So what's going on with WoWFollow

the talents you get to pick from now are all the bolded stuff digg.

those talents you bemoan the loss of have been baked into the classes or if not the whole class then a spec. that your blah lasts 5 seconds longer crap was rolled into baseline abilities.

No. It's an entirely different setup.

WoW typically gives you three talents with similar end results and tells you to choose between them.

Vanilla WoW offered you Ice Block, Combustion, and Presence of Mind, and made you choose. They were all fundamentally different talents with different uses and their own sets of pros/cons.

Now?

Mage Tier 1 - 3 movement-related talents, two of which are noteworthy in PVE. All PVE Mages are taking PoM or Ice Floes. And it's 100% encounter specific which would be better. Most dungeon Mages will likely default to Ice Floes, as (assuming movement is still a thing), it would probably be far superior in PUGs.

Tier 2 - Pick your shield talent. PVP selection - just having one is sufficient for PVE. I imagine most Mages would take Flameglow, just because it's passive.

Tier 3 - You're taking Frostjaw. Either way, this is clearly a PVP tier - two AoE roots and a silence/root.

Tier 4 - Oh look, another suvivability tier. How interesting. Do I want a threat drop, which I should never need with the changes to tanking, Cauterize, or Cold Snap. Every PVE mage, unless facing specific encounters they'd need Ice Block or a DoT-dropper for, is going to take Cauterize. Which is passive.

Tier 5 - Oh look! Actual PVE talents! Sort of. These are actually three talents that do the same thing, slightly differently. And each has a clear hierarchy based on number of opponents, so it's encounter specific. And because AoE with groups over 6 mobs is less common now, the third one is almost never taken. So you actually decide between Living Bomb or Nether Tempest... and both of them have specific coding quirks that means your secondary stats ultimately decides which you'd take, regardless of number of mobs.

And your stats, of course, are linked to your spec. So it's almost like... you don't have a choice at all.

Tier 6 - You're taking Evocation. Very, VERY specific encounters can allow for the others to perform better than Evocation can, but in the vast majority of situations, no.




I'm sorry, I don't see choice here. I can't decide to build myself more towards the glass cannon end, and go full damage with low survivability. I can't decide that that's a bad idea, with dungeon-running being my main content, and sacrifice some of my AoE and ST damage for a higher chance to survive. Or maybe I like being more strategic with my play and I maximize my CC, instead of my AoE, and keep the ST damage. Or maybe I understand that our highest chance for death in dungeons actually comes from trash, since there's a heavy skew towards glass cannons with DPS, and I counter that by building for trash.


ALL of these were decisions you actually made, on most classes at least. These are no longer decisions you make. Blizzard gives you a set of talents that are largely similar, or contain no real PVE benefit, and then you "choose" one. Even the talent trees where there are legitimate options, they're all options that do the same thing.

On Mage Tier 6, you're not choosing whether or not you'd like to buff your mana regeneration, your AoE damage, or choose the ability to cast while moving. You're choosing three different forms of mana regeneration, two of which are highly situational, and one of which isn't.

That's not a choice.

To be entirely fair to the new system, I'm not opposed to it in principle (beyond the leveling issue, which would be nonexistant if they had replaced it with something else).

I'm opposed to it in its implementation.

I think it's problematic that so many of the talent tiers are essentially serving a single purpose, with a pick your poison kind of choice.

It's like Tier 3 is going to be a damage shield. So you can choose true shield, passive shield, or healing-based shield.

That is a legitimately interesting choice in PVP. And it's not an awful choice for tanks (granted, the tank is probably going to choose any talent that has a "saves from death" effect). But for most players, that's just not interesting.

But if they had given me truly different options there, it could have been.

That said, the other thing it is seriously lacking is progression. Having requirements for talents beyond the base points was interesting. I wish they had structured the talent trees more like tournament maps or whatever that shape system would be called.

That would have created a system where you actually needed to make decisions.

Of course, the other side of that equation is that content design and player philosophy has changed to the point where mostly people just care about damaging talents, outside of PVP. Back in Vanilla, people LOVED bringing Mages to dungeons, because Mages brought Polymorph. A strong CC was something worth sacrificing damage over.

Nowadays? People would probably dump half their Stamina if it meant 100 more in their core stat...

