New Solution to Long Queues in 4.1Follow

Nice O-boards lines.

Oh! Oh! I can answer this one!

Instances are harder and the average WoW player's IQ/skill hasn't increased, ergo there are far more wipes in the dungeon finder groups, ergo tanks and healers are less likely to queue because wiping sucks.

Oh it was too. People griped about DPS queue waits back in Wrath, it's just more of a problem now because Cata heroics are more challenging. Well, some of them. Lost City is a breeze.

Oh I definitely agree; I never once ************** about it when my guild was wiping in T6 content despite the fact that it was pretty easy.

It's when the retards wanted to have a 30 minute conference after each wipe that I got pissed (my brother did as well; he was the #2 officer in the guild and would always start yelling).

LFD also came out with ICC. Tanks where all ready over geared and off spec tanks were more plentiful. Heck when LFD came out everyone was over geared so 5 mans were all ready trivial beyond the ICC ones.

I recall stories of people complaining that tanks would bail as soon as they saw it was an ICC 5 man. As things stand right now all of the 5 mans are a kin to those in difficulty. That also is a large factor.

Fair enough... and like Pigtails said, there's always something to complain about. LFD was always the lesser alternative to grouping with friends or your guild. Relatively speaking though, compared to Cata LFD, Wrath was a constant PARTY! ...and that's maybe kinda sad. lol

It just peeves me that Blizzard is applying such a cheap maybe-probablynot-remedy to a problem they can do something about (if they'd only get off their working-as-intended high horses).

If I did...

It just seems that of the various things many would say need fixing in Cata, giving into some of the user complaints about healing and tanking rotations might be a good start. I'm no developer, but my guess is that even with balance and other contingents they'd have to address this would not be as difficult a task as say, fixing the guild rep snowball. It's a game, and when players say it's not fun to play they should be more concerned about that than any master plan they might have had in mind... however well intended. That is, unless the current state is satisfactory which it clearly is not or else no goodie bag would be necessary.

Ohhhh! ME, ME!

Split PVP and PVE further by acknowledging the differences. Break the talents into two sheets, one for PVP and the other for PVE, and give each toon a separate spec for each. Retain the current "dual spec" option, but it would only apply to the talent sheet you buy it for (PVP or PVE). This would streamline some of the balance issues and open up the classes for a major revamp. On a PVE server, your default talent sheet would be PVE and you would be automatically switched to the PVP sheet when you entered a BG. On a PVP server, your default talent sheet would be PVP and you would automatically be switched to the PVE sheet when you entered an instance or raid.

WTF Rhode, why? I remember it as something of a novelty role, but rogues, hunters and warlocks used to be able to try tanking, either through avoidance (rogue) or by pushing the boundaries of pet mechanics. Today, try to make that kind of novelty role more practical and somebody would spreadsheet and min/max the talents until they devised an build that broke something. Drawing a line between PVP and PVE would allow the devs to tweak the talent sheet and not just talent trees. There could be completely different talents that are sheet dependent, or talents might have slightly different mechanics depending if your PVP or PVE spec were active. This would also allow further splits, such as glyphs that only go on the PVP or PVE sheet.

How does this address the problem at hand? Rogues (and maybe even kittydroods) could be revised to make avoidance tanking viable. Right there you would have one extra class able to tank, and if kitty could tank that might bring in a few extras from another class. Personally, I rather like the idea of a pissed off kitty dancing around in front of a boss, or a rogue that would go splut pretty quick ... if he'd just stand still and take a beating like those guys in plate do. Let BM hunters and Demonology spec'd warlocks have tools to let their pets tank more; some of that could be handled directly on the talent sheet and some might be handled by mechanisms such as glyphs. Heck, remember when you could put a collar on your pet? What if craftsmen could create gear for them? As for healers, what if mages had more tools for things like damage mitigation? I'm not sure I'd even object to making mages able to do a bit of tanking through judicious use of spells to avoid or soak off damage.

Traditional tanks and healers would retain an edge in most situations; people are going to take damage and need real healing to stay up, pets are going to be more cumbersome than tanking something directly, avoidance tanking is going to be more at the mercy of the RNG. On the other hand, with enough mitigation a player who isn't able to main heal could still contribute, an off tank might be more useful too.

Talent trees are not the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!



