I disagree with this portion of your post, Bo. To me the new system is much better. Before there was basically no choice at all since everyone always had the same spec in order to maximize thier DPS, heals, etc…
Now, all of that stuff that you used to have to click 41 times in order to have just like everyone else playing your class you get automatically. The new talent points are truly bells and whistles as far as I’m concerned. You get to actually enhance your toon instead of basically being locked into a spec in order to compete or even keep up.
BTW, I like the new patch.
You didn’t really disagree with me at all, you know, not as to what the new talent trees purpose is. You just happen to like the fact that now all toons of a class will be the same, and I don’t. I know that before the vast majority of, say, Resto Shamans had the same points in the same things, to within a point or two but at least people had options. If you wanted to make a funky build, you could. Now, like I said, the talent trees (and glyphs) really only seem to be there to give people the impression that they are making meaningful choices about their character, when in fact, choice has been taken away.
WoW has been moving away from being a Role Playing Game for many years now, but this is the first time that they’ve taken a leap away from the genre rather than taking small steps. It’s really turning into a cookie-cutter game, both for raiders and for PvPers. PvP is becoming little more than what you can experience in a variety of FPS games, except that in WoW you use magic for ranged attacks and healing, and only hunters can really use guns.
I’ve said it before: EQ got a lot of things right, and WoW improved on those things, to a large degree, but WoW also abandoned a lot of the quirks that made EQ fun and a unique experience not just for every person who played it, but also for every class & race and combo thereof. WoW is, comparatively, a very limited game.
I think only the illusion of choice was there before since in order to be successful you had to use the cookie-cutter spec that everyone else used. There were no actual choices involved. There was a best spec, and then there was everything else.
And using an “everything else” was pretty much a huge tip off that someone knew shit all about playing their class.
Ah, but see, that’s what I mean by them moving away from being a Role Playing Game: there is no “successful” in an RPG except for “having fun and enjoying your time”.
Blizzard doesn’t want people to do that, unless it involves raiding or, to a much lesser extent, grinding pvp.
And many people are fine with that; our culture to a large degree pushes people to get more, achieve more, get better stuff, get more stuff, etc. just like Blizzard encourages people to get more, achieve more, etc. It’s such a part of our society and our culture, that most people prolly don’t or can’t imagine that the game can be anything else other than a grind to acquire stuff so that you can then acquire other stuff.
It’s not all that a game has to be, tho, particularly not a game that bills itself as a Role Playing Game.
Not every patch no just at various points when the game files needs a tweak. For me it installed the 64-bit client which meant my FPS going up from 60 odd to over 140 in Undercity, some lighting effects too I am sure.
You still have choices to create the character you want - last night on my druid alt I asked what the other cats had picked for the level 60 tier of talents and the three of us had picked different talents. Before the patch we all had the same first 4-5 rows in the old talent trees I am sure.
How is this not role playing? All of our cats will be a little bit different wont they? Tangible differences too, while I went for easy mode extra energy the other two picked the flavour talents of summoning trees or looking badass.
Question for any druids, I see our dispell now has an 8 second cooldown. Is that right, or am I looking at the wrong spell?
I’ve been away from the game for a while, but I’ve done the new dungeons a couple of times now and I’m pretty sure there’s one particular fight where in phase two, the boss puts two stacks of a debuff that need to be dispelled twice.
I remember it happening once a long, long time ago; also when I re-opened the game after a year of not using it. It’s very rare, done only when there have been major changes to code.
There are classes for which minor glyphs are 100% cosmetic and others for which some have utility. I wish it was possible for mages to choose which animal to polymorph without having to carry dust around, but hey, it’s not like a pile of eraser will burst my bags open.
Some talents are also cosmetic (at least part cosmetic); my druid is now an extra-supah-dupah-boomkin thanks to a talent, rather than a regular boomkin or a starrykin (which would be a glyph).
Well, I promised Quasi that I’d be back for MoP, and recently talked to a couple in-game friends on Facebook and told them I’d be back, so I guess I’ll be back. (Actually, is Quasi still playing, or is RL stuff keeping him away? I should PM him.) But my WoW play really tailed off last September when I started playing City of Heroes, and I officially cancelled my WoW account in February. And I haven’t really missed it. CoH has really been the perfect game for me.
Heh. I currently have 89 characters in CoH, and space available for plenty more. Paid subscribers get 12 free slots on every server (there are 16 servers), and can pay to unlock up to a total of 48 slots per server.
