The Queue: I need a new Diablo expansion
@MatthewWRossi
Maybe I’m just weird, but I’m very very very serious about wanting another Diablo 3 expansion. I want some of the things left unresolved resolved, Blizzard!
Did Leah’s soul end up trapped in the Burning Hells? If so, when do we get to go save her? What happened to her was the kind of injustice heroes are supposed to do something about, and after both her grandfather and father got screwed over by Diablo, it’s about time someone in that family caught a break.
Anyway, this is The Queue. I want a new expansion, or even news about Diablo 4. Don’t let this franchise wait another 9 years or so like you did between Diablo 2 and 3.
We’re talking about retro gaming again? Okay then. *buries head in Chronicle and new Youtube channel*
Hey, I’m right here, if you want to talk about Chronicle, let’s go. I’ll be your huckleberry. (Yes, I worked a Tombstone reference in here, that movie rocked and it was Val Kilmer’s greatest performance.) What do you want to talk about? Lordain? The Titan-Forged? Llane Wrynn? I’m down to clown. Don’t leave me hanging here, Alvilda.
Let’s talk about Titan’s Grip and Gladiator’s Resolve, because I don’t play a Hunter and don’t know what you’re talking about. (Well, I married a Hunter so I kind of do, but it’s my grumpy persona that everyone tolerates about me.)
Titan’s Grip started off as a talent, and a deep talent, too. You had to go way down the Fury tree in Wrath to get that bad boy. (Well, technically you could get it at the tail end of Burning Crusade, but it was a hard slog.) As a result, it had to be very good, and soon it basically became mandatory, to the point where Single-Minded Fury was created to balance against it. That balance never worked. Titan’s Grip always did more damage by the end of the expansion.
Similarly, Gladiator’s Resolve essentially penalized players who wanted to play around with the Gladiator DPS style — as you pointed out, they either took the talent and essentially gave up a talent choice for a new stance and a buff to Defensive Stance, or they didn’t. It’s a binary situation.
I don’t know if just giving these kinds of talents as baseline abilities really solves the problem. When Warriors got TG and SMF as baseline, it didn’t fix anything — one was still almost always better than the other. And the example you give I can see all sorts of mechanical problems with it. Does Dire Beast become Dire Frenzy as soon as your pet dies? If not, do pets have to become almost invulnerable to balance out the two options? At least with TG vs. SMF you were just switching weapons, there wasn’t a playstyle difference aside from that.
In the end, though, I always come down on the side of more player choice, not less. Whether or not you have a pet seems like a personal choice, to me. But I’d rather it be a talent option than not be available at all.
So all I lack for WoD flying is treasure hunting…
Is it actually supposed to be fun? Not only am I hating it, I’m having difficulty conceiving of a situation where’d I’d enjoy it.
My theory is it was someone’s idea at Blizz and they’re all butt-hurt no one was doing it so it was included in flight meta.
I did it in a day. I found it a lot less painful and much less annoying than the rep grinds, or that one awful mission at the Pit that you can’t buy for resources and just have to wait until it spawns.
I didn’t like the jumping puzzle ones, and I’d probably hate them even more now, but overall I didn’t find it hard. Gorgrond was the hardest zone and even that I got done in an hour. I’d have to say I thought it was pretty fun.
I find in general it’s always dangerous to assume your personal experience translates out to everyone. Even if you find ten people who agree with you, it’s easy to forget that you tend to associate with like minded people, and there’s always someone out there who disagrees.
So now that I’ve read the chronicle Volume one (and loved it!) I have to ask those who might know the answer here:
How much of that was probably always as they told it in the chronicle, how much was changed, and how much seems to be like when I’m DMing and I tie two loose plot points together and say I’d always intended it that way? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
The beauty of loose continuity like the Warcraft setting has had for years is, it leaves room for things like Chronicle, and the best part is, there’s still tons of room because Chronicle covers tens of thousands of years of history in very broad strokes. It connects things from each Warcraft game and expansion but does so in a way that leaves room for entirely new discoveries.
I definitely think that around the time that Warlords was on the conceptual drawing board, they started working to tie up some loose ends and connect things. This is definitely not the lore they had back when they made the first Warcraft game — even Kalimdor didn’t even exist back then. This book is absolutely about making connections between two decades of game stories. At least two huge lore reveals in this book were fairly recently decided upon, I’d stake your life on it.
Not my life, I need that.
I’ve now leveled all 11 toons on my main server to 100, one of each class. The last one, my warrior, I leveled from 93-100 doing nothing but treasure hunting and XP garrison missions. 0 quests, 0 dungeons. Good thing I have lots of baleful tokens to give him.
This reads to me like someone saying “I’ve eaten a lot of terrible food, and when I got to the one delicious item I could have eaten, I instead stuck it in a blender so I could swallow it without chewing or tasting it.”
I mean, okay, it’s your time, level your characters however you like. But Warriors are actually fun to play, and you deliberately didn’t play it. That just blows my mind.
Q4tQ, first time asker. You talk about the detachment between story and gameplay in Overwatch, that Blizzard has stated “ignore the story for the sake of gameplay”. But unlike HotS this isn’t full of characters with their own backstory firmly planted in other games, this is 100% new content and new story. So my question is what’s the point when it’s a 100% multiplayer game? There’s no “story mode” that you can play through to get a feel for the characters, no ongoing campaign. Sure we’ve seen the original trailer and you can read the narratives on the characters and soon we’ll start seeing the short movies they release to fill in more information. But all of that has zero influence on anything you’ll ever experience in the game. They’re creating a rich backstory for the game and then telling you to turf the whole thing out as soon as you start playing. I’m confused as to why they’d even bother?
It’s entirely possible to play World of Warcraft and never once care about the lore of the game. It’s even easier to do in Diablo, any of the Diablo games really, and yet those games have incredibly detailed lore that comes up in various ways.
The lore of Overwatch comes out in the background. The characters you play, the places they go, those are the methods by which Overwatch gets its story across. It’s a subtle thing, but it’s there, if you want it — but Overwatch isn’t an MMORPG or any kind of RPG, really, and thus while you’re playing the game you’re more concerned with winning a match than ‘what’s my motivation for winning this match‘ and frankly, I think that’s not very surprising for a team shooter.
I don’t think it’s as simple as Overwatch ‘turfing’ the story, so much as it’s saying ‘get in there and fight, and if you care, here’s what’s going on’ and it’s an approach that Blizzard has taken for years.
Would I love it if Blizzard made something I could compare to Bioshock or Fallout? Yeah. I’d be down. And frankly Overwatch has serious potential to be more than just this game.
Okay, such is the Queue for today.
Give me another Diablo, Blizzard.
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QftQ: How do you feel about major playstyle choices being attached to talents? Referring to the pet/nopet debate among Marksmanship Hunters and Frost Mages, the zoo/strong pet debate among BM Hunters, etc.
Personally, I’d prefer these major playstyle choices to be a baseline passive of the spec, in the case of MM Hunters, just a passive that increases shot damage when you don’t have a pet. For BM Hunters, have them get both spells (Dire Beast and Dire Frenzy) but they share a CD.
That way, the playstyle choices can be balanced without respect to any other talents or abilities. This would create a system where a Hunter who wants a pet would never be “forced” into Lone Wolf for a DPS gain.