Roles that were defined in Vanilla have become restrictive and one reason may be the need to keep balancing PVE and PVP concerns -- which is somewhat like trying to plan a meal with dishes that would work equally well with seafood or beef. With some of that problem taken out of the way (by using different PVP and PVE sheets) it might be possible to mix things up further by adding a fourth tree that a player could choose at the cost of giving up one of the other trees. By cutting the size of each tree back, Blizz may have reduced some of the confusion brought by each new expansion adding a new end talent; however, that doesn't leave much room for things that don't fit tidily into the revised trees. The fourth tree choice could be used to make that less of a problem and perhaps to encourage spec's that fall outside of the traditional role for a class. The latter point is particularly important because the revised talent trees now have basic elements that apply to the tree; a fourth tree option would let DPS classes further spec for the new roles without requiring major changes to the existing choices.

Let's look at mages and give the fourth tree the uninspired name "Wards". A player who wants to do damage mitigation with Wards might get talents that let them place shields, slow opponents, or make their target harder to detect (and hit). They might choose to give up Fire, while keeping Frost and Arcane. They would keep people in the group up through the fight and use conjured food to heal everyone up after the boss is down. All these things are in the game now to some degree, but not strongly enough for a mage to step out of the DPS role.

Where's the bait? One word: achievements! Achievements for filling one of the new roles, achievements for things like downing a boss with a pissed off kitty as a tank instead of a plate wearer, achievements for completing the instance without a traditional tank or healer. As a bonus, things like new glyphs might be good for craftsmen and bring a bit of fun back to the AH.

Rhode, you did Wallotext again. I've tried to suggest a way to shake things up without doing too much damage to the existing order of things. I see two parts to the problem -- the need to make trade-offs to balance somewhat incompatible elements of the game (PVP and PVE) and a certain amount of tunnel vision that restricts class roles.

Call to Arms is a PVE feature; I've mentioned PVP but haven't made an effort to flesh out that part of my suggestion. Mea culpa, but it was already making your eyes bleed.

Two comments I would like to make.

1)Frost and Arcane already have the groundwork laid to be altered into tanking trees, if giving mages tanking is something that you feel should be done. Giving mages a healing type tree would be weird.

2)You can take away my fire tree when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Edited, Apr 8th 2011 2:58am by Poldaran

Not sure what you mean by avoidance tank. If you mean a tank with a huge, like 75%, you get back into the encounter design of all bosses need to be able to 2 shot the tank or they cease to be a challenge. You also put other tanks out of a job.

I didn't play FFIX but isn't that what happened with NIN tanks?

why would i give a **** over what other people get for free if its in a situation which benefits me due to it? Specially if its asethetic flavor and not badges/thundering helm of raid soloing?

Yeah, NIN/WAR made Paladins mostly obsolete. There were only really three reasons to take a Paladin tank. One, he was your friend. Two, you couldn't find a (good) Ninja. Any Ninja could tank, but there was some difficulty (and a lot of gil) involved in keeping threat. Three, AoE abilities would strip a NIN of all their shadows and hit the NIN, so occasionally you needed the extra HP and survivability of a PLD.

There's really no reason to make kitty druids able to evasion-tank, Cat DPS is already in the same tree as Bear tanking. Turning a rogue's combat tree into a hybrid Tank/DPS tree could certainly work, but it wouldn't be through high evasion tanking. If anything, I think it would work like in Rift, where different (Riftstalker soul)rogue finishers increase parry/dodge, armor, or provide a partial damage shield for up to 60 sec.

Blizzard can't give anything not already in game as a reward, or DPS-only classes will legitimately have no way to get that title/vanity pet/mount. By picking stuff specifically from 5-man instances (and rep), it's something that anyone could get, given enough time. Among other things, what this does is give tanks a reason to grind out instances past getting gear/points. Good thing, more tanks in queue.

I swear, sometimes I'm reminded of an old argument back in FFXI when Squeenix reduced the exp needed for 71-75. A lot of people already 75 were wailing on the forums about how they had wasted time leveling, and all this stuff was just being given away to new people. One idea going around was that you get a little star after your name once you earned all the exp needed to get to 75 under the old reqs, so everyone could see if you really EARNED it or not.

Question: If you've got your shiny pet/mount/title/vanity doo-dad, does it become any less valuable to you if someone else has it? It's bound to you, so there's no scarcity/market-value correlation.