GC on Role of RolesFollow

Thread title is a bit misleading.

Roll != Role

If we don't get no tolls, then we don't eat no rolls.

I spent some time reading it the other day too. I wasn't sure what to really take away from it, other than they're trying to decide how to best balance all the different specs.

An IMO...

It's great they've made just about every spec balanced in your typical PvE encounter, but it feels they've lost something in doing so. It seems to be difficult for them to keep different specs doing equal damage/healing/whatever and still retain some of the flavor that makes them unique. Certainly it's nice to have your only DPS spec be viable if you're something like a priest or paladin. In something like a hunter or a mage though, you'd think they could have more room for creativity if they just accepted that one spec would do the highest DPS, and the others would provide something else useful; better PvP or soloing utility, good CC, buffs, or whatever. But that's just me, I'm not really a fan of the 'glass cannon is always the best spec' approach.

Anyhoo, will be interesting to see where they go with stuff.

The problem with that is twofold.

1 - While people like to talk about utility and being useful, people also like doing lots of DPS and topping meters. Is it really fair to take high DPS away from people in favor of utility that they might not really want? Especially for classes with limited DPS options in the first place (priest, paladin, shaman...) There's a reason why Blizz moved away from that philosophy in the first place.

2 - There's really no place for a hybrid like that in the game any more. Back in BC and such it was sometimes helpful to have a backup healer or primary buffer (shaman, paladin, especially when blessings were much shorter duration) but today there's no need for it. There's been enough homogenization that hybrids just don't have a place any more, and Blizz can't really go back to the old model at this point without pissing off way too many people.

They killed hybrids because of raids. People were whining non-stop that their Druid/Shaman/Paladin was getting benched on raid night due to sub-par damage/healing/tanking. In raids, only three things matter: healing, tanking and damage dealt.

With bosses hitting harder and harder, getting two dedicated tanks instead of one tank and one hybrid became preferable. As more raid-wide damage started showing up, more dedicated healers were needed, removing the hybrid healer. And with two hybrids turned into dedicated healers and tanks, the raid needed a dedicated damage dealer to make up for the lost DPS.

The end.

They could easily make the game viable for hybrids again. They sort of did it with the early Cataclysm heroics where you could end up wiping because of a pull gone wrong. Unfortunately, after two expansions of people getting used to the tank, healer, damage dealer setup, the Cataclysm heroics failed miserably. People were going AOE apesh*t and blaming healers and tanks left and right for wipes, which caused healers and tanks to whine about survivability and throughput, etc.

I went hybrid a couple of times in there (I believe I mentioned this in a thread last year) and we steamrolled the heroics with next to no problems. Then someone looked at Recount and started ranting at me because I wasn't "pulling my weight" in there as a damage dealer. I tried to explain that my damage dealt was low due to my support role (off-tanking adds, backup healing when the healer went OOM), but they brushed it off and told me to deal more damage or get out. I gave up arguing, switched to pure Cat and we wiped on the first trash pull because the tank got one-shot by the mobs.

The game was fine, people just needed to accept that heroic runs required a support class. And Blizzard needed to realize that they'd absolutely demolished the support classes in the previous two expansions. Instead, Blizzard caved, reverted to Wrath of the Lich King standards and proceeded to rip the hybrids a new one.

Point is, people are sheep and would rather bang their heads against a wall for years, while screaming bloody murder at the developers for putting it there, rather than think of a way to bypass it. Until that mentality goes away, this game can only get more homogenized and boring, until the sheeple eventually go BAAAH and leave.

I hate people.

Edit: That came off more hostile than intended. I guess I got caught up in the memories and the anger.

Edited, Feb 11th 2012 12:55am by Mazra

Yes. The game is far beyond the point of no return. They tried with Cataclysm, albeit halfheartedly, and it turned into a sh*t storm of unprecedented proportions, so they "quickly" changed the game back to the familiar AOE faceroll that we loved.

They dropped the ball somewhere between TBC and WotLK (maybe late Vanilla even). How and why, I don't know, but I'll bet my left nut that it had something to do with people going BAAAAHH.

Edit: I can't figure out if **** storm is one or two words, so pardon the edits.

Edited, Feb 11th 2012 4:07am by Mazra

I think what I've learned is that nobody really has done support classes well. They got close with Shadow Priests and Shamans/Paladins in BC, but they were still far from done well.

It makes me wonder if there really is a good way to do hybrid and support classes in an MMO.

Not that everything was better of course. There's always the nostalgia factor and all that. I mean, let's face it. As much as we like to remember all the good things from "back in the day" we also tend to conveniently forget the crappy parts like individually casting 5 minute duration blessings on an entire raid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u5n5Tkwd4U

I had been thinking the same thing.

I blame looking for group and the way it destroyed community and social interactions in the game.

But it gives you more epics. Don't you want more epics?!

They need to skip blues and go straight to purples.

Epics or GTFO!

...and every armor set should resemble a bikini.