You really can't fault Blizzard for that. They tried to bring back CC in dungeons in Cata and look what that did to them. I wish they just would have said "***** you! Adapt or leave." to all the whiners but since they are a company that wants to make a profit I can totally understand why they caved in.
I blame the playerbase and their desire for easy AND instant gratification. Yes, there are still people that like to grind sh*t out or do harder things. And Blizzard even gives those people content too. In form of the White Raptor for 9999 dino bones or the Challenge Modes. But I don't think they will ever put emphasize again on one of those two things in the main PvE endgame, i. e. maxlevel dungeons, LFR, normal mode raiding. Because too many players would cry and leave.

I think many of the things criticized in this thread (or other WoW threads) can be traced back to the enormous amount of tears players shed when the game gets harder.

I don't agree with your logic there. At all.

"Blame the players" is a terrible position. Its the job of the company to provide a quality experience for the players. The players are paying for that service.

The players want to have fun. It's Blizzard's job to make things fun.

Back in Vanilla/BC, killing the trash mobs was still fun. Because they could actually kill you and you had to pay attention. Plus, they actually had drops you cared about. Items to turn in for rep (which was the main way to actually gain rep), random drops that were a really nice addition to your gearset, item scaling that meant the green or GASP blue or GASP purple drops you could get from them would all be great. Plus, you didn't get 3 upgrades for every slot every week, so getting gear was actually exciting.

Blizzard is the ones that changed those things. They not only got rid of the need to CC mobs, they got rid of any realistic value to killing those mobs. What a SHOCK that a half-assed reintroduction of CC without making those fights fun or challenging, or bringing back value to killing trash mobs, was unpopular.

In Cata, the ability to AOE down a pack was pretty much JUST out of reach for players at the start. And gear progression to the point you could do it anyway happened pretty quickly.

Essentially, they arbitrarily introduced a mechanic without reintroducing anything that once gave that mechanic actual value. Players are willing to work for something when the reward is worth working for. They aren't happy about doing pointless crap just because the developer tells them to.

It's Blizzard's job to give the players those experiences, not the players' job to be happy with whatever Blizzard lands at.

[EDIT]

The three identical talents thing is what really kills me.

You know, even if it was rare to have damage talents, if each of them were actually different, it would be so much better. But they're not going to do that, because it's too much for them to balance the player who took all movement and CC break talents against a player who took all damage reduction/shield talents and an emergency heal.

If they can reduce everyone down to controlled numbers of each ability type, it's easier for them to balance.

But it's not going to please the part of me that remembers having to seriously decide between very, very different talents. The number of discussions we've had on these boards weighing utility against utility for 31/21 point talents (and those leading up to them) is pretty immense.

Edited, Sep 5th 2013 12:05pm by idiggory

it is the players. once blizz showed them that they would design content that could be AoE'd down most of the player base decided they loved that play style.

when blizz tried to revert, early cata heroics, there was huge push back. a combination of nerfs and gear inflation made them easy again. which then caused other players, probably some of the same ones honestly, to complain the game was too easy.

blizz is also at fault as they keep waffling on the difficulty level of content, especially heroic 5 mans and normal raiding.

ideally i'd like them to have level 90 regular and heroic 5 mans. with the heroics closer to BC or early cata difficulty and acting as the stepping stone to normal raiding and beyond. let the regular version be for people who will mainly do LFR.

or anything just something defined. of course that wont work as it is too close to telling some people they suck and cant hack it in heroic 5 man content.

That argument is way too simplistic. It would be like me saying that WoW grew the most during Vanilla and BC, when CC was necessary, so therefore people really liked CC and that's why the game expanded.

You're attributing causation to something which could be simple correlation. Even worse, I might be no more than coincidence, considering the AoE-style dungeon combat is still in the game and subs are still falling.


The reality is that this has everything to do with the evolution of the desires of players, the design philosophies, and the implementation over time.

Warning: Really, REALLY long post ahead. And that's coming from me. The TL;DR is that it was the effect of unbalanced implementation of design features combined with a consistent failure, until recently, to establish the necessary infrastructure to make Blizzard's design philosophies work together. The nature of CC's demise, and failure of its revival, are directly linked to the incompatible design directions being followed at the time.

SpoilerYou make absolutely no attempt to look at the actual picture, how things changed, why they changed, and why players would care about those changes. You don't bother to trace the gear levels of players relative the kind of content they could do or were doing. You don't bother to look at how gear levels and stat inflation impacted the game at large.

The reality is that the current state of dungeons was never intended by Blizzard. They screwed up, and stacked stats so high that dungeon running didn't require thought (particularly with the elimination of triage healing).

