Mists of Pandaria

[Setanta]

Ret sucks. I liked it in WotLK but now my pally is back to prot/prot specs.

Hunters are fun again - if Cataclysm did one thing right, it was the hunter class.

[luckton]

Blizzard: "Oh, the Dungeon Journal wasn't enough?  You want us to tell you how to play your class as well as telling you the abilities and phases of the fights?  Ugh, fine..."

It's actually a nice thing, I guess.  Both for the newbs so maybe they'll start pushing the right buttons in the right order instead of /facerolling (since they're effectively killed that method of playing), and also the vets so we have some kind of idea of how GC thinks we 'should' be playing instead of how we want, so when our DPS numbers don't match his, he can chortle and say we're not doing it right 

[Ingmar]

Are you seriously complaining about this? This is a great thing for new players.

[luckton]

Are you seriously complaining about this? This is a great thing for new players.

It's actually a nice thing, I guess.  Both for the newbs so maybe they'll start pushing the right buttons in the right order instead of /facerolling....

 

[Merusk]

Sure as fuck sorted me out on all the hunter changes.  I had no idea how to play BM with things moving and going g'bye and new introductions and now I do.

It's not high-level stuff but it does fix the whole "LEARN YOUR CLASS, FUCKER" problem that people always bitch about.  Expecting people to go to 3rd party sites to learn to play your game is rather fuckstupid.  Particularlty when there are SO MANY abilities to be used. 

It's one thing to throw 35 abilities at people and say "pick 8" and let them fail on their own inability to create a synergy.  Quite another to pull your typical MMO of "here's 35 abilities, figure out which 7 actually are what we design and balance your class around!"

[Paelos]

Hand-holding in this game is a great idea. In fact, it's a necessary idea if they want to remain relevant after changes.

[Rokal]

It feels a bit too paint-by-numbers at the moment. They're telling players what rotation to follow by not why that is a good rotation.

I would like to see a little more information given on why those abilities are recommended. It's good that it tells players who might not be familiar with Assassination to keep Rupture on the target, but why? A player isn't going to know that they're doing it for energy regen. They're not going to have consciously picked the talent that makes Rupture/Gouge return energy given the new talent system: they'll just have it.

It's the difference between the boss journal telling you a specific strategy for a boss or telling you what the boss does. Educating players is an admirable goal but just telling players a rotation isn't enough. Frankly, it's not much fun either. Knowing what my abilities do or what boss abilities do is more interesting than blindly following directions.

Given the screenshot above (that hopefully does not break) here's what I'd rather see:

Mutilate: A high-damage move that is great at generating combo points. Use this as your primary combo-point generator to feed finisher moves.

Rupture: A low-damage finisher that does damage over time, but regenerates energy. Use this on your target to regenerate energy faster and allow you to use more abilities.

Slice and dice: A buff that increases your attack speed. Try to keep this buff active on yourself as much as possible to attack faster.

Envenom: A high-damage finisher move. Use this for damage when you do not need to refresh slice and dice or rupture.

Dispatch: A high-damage move that is great at generating combo points, but can only be used when your target is at low health (35% or less). Use this ability to generate combo points when your enemy is low on health.

[Ingmar]

Eh, it is beta. They are all probably in a state of placeholder text for the most part.

[Merusk]

You're talking different levels of play.  Those who care to know will go look and educate themselves, that's not who they're trying to reach.  It's more than enough to know the what but not the why for the players it's targeted at.

It's like complaining that LFR isn't challenging enough for you.  I've been on enough failed LFRs (because fuck staying up past midnight for raiding anymore) - even now when a lot of folks outgear it - to confirm it's plenty challenging for the general gaming public.

They lost a shitload of players by saying "suck it up, learn to play" they're not going to make that error again and will be reaching-down to hand hold a lot more.  

[Rokal]

You're talking different levels of play.  Those who care to know will go look and educate themselves, that's not who they're trying to reach.  It's more than enough to know the what but not the why for the players it's targeted at.

It's like complaining that LFR isn't challenging enough for you.  I've been on enough failed LFRs (because fuck staying up past midnight for raiding anymore) - even now when a lot of folks outgear it - to confirm it's plenty challenging for the general gaming public.

They lost a shitload of players by saying "suck it up, learn to play" they're not going to make that error again and will be reaching-down to hand hold a lot more. 

I'm assuming you're responding to my post, but my complaint isn't that they are hand-holding players too much with this new system. It's that they aren't doing it enough. Knowing that you're supposed to use rupture and slice in dice instead of just spamming envenom isn't going to make you a much better player if you have no idea why you are using those abilities.

