The Queue: Demons in a death machine
Oh, would you look at that? It’s already Wednesday! I hope you’ve all had a lovely week and are gearing up for a nice weekend. I myself am gearing up to — checks notes — oh crud, suddenly I’m behind on everything.
Let’s Queue.
Are there patch notes for 10.1 yet? Or at least some sort of summary – I don’t much care about class balancing but I’ve really fallen behind on reading about features lately.
Typically, Blizzard won’t reveal the official notes until very close to (or day of) launch, since so much is constantly changing. Just look at the recent health and damage changes announced!
I know you said you don’t care about balance, but as far as patch notes are concerned, balance is the bulk of it. In-depth details behind the features is usually discussed in blog posts or occasionally videos w/ influencers.
Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to our own patch 10.1 coverage or Kal’s overview piece! 😉
Do they actually WANT us to keep playing? I thought maybe my low key drop rate was just me being pessimistic. I collected the weeklies and the dailies. I bought a map that shows treasures and started it up. I did all of the quests. I flew around and killed a few rares. I even spent time in the war creche which netted nothing. In that hour I saw maybe 7 treasures, a few of which disappeared when I went down to them. Total? 4 keys in a bit over an hour, and two of the keys were from wonderous fish used to buy iskaar supplies. That means I need over 7 hours of wasted time to open all the vault doors just for this week.
Well, yes, Blizz absolutely does want you to keep playing. But also, sometimes Blizz doesn’t want you to keep playing, y’know? Sometimes, Blizz is okay if you don’t do everything there is to do.
It’s really hard to balance an MMO for any particular playstyle because content is always going to be shared by players with several, often conflicting, playstyles. I think at this point, the answer is more that Blizz wants you to play the way that makes you happy, without feeling like you’re losing out on something absolutely necessary if you do.
There are obvious exceptions here — if collecting mounts makes you happy, you’ll still have to go outside your comfort zone for some mounts, for instance — but the bulk of a patch’s content is, imo, best played at your own pace. If you’re putting effort into something you don’t feel worth the reward? Don’t do it! Hopefully that reward isn’t absolutely necessary to do the other content you enjoy.
(I know I’m speaking broadly here and,at the end of the day, low drop rates are still very unfun.)
Is there a reason why Blizzard steadfastly refuses to give mages any self-healing? I’m baffled. Just now they’ve announced this big change re: player health, mob damage, and the effects of self-healing. Twelve classes listed with their various incoming changes, with only one class missing because oh hey, no self-healing. The one and only class that has nothing of the sort.
Yes, there’s the ice block heal you can talent into, but that also means losing several seconds of dps uptime. So hardly ideal.
Well, to answer your question directly before I go off into a tangent: The reason is survivability. Mages have a lot in their toolkits designed to make up for the lack of self-healing.
Personally, I’ve long disliked how much self-healing exists in the game, particularly for classes that don’t have, like, an actual healing spec at all. I’m not saying it shouldn’t exist, but goodness does it feel like A LOT of it exists, all over.
Maybe I’m just “old man yells at cloud”-ing here, but I feel like Blizz could utilize Healing Potions as an alternative to the amount of self-healing in the game — if they did a bit of a redesign. Having them share cooldowns and have a long cooldown in their own right? Definitely would have to adjust a bit there.
Either way, I feel your frustration, but for different reasons.
That’s us for today! I hope you all have a lovely Wednesday. Be sure to ask lots of questions, please!
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