Then they forced raid-geared players to go back into dungeons, to keep that content utilized, even though those players so laughably outgeared it that it was like a level 80 character running a level 70 dungeon. But they did nothing to scale anything but the rewards.

Add to that the fact that they implemented a gear scaling system that meant approximately the same amount of gear gathering was necessary to get into the current raid content at any time, so you never needed to revisit the old raids (except for your weekly bonus).

Is it any surprise that players who were always going to become rapidly geared for raid content multiple patches passed the implementation of those dungeons weren't going to take them seriously? Any at all?

That's not a situation you blame the players for. Blizzard vastly over-geared them and then forced them to run content not suited for their gear level just because they didn't like that content going to waste.

Now, it IS worth pointing out that I don't think this is the design philosophy Blizzard went into the expansion with. Stat levels skyrocket far beyond what they initially intended due to the implementation of half tiers. And I think they underestimated the effect that making raids more accessible would have on dungeon running (the irony, of course, being that the implementation of the group finder rendered the need for a huge population to run those dungeons relatively irrelevant). But, again, that's something they implemented without having properly planned for it.

Then comes Cata, and Blizzard again didn't do their due diligence with the system. And this time, I'm willing to really blame them for it. First, Cata shipped at least 6 months too early. I remember how shocked I was as a beta tester that Blizzard, of all companies, was going to launch the game at the state it was (having always been known for keeping content until it was ready for launch). There was nothing even resembling balance for MONTHS after that launch.

That soured their new system from the start. When you had such a gross distinction between class capability for so long into the expansion, of course it wasn't working. You had dps classes with disparities as high as 33% dps (comparing the top spec of one class to the worst spec of another). And CC had changed a lot in Wrath, to balance PVP around the new, ridiculous stat numbers. But those changes weren't necessarily well-balanced for PVE... And of course not. With no semblence of balance in PVE, how could you possibly balance CC?

So, yeah, players complained. Some of them were complaining that content was stupidly hard even with CC, because they were playing horribly underpowered classes. Some of them were complaining that the gimmicks used to force CC were annoying, because they were still powerful enough to plow through it (and no one likes being FORCED to do something, just because). Healers were annoyed, because healing was in such a bad place to begin with that why wouldn't they? Tanks were annoyed because they kept dying due to content that wasn't balanced at all. They had to contend with unhealable damage spikes at some points, with pitifully easy-to-handle damage numbers at others.

In short, you can't blame the return of CC on the mess that was early Cata, because without anything remotely balanced between the classes, it just isn't remotely possible to implement a balanced, acceptable approach to CC. And by the time they balanced the classes, the damage was already LONG since done.

Why?

Because they were still using dungeons as odd stepping stones to raid content. Once you started getting raid geared, you still needed to run dungeons. And running dungeons in raid-level gear was faceroll easy. So requiring CC, which is directly linked to a healer's ability to keep the group alive, very quickly stopped mattering by the time Blizz was in a position to actually implement it in a balanced way.

And by then, they had completely pissed off such a large portion of the player base, who had been having such bad experiences with the CC in dungeons, that it made no sense to continue with it. If they were going to allow for gear progression to negate the mechanic, there was no reason to implement it in the first place.

Which is really what this comes down to. It's one thing to make content loleasy for the raiders, it's another to make it loleasy for raiders and then PUT THE RAIDERS IN WITH EVERYONE ELSE.

That kind of disparity was never going to work.

It's really simple. This isn't about player mindsets becoming inconsolable in the wake of evil CC. It's about them having to deal with really, really poor implementations of the system, getting fed up, and Blizzard abandoning their half-assed attempt at it because it was easier than actually bothering to fix things, because they hadn't done any of the necessary infrastructure work at the start of development to actually support that sort of system.

I had a discussion with Fishy in the BDT recently about the difficulty scaling system they're implementing. I said they should have implemented it long ago, and he countered that it was the infrastructure they laid in MoP that made it possible.

I'm going to hold that both of those are correct.

Blizzard is, in a way, finally getting their act together and taking a look at their content as part of a cohesive picture. They're finally addressing the reality that, if you're going to try and put all players of a huge ranges of skill and gear types into the same content, that content needs to scale.

I'm holding to the opinion that they should have implemented that scaling system long ago. It should have happened in Cataclysm; the lessons learned from Wrath should have been more than enough to make it clear it was necessary.