Eh, it is beta. They are all probably in a state of placeholder text for the most part.

It's possible. There is also a "what has changed" tab that was implemented earlier and was written a bit better though.

[Sjofn]

"What has changed" is laughably shitty, at least for the paladins.

"There are no more auras, and a lot of passive talents you just get now. THE END."

[Soulflame]

No more auras?  WTF

[Lantyssa]

I'm assuming you're responding to my post, but my complaint isn't that they are hand-holding players too much with this new system. It's that they aren't doing it enough. Knowing that you're supposed to use rupture and slice in dice instead of just spamming envenom isn't going to make you a much better player if you have no idea why you are using those abilities.

Those players don't want to know why.  Too much information turns them off.

[Sjofn]

No more auras?  WTF

Yeah I was kinda wtf about that too. Now they're passives? Or something? Depending on your spec? I know I noticed crusader aura being a passive (but it didn't seem to indicate it would go on my entire group but ... that might just be a shitty tool tip, WHO KNOWS). The "what's changed" didn't really feel the need to explain and I was busy rooting around trying to find all my goddamn spells to put on my bars again and didn't investigate much further.

Seals are now on the aura bar and are just on instead of casted or whatever.

[Fordel]

Some Aura's are just passive, others are little group cooldowns or something.

[Rokal]

Those players don't want to know why.  Too much information turns them off.

Yes, knowing what your 5 most important abilities do is too much. Offering 1% of the information that the successful game previously required players to read over the past 7 years, boiled down to the bare minimum, is still too much.  

Default UI should probably not include abilities names or icons. Instead, you can have your red ability, your blue ability, and your yellow ability. Just press red>blue>yellow, I'm sure most people don't want to know anything more than that! You wouldn't want to give them too much information on an optional screen that takes less than a minute to read.

[Nevermore]

They could tap the previously untapped Guitar Hero demographic! 

[Ingmar]

Those players don't want to know why.  Too much information turns them off.

Yes, knowing what your 5 most important abilities do is too much. Offering 1% of the information that the successful game previously required players to read over the past 7 years, boiled down to the bare minimum, is still too much.  

Default UI should probably not include abilities names or icons. Instead, you can have your red ability, your blue ability, and your yellow ability. Just press red>blue>yellow, I'm sure most people don't want to know anything more than that! You wouldn't want to give them too much information on an optional screen that takes less than a minute to read.

You can go all sarcasto-snob about the 'dumb' people all you want, but she's right. Part of my job involves occasionally writing instructions for people on how to use new IT systems at our company and I have seen this in action. If you give the general user base anything more than "do this, then this, then this" they will get it wrong, break something, or just give up on it before getting to the end - and these are not dumb users, these are engineers, people with advanced college degrees, etc. I don't see any reason at all this doesn't apply to new gamers. Once they can push the buttons in the right order and get monsters to die, they can build on that later. There's basically zero reason to go in depth, really there are a lot of reasons to NOT go in depth.

[SurfD]

They could tap the previously untapped Guitar Hero demographic! 

[Rokal]

Once they can push the buttons in the right order and get monsters to die, they can build on that later.

They already do this. Again, this screen isn't going to be the first thing that pops up when a new player logs in. You'll slowly get new abilities and learn how to use them. At least for the rogue one, it's not even a rotation you'd want to follow until you were at end-game. Things die too quickly to use anything besides envenom and mutilate. Why would you want to use Dispatch, a move that requires you be behind your target, does less damage than mutilate, and can only be used at 35% or less while leveling? If blizzard is smart this tab won't even appear until you're level 80/85 and your rotation actually starts to matter in group play.

By end-game people probably have a pretty good idea what buttons to press to make things die, but they might not understand why they should start using abilities like Rupture. Telling them to use it without the most basic information about why they should use it isn't helping them.

I can see the situation now where someone uses Rupture per the instructions on the 'core abilities' page, thinks to themselves "but this does less damage than envenom, and doesn't do it instantly..." and never uses it again until another player or outside resource explains the reason why they should use rupture.

[Nevermore]

They could tap the previously untapped Guitar Hero demographic! 

Finally, that twitch combat we've all been waiting for!

[Zetor]

Clearly WOW needs to implement QTE-based combat. 

[Sheepherder]

It feels a bit too paint-by-numbers at the moment. They're telling players what rotation to follow by not why that is a good rotation.

