The Queue: Sometimes The Bear Gets You
@MatthewWRossi
One of my oldest WoW memories is of the bears in Ashenvale eating my face while I tried to run through the zone at level 20. So many freaking bears in Ashenvale.
This is the Queue. Let’s talk.
Be honest. The fact that they don’t immediately kill you is a little depressing, isn’t it?
One of the big problems with WoD in my opinion was Blizz set an early release date to maximize preorders and then shoved it out an unbalanced mess to meet that date.
I think they would do better if they showed a willingness to delay things until they are ready instead of shoving them out to meet marketing’s date.
Honestly, for me, Warlords didn’t have a problem with its release date. It released with excellent content for leveling. The problem was it released with sparse endgame and little in the planning stages for more. Mists dropped three patches after it launched before its end of expansion patch and all had some content for max level. Patch 6.1 had nothing, and 6.2 ending the expansion feels like an unmitigated disaster in hindsight.
To me it feels less like a rushed release and more like they didn’t have an entire expansion’s worth of game.
Q4tQ:
We might have discussed this before but, do you feel Blizzard intended to throw as much gold at us as they did or do you think they underestimated our willingness to extract it in epic numbers? Even after treasure missions were nerfed, it was still quite profitable to log in if not just for that. Could it even be a sort of in-game apology for the lack of content?
I think they intended for gold to be accessible because they’d made gold the de facto currency for a lot of things, but I think it’s quite possible to argue that they didn’t fully grasp either the average player’s willingness to extract said gold or the consequences of making that extraction possible. The economy in WoW feels like it’s almost post-apocalyptic right now. Sometimes I’d honestly take bottle caps over gold.
Q4tq: do we need another stat squish? It’s hardly worked out, has it? A single expansion and we’re already back to silly numbers. This was the slide from Blizzard where they announced it:
http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/wow.gamepedia.com/9/9f/Item_squish.jpg
My characters are already back to those stats in WoD. 1.5 million health for tanks in Legion? Only the best geared tanks were hitting that at the end of MoP. It just seems like it’s failed miserably.
I don’t think it failed. But I do think it points to the major problem with WoW and stats right now — too many gear levels per raid tier.
With LFR, Normal, Heroic and Mythic you end up needing four levels of gear per raid tier. Even just in Warlords, which only had two raid tiers, we go from iLevel 640 in Highmaul LFR to iLevel 735 at the end of Hellfire Citadel Mythic difficulty. That’s nearly a 100 point spread. And that’s just with two raid tiers!
We started seeing this problem in Wrath and we’ve seen it ever since – the more raid difficulties there are, the more itemization of rewards spreads out and bloats. Stat squishing really shows its oddities when you look at, say, Cataclysm raid gear and see that the heroic version of Gurthalak is actually weaker than the normal version, for example.
Squishing really has its most amazing effects on lower level content. I’m playing a DK on the leveling stream and the heroic ICC gear I farmed for her is better than stuff that drops in Mists, despite over 120 item levels of difference between them. I’m just starting to get better stuff in dungeons at level 87 than dropped in the level 80 raid. And it comes down to that wide spread of raid difficulties causing bloat in itemization at endgame. That’s the real enemy.
How do we fix it? Maybe we squish again. Maybe we stop itemizing so broadly for raid difficulties. Maybe Mythic raids shouldn’t give better gear than Heroic in terms of stat points. I really don’t know.
Has the substantial removal of secondary stat break points and soft caps made gearing more or less fun/interesting, in your opinion?
Ironically, I play a Warrior, and for Fury they introduced a haste breakpoint of sorts, so I can’t quite answer your question because it’s not an accurate question for me.
But I can say that I generally prefer to equip gear and move on to spending ten minutes reforging everything.
Okay, that’s The Queue for Tuesday. Play nice with Alex for tomorrow please.
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That awkward moment when you, as a Warlock dressed head-to-toe in fel & demonic transmog, port into the Exodar with your Felhunter minion and Nibbles the felstalker pet out:
“Whoops! Eh-heh, sorry guys, just passing through, don’t mind me I’m on your side I swear!”
Clicks the mount button… forgetting it summons his Illidari Felstalker mount… “Uh… praise the Light!”