in areas where zones adjoin / border each other, and are also all over the place in cities.  Zul farrak and Zul'Gurub are, from what i can tell, the ONLY outdoor instances in the game which are fully visible from the sky.

Go have a look at Diremaul, and you will notice that wierd chunks  of the outdoor portion of the instance are non visible.