Because Cata's design was never going to work. But, frankly, just about everything in Cata's design was so disjointed it's not actually surprising.

But it's also not my job, as the consumer, to be blamed for their decisions, or to just be happy with what they give me, etc. Blizzard's job is to make me happy enough with the product that I'll give them $15 a month. They lost massive numbers of subscriptions because their game was messy. That's the sad, sad truth.

It's not so simple to boil this down to one mechanic and say "SEE! This is proof the players are the problem!"

Sure, players are generally immovable on things they don't want. But it's the game company's job to make them want it, if they think it will be good for the game, not the job of the gamer to be happy with whatever Blizzard deigns to give them. Blizzard had good intentions, but really poor implementation.

Edited, Sep 6th 2013 10:04am by idiggory

After I expanded your spoilertag I almost collapsed.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. Maybe I'm jaded, maybe my opinion of the WoW playerbase is too negative or the impact the vocal a$$hats have on Blizzards design decisions is not as big as I think (no, exceptions like CRZ have not eluded me). But I seriously doubt that.

Edit:



Be thankful. I usually stay in /1 and /2 because there's always this one group forming for FL/Ulduar/whatever that I don't wanna miss. But reading those channels can also kill much enjoyment. Maybe that's the reason I think the overwhelming majority that plays this game consists of the scum of the earth. Or rather the scum of the internet population.

Edited, Sep 6th 2013 11:12am by TherealLogros

Blizzard, like literally ever other company in the world, is going to make the decisions that they think will bring them the most cash. Sometimes those will line up with the very vocal demands of the people screaming on their forums, sometimes they will not. They will always be bound by what they can get approval for from their funding sources.

That's the absolute truth of the matter.

Now, the other side of that is that market research is a part of this process. A part of that is conducted on their forums.

But it's not like they just take whatever is being posted about the most and make that change. They'll use metrics. One person posting about the same thing 600x isn't going to have their opinion valued at 600x the value of someone who posted once. And Blizzard's market research team is going to be very active in trying to find exactly how the public sentiment of their X million users is mirrored in the sentiment on the forums.

Is the value of opinion of someone on the forum probably valued higher than the opinion of someone not on the forum? Could be, if they think those users are flight risks. Or they could be undervalued, if Blizzard finds that people who care enough to post on the forums are less likely to unsub.

If you actually think Blizzard just blindly follows what the masses demand, then I can't take you seriously.

And... you'd have them do something else?

As I pointed out, that's absurdly reductive of the situation here.

The content wasn't reduced to the current state because that's what players wanted, it was reduced to the current state because Blizz messed up with the implementation of the content.

They created a situation in which CC was useless, then created a situation in which CC was fairly worthless and everything was painful. And instead of attempting to fix that, with all the additional infrastructure work it required, they decided not to bother.

This wasn't about them succumbing to player demand. The implementation of their early Cata dungeons was terrible. It didn't matter if you liked CC or not - it was just awful. But properly implementing CC required a level of infrastructure work they hadn't done, and were not willing to do (having just spent 6 months playing catch-up with their launch). They needed a quick fix to keep the game going, and the only quick fix available was to return to the simpler AOE model.

It was never about player demand. Player demand is what made Blizzard think that they should be reimplementing CC in the first place, in Cata. But the same BS that led to a good half the features of that expansion being slashed from the cutting board and the remainder being released 6 months early rendered that impossible.

The ROI of implementing CC, once they hit that point, was lower than the ROI of not doing so. Far, far more.

They predicted that their maximum profits would come from re-implementing CC in dungeons. But they failed to actually do so properly, in essence skyrocketing their investment costs relative to the predicted earnings. That's what destroyed the plan.

I'd be thrilled if certain systems in WoW were far more consistent between expansions (gear/loot system, talents to name a couple) but i hate that's too much to hope for.

I know many folks are hoping for next WoW exp details from Blizzcon, but I'm dreading it. Cata spoiled me with so many LFR raiding alts that I dont even have to 90 yet, and hearing the endless debates of whats coming next I'd rather push back for awhile.

I agree with azwing.

And I ran some more Panda dungeons. Still not a fan. I don't think I've met a single boss that didn't have some gimmicky mechanic that would wipe you if you didn't do something when lights start to flash. It's like they're trying to turn 5-mans into mini-raids. I can appreciate them wanting to make 5-mans more exciting, but it's not working. It's just so confusing, the effect is the opposite.

Less is more, Blizzard.