I enjoyed the new low-level game in Cata, and I think Blizz had legitimate reasons for making it easier. My complaint was the brick wall you ran into when you got to the 80+ Cata content. My fire mage, who I loved playing in Wrath, just felt so gimped in Cata that I just gave up playing her once I got her to 85. I enjoyed running 5-mans in Wrath on both my mage and my ret pally, but had no interest in raids; then what I saw on the official boards made it sound like they’d turned the Cata 5-mans into mini-raids, and I lost interest in even trying them. Admittedly, a lot of that is personal RL issues, mainly my odd, unpredictable work schedule that prevents me from playing with a regular group. I might have tried out the Cata dungeons if I’d been able to have some regular, dependable teammates, but after reading the forums I just wasn’t interested in jumping into the dick-waving bitchfests that PUGs seemed to have become.
It’s another reason I like CoH so much. The CoH “endgame” is basically just bonus material, it’s not the be-all, end-all goal that raids are in other MMOs, and the playerbase as a whole seems to agree that the journey is more important than the destination. It’s one reason that, out of my 89 characters I’ve only gotten one to the level cap (50), and haven’t felt the game was any less fun for that fact.
Oh, good. I never understood how a 50% mana discount on a “cast and forget” long-duration buff spell was supposed to be useful (specifically, paladin auras and buffs that I only need to cast every 30 to 60 minutes, or when I died). It’s not like they were expensive to begin with.
Yeah, the 8 sec dispel thing bit me in the ass on my priest. On Arcurion in HoT, get ready to dispel left right and center, and crap, where’d I hide Mass Dispel? (Yeah, I learned to dispel before Mass Dispel was a thing. /cough)
Still getting used to the new Vengeance mechanics and the blood DK mechanics (I’m trying to decide which I prefer, Runic Empowerment or Blood Tap. Leaning toward the latter).
That said, my baby druid is dancing her new perma-tree butt off, and I am actually loving druid healing post-patch. Especially with the rearrangement of spell orders so that I can actually heal more effectively in my 50s instead of watching the castbar crawl by and waiting for it to actually, y’know, go off before the tank takes that much more damage.
Okay, this is really irritating. I re-upped my account and got all patched and updated, only to find that the same login info that logs me into Battle.net isn’t working to get me into the game. Gah!
I love being a healbot in pvp. Haven’t tried logging in since the latest patch.
I hate doing quests, I don’t really dungeon either, as I’m a cowardly wimp, and selfish with my time. (healing them is fine, but I’ve not tried since Cata to do so. Tanking I’ve done a bit more of.)
I’m a dread ROLEPLAYER. Wooo.
I guess that’s why I keep crawling back to the game when I need a hit of something to distract me from the real world! Glad to see there’s an 11th slot… (see the bit about roleplaying. ) You can keep your pandas. Orcs and trolls for me!
I’m a fairly new player, with my highest toon at level 67. I have to say that I’m kinda mixed on the new patch. I liked my hunter (yeah I know) being able to switch between weapons from distance to close in, using both bow and sword. Made aesthetic sense to me, and as a SCAdian who uses both, it was kinda like playing me as a troll.
That said, it means that I can now use some of my nastiest abilities even when the MOBs are right up in my face.
Want to crowd me? Here, have a face full of aimed shot goodness!
The new pet battle system also really strikes me as a bit silly. If I wanted to play Pokemon, I would be playing Pokemon. It may seem odd that a person who has a wolf fight with his toon would have this objection, but the wolf and troll are a team, while sending Mr. Grubbs into the arena against someone’s bunny rabbit… Hey at least now Michael Vick might get into the game.
I’m another one of those “the magic has gone largely out of WoW” types. I plan to get MOP and play long enough to level my DK to 90 and take a panda through the starting experience, but beyond that, I’m not sure. I’ve started playing The Secret World and I still love it, so that’s been taking up my MMO time–that, and the fact that now that I’ve stepped off the raiding treadmill, I’m really enjoying having free real-life time again, and I’m unwilling to give that up at this point. Plus, some of the new stuff like pet battles just leave me cold.
That said, I just finished the new WoW novel (Jaina Proudmoore: Tides of War) two days ago, and I loved it enough that it’s got me excited about playing through the Fall of Theramore scenario when it comes out. Only problem is, all my toons are Horde, and I’m pretty disillusioned with the Horde’s direction right now. I hope they give us an opportunity to play as an underground resistance movement aimed at taking Garrosh down, because there’s no way my proud and intelligent blood elf mage and DK are going to take orders from that microcephalic warmongering cretin.
I’ve already decided that my mage is going to retire (he was my longtime main, but I’ve switched to the DK for the past year or so). He’s disgusted with the Horde so he’s going back to Dalaran to become an academic.
Oh, but it is nice to have my spectral tiger on all my toons.
I’ve been encountering annoying lag issues ever since the patch whenever I enter combat.
Just running around, no problem; but the moment combat starts everything starts stuttering. Extremely annoying, and making it difficult to enjoy playing.
I’m running a top-of-the-line gaming computer that’s only a few months old, so I’m sure that’s not the problem. Guess I need to check the Blizzard message boards to see if anyