The Queue: More mail please

I don’t know if Blizzard is planning to add another class to WoW, and frankly I kind of hope they aren’t. But if they do, it really needs to be a class that wears mail. With the Legion changes, we no longer have classes that start off in one armor type (mail for Paladins and Warriors, leather for Hunters and Shaman) and we now have three cloth classes, three plate classes, four leather classes and only two mail classes. And this bothers me for no adequately understood reason!

Seriously I have no idea why this is a problem for me but it is.

This is the Queue. Let us talk.

What i want is never going to happen, but I’ll never stop wanting it, so I might as well say it again here.

I want us to be able to reclaim dungeons.

So, if you’ve cleared a dungeon on a character, you can spawn an instance of that dungeon that’s yours. It’s been cleared of monsters and it can have your own minions in it if you want (you’d have to go on quests to collect various minion types) or henchmen loyal to you (think like Garrison or Order Hall Followers, but more personal — these are your folks) and you could decorate it in various ways. You could link it to world questing as well as professions, so if you wanted that really awesome chair that Nefarian sits in when you come to fight him in Blackwing Lair, you’d have to do some stuff to get it.

Basically, I just want Blackrock Depths as my own personal hangout.

It depends on the fight in question, but there are several reasons to do this.

One is about controlling the space the players can use to fight a boss. If, as an example, you could pull the various Kings in Mogu’shan Vaults off of the platform you fight them on, you could trivialize various mechanics of the fight. Now that we’re all able to solo it that’s less important, but the fight was designed to be challenging for max level at the time it was introduced.

Another is about keeping all players in combat. Back in the day, 40 man raids used to have a Paladin or two stand out of combat in Molten Core and just res people who died. It wasn’t intended, but Blizzard didn’t do anything in MC to stop you from doing it, either. For that matter, if you wanted to in MC you could kite some bosses all over the place. We fought three bosses in Garr’s room.

Essentially, the ‘you’re locked out’ mechanism, keeps you from pulling a boss too far away from where the designers intend you to fight him, keeps you from trivializing mechanics, and keeps you from having some players sit out until a certain point. Not all bosses have it — Shannox in Firelands is easily kiteable anywhere in the raid, there’s even an achievement for doing it, and you could fight him anywhere you wanted.

But when it exists, it’s usually to keep you in one place, keep you from trivializing mechanics, or keep you from keeping some players in reserve. Nowadays with timers keeping you from releasing until the end of an encounter, it’s less likely that you’ll be able to zerg down an encounter by running back (we see this in world bosses more often) but that used to be an issue too in a few cases.

Here’s the thing — the Legion is so massive, and we know that unless we find a way to kill demons permanently they’ll just come back at some point, so even if we kill Kil’jaeden and seal off this particular portal, we’ve essentially just bought ourselves some time. Eventually, they’ll find a way to come back. Some Warlock will get corrupted enough, or some demons already here will find some artifact, or something will happen and they’ll come back.

In fact, if we were to go to Argus itself, and somehow prevent that planet from having a portal network? Still not good enough.

If we were to go to the Twisting Nether itself and fight and destroy Sargeras? There are still uncountable hosts of demons out there, and for all we know, Sargeras would just pop up again. We know the Titans survived near certain death by sending their spirits to inhabit other bodies and could pop up again at some point, for all we know, Sargeras will do that too. And meanwhile, the Legion would be running buck wild with no one telling it what to do. An army of demons that can’t be permanently killed (so far only Sargeras seems to know the secret of how to permanently kill them) and the Nathrezim clearly having their own agenda.

This isn’t a war where the victory condition is actually victory. The victory condition is ‘the delaying tactic worked and we get to stay alive a bit longer so we can try and think of an actual way to win this’ and so far, that’s the best we’ve ever managed to do. So even if the most wildly optimistic things happen at the end of Legion? We’re not even remotely done with the Burning Legion.

So no, I don’t think we’re seeing a clearing of the house at all. We’ll move on to other threats because that’s the nature of an MMO, but the Legion will still be out there. We have no idea how to beat them.

Do I think they will, or do I think they should? Those are different questions.

I don’t think they will. Most other tanks are under the delusion that Ignore Pain is the single greatest tanking ability in existence, brokenly good, and makes Warriors imba beyond the dreams of a mad god. So the idea that we’ll get a specific magic damage buff (say, reducing the ridiculous cooldown on Spell Reflection) seems unlikely to me.

I’ve tanked more on my Blood DK than my Warrior this expansion, but I’ve done some raid tanking as Prot, and we blow up just as easily as anybody if the healing isn’t there, so I think people really overestimate Ignore Pain. Is it a good ability? Sure, it’s tight, I love having it. But it won’t save you if the healer isn’t on the ball, it’s honestly a lot str9nger out in the world soloing than it is in a dungeon or raid.

Really, I’d like to see an Artifact trait that buffed Spell Reflect, maybe lowered its cooldown and/or increased its duration or how much damage it countered. But I am not optimistic at this time.

Wow, the Sword/Axe/Mace/Polearm/Staff mog thing has been in the game since before Ghostcrawler left, I remember he even tweeted me telling me in was coming in so I could dance the Snoopy dance of joy, which I then did. (And yes, you can mog staves to swords or axes or maces too, if you’re a Warrior and can equip staves.)

I really have no idea why we can’t equip Fist Weapons to Swords/Axes/Maces or at least to Daggers so Rogues and Shaman could use them more. I like Fist Weapons, myself. I used to tank with a Fist back in BC, I had a really awesome Fist of Molten Fury I tanked Black Temple with until I got the axe off of Supremus.

I’ve seen no recent statements about why Fists can’t be mogged to anything but Fists. Yes, there’s a different animation, but at this point the Polearm/Staff mog seems to say ‘we can fix that if there’s a reason to’ and I’d love to see it.

Then again, I was the guy who wanted to let everyone mog more broadly in general. Back before they removed certain mail pieces from Warriors (like the Green Iron set, which my warriors all used to wear, and now never will again) I always wanted to be able to mog Plate to Mail, and thought classes like Hunter s should be able to mog Mail to Leather. So maybe I’m just out of step with where transmog is going.

Honestly, if they were going to do that, the time was when Vanilla was going into it’s first expansion.

People may not remember this, but the concept of a ‘Hero Class’ was very different before we actually got one in Death Knights. (Demon Hunters also seem to be that, as they also start at a higher level.) No one knew what it was going to be or how it was going to work, and when I say ‘no one’ I’m not excluding Blizzard here. I seriously think that before Wrath was in development, they didn’t know either.

As an example, back before TBC there was some vague text in the game about hero classes, but nothing concrete, and at least a few sites I’ve read have argued that originally Blizzard considered having Paladins be a hero class (they were a hero unit in Warcraft III) and back in vanilla there was a lot of talk about how Hero Classes would work, including the possibility that you’d level in a Hero Class after level 60 on a current class. So, instead of just rolling a new DK and starting at level 55, you’d switch your current character and convert him or her to a DK.  Essentially, Hero Classes would be like prestige Classes in 3rd Edition D&D, a form of multi-classing that converts the theme of your character.

In the end, none of that happened. I think if they’d wanted a straightforward multiclass system, it would have had to be back then, because the amount of complexity it would bring to the game would need to be something we grew into. Nowadays? Even dismissing concerns about the game’s code not being able to do it, can you imagine all the min-maxing guides telling you that the best tank for a raid was a multiclassed Druid/Paladin?

Okay, guys, that’s the Queue for today. I’ll see you all Friday. Hopefully.