I would like to see a little more information given on why those abilities are recommended. It's good that it tells players who might not be familiar with Assassination to keep Rupture on the target, but why? A player isn't going to know that they're doing it for energy regen. They're not going to have consciously picked the talent that makes Rupture/Gouge return energy given the new talent system: they'll just have it.

It's the difference between the boss journal telling you a specific strategy for a boss or telling you what the boss does. Educating players is an admirable goal but just telling players a rotation isn't enough. Frankly, it's not much fun either. Knowing what my abilities do or what boss abilities do is more interesting than blindly following directions.

Given the screenshot above (that hopefully does not break) here's what I'd rather see:

All that information is in the tooltips, right now.  Surprise!  You're wrong!

[Sjofn]

If someone cares why the game is telling them to use rupture, they can look at their shit to figure out why, ask a guildie, whatever. If someone does not care why, only that it "works," putting too much crap in the "how u play" tab will just make them go "ugh, too much wank" and ignore it.

I sort of ran into this when I was (begrudgingly) leading raids. I knew which people wanted/needed to know why and which didn't, and how to explain the fights to both kinds of people (because we had a long, long streak of having One New Person every week  ). It is generally safer to err on the side of derp, because too much at once just starts to sound like "blah blah blah" and the person tunes out. Same can be said for "you use this because blah blah blah."

[Merusk]

This strikes me as shades of the same argument hardcore inux users have with, oh, everyone else on the planet.

Peoples lives are complicated enough they don't really give two rat fucks about the WHY of a computer game.  There's more important shit to deal with.  Particularly for the significant portion of their user base that's moved beyond high school AND college now and are discovering, "Oh shit, I can't spend 4 hours a day researching all this crap.  And even if I could.. why does it matter? Will it  help me professionally? Socially? Is it really just a waste of time that I now don't really have.. oh, it is."

[Paelos]

The "give a shit" factor in learning the ins and outs of games also decreases exponentially with age for most people.

It's probably because you gain this magical thing called "perspective" as you get older.

[Sjofn]

Impossible, I thought it was Kids Today who couldn't be bothered to learn anything and wanted everything dumbed down and shit. 

[Paelos]

Nope kids today just assume they know it all and are the best players ever without reading the manual. 

[Rokal]

All that information is in the tooltips, right now.  Surprise!  You're wrong!

Current tooltips tell you what an ability does, but not why to use it. Here's the rupture tooltip in MoP:

Finishing move that causes damage over time, increased by your attack power.  Lasts longer per combo point:
  1 point  : X over 8 sec
  2 points: X1 over 12 sec
  3 points: X2 over 16 sec
  4 points: X3 over 20 sec
  5 points: X4 over 24 sec

Why would you use this again, as a fresh level 90 playing their first rogue? It still does less damage than envenom and isn't instant. You'd have to check your passives sheet (which was a confusing mess the last time I checked the beta server), or an outside source to learn why.

Same deal with Dispatch unless it's recently changed to be different from backstab. You wouldn't know that it refunded energy, you'd just know that it did less damage than mutilate and built fewer combo points.

Providing an extra line of text that gives context to why to use these abilities is not "too much", especially when you consider that these rotations are targeted at end game.

[Ingmar]

Providing an extra line of text that gives context to why to use these abilities is not "too much", especially when you consider that these rotations are targeted at end game.

All I can say is you've apparently never written user documentation and seen what people do with it. I learned the hard way that it is really, really easy to hit 'too much'.

I mean in some cases complete sentences will cause people to give up and stop reading.

[luckton]

Head enchants are gone, Inscripters can now get rich off shoulder enchants.

I hear where he's coming from.  To me, I didn't really care; I've grinded out those factions anyways for the once-relevant gear/swag that they offered.  I don't expect them to go back and put new stuff in the place of the Wrath/Cata vendors, but here's hoping the MoP factions will have some decent offerings in the enchants' place.

[Lantyssa]

I mean in some cases complete sentences will cause people to give up and stop reading.

We're lucky if they read past the first sentence.  I've taken to making numbered lists with short phrases.

[Merusk]

I recall hearing, years ago, that seven to eight words a line was the maximum for an average reader of lists/ instructions. 

[Lantyssa]

It's hellish trying to diagnose problems when the reply to detailed questions is "IT NOT WORKY".  Too much effort to read.  That I need that info to get things working for them again is irrelevant.

[Simond]

I recall hearing, years ago, that seven to

Sorry, I got bored about here.