I’ve been toying with the idea of my buddy and I joining, been studying up on it, etc.
I am skeptical because for all the “role-playing” hype it is basically a “MM tactical
fantasy game”, which I can deal with to a certain extent (even as my aesthetic
sensibilities are bruised).
Well dontcha know I dreamed about playing it last night. Me the Mage and my
buddy the Paladin. We were in a dungeon killing various forms of lower undead
for piddling experience, and after the umpteenth skeleton I remember thinking (i.e.
my cerebral cortex was nominally functioning which is rare for a dream), “Is this all
there is?” Well a group of guys yells that some of their buddies have cornered a
spectre (even if there are no undead named that specifically in WoW), and after a
few Turn Undeads by me (yes a cleric spell) I had whittled it down but apparently
it was not affected by the aggro of the other players and killed me, soon being
finished off by the other players anyway.
Well the endless faceless undead hordes didn’t intrigue me, but a harder boss
monster requiring teamwork is a little more palatable. Just wondering if that is
gameplay in a nutshell or does it get even more intense than that? [Actually I
have an idea for a MMO which I haven’t really seen yet on the market, if anyone
wants to hear about it]
I don’t play WoW, but I’ve played both versions of Everquest, which is similar. You’ll find plenty of “boss” type mobs that require teamwork to kill. The biggest and baddest bosses will require very large forces to kill. EQ had 70 man raids. EQ2 and WoW also have plenty of raid targets, but the maximum force is smaller (I forget the exact numbers). There are also boss mobs intended for smaller groups. You’ll get the best loot from bosses.
There’s also the PVP option, if you like to fight other player characters…
Yeah, there is definetly… let’s call it an opportunity for good team-based game play. The trick is finding a good team. I got two characters to 60, but never really got into the guild stuff. I joined one guild with my first 60th level character, but got kicked out when I stopped playing him to focus leveling up my other 60th level character. I got in a lot of pick-up groups, though, and it was kind of mixed. Most of the groups were crap: idiots who didn’t know how to play their characters and couldn’t comit to more than half an hour of play time at a go. But when it worked, it worked really, really well. The frustration of all those crappy, half-assed groups was worth it for those times I’d get in a group that ran like a smooth, well-oiled machine and we’d just cruise through a dungeon slaughtering everything in our path. If you’ve got a bunch of friends who play regularly, or can get in a guild, that sort of experience will be much more common.
There’s plenty of that, but it tends not to happen as naturally as it did in your dream. Most dungeons require at least five people, and getting a five man group together can be a frustrating experience. You rarely luck into four attentive communicative strangers all at once. If teamwork in dungeons is what interests you, a lot of your “game play” will be spent idle looking for people to group with. If you have the patience for that and find a good guild eventually, you should enjoy it.
Also the “teamwork” for dungeons tends to follow the same formula of tank/heal/crowd control/agro management until you get into the 20+ man raid groups where they sometimes mix it up a bit.
In a way multi-group raiding can be considered more intense, but in other ways it is less intense. You’re a small cog in a larger machine. Some like it, others don’t.
Well the tactics from what I’ve gathered (from some forums and their Wiki) seem kind of canned.
I love to improvise and rote actions over and over in the hamster wheel would bore me.
You can play like that, but the problem is that WoW players can get kind of obsessive. They analyze each creature and situation and play it over and over again until they “solve” it and find the optimum strategy. Now, you don’t have to be that kind of player yourself to get the most out of the game, but some of that ilk will get very impatient if you don’t know and stick to the solution.
Really, it all depends on your guild. The right guild can solve all of these problems and the others mentioned in this thread.
The thing about these types of games is that there is no “right” way to play. Power-gamers do their thing, but casual players have plenty of things to do as well. If you want to get “teh uber” gear, you’ll have to do a certain amount of raiding…but on the other hand, if you’re not a raider, you don’t really need the most powerful items in the game anyway. You can play perfectly fine with “second tier” gear, and have lots of fun.
At the single group level, you’ll find that some tactics work better than others. Some games have a “holy trinity” of classes…in EQ, it was tank/healer/crowd control. In EQ2, it was Tank/healer/dps. As long as your group has those bases covered, you can fill out the remaining slots with whoever is available. Different tactics come in to play with different classes. Several classes are probably capable of filling a particular role, but they do it in different ways. The challenge lies in learning the best tactics for your class individually, and in combination with others. Something that works great when you have a melee damage guy on the team may not work so well if you’re running with a squishie caster dps guy.
At the raid level, the game changes. To a certain extent, the target’s abilities are going to dictate the tactics needed to win. Some guilds have a basic strategy in place, then just pull the mob and see what works. Other guilds will research spoilers and just copy the proven strategies.
The game can be whatever you want it to be. Some people like to do roleplay. Some want to rush through everything to get to max level ASAP. Some like to raid, craft, work on quests, explore the world solo or just hang out in common areas and chat/buff/sell/trade/mingle. Many players do a little bit of everything.
Basically WoW is a social RPG. If you like developing a character in the classic RPG sense, exploring worlds and/or socialising online, then give it a shot.
If you want to play the game to discover new and interesting tactics, or to at least have a broad range of tactical options, I don’t think you’ll find what you’re looking for. Group PVP is a little more tactical than PVE, but if you like RTS games and are looking for a similar experience, I think you’ll find PVP Battlegrounds in WoW to be a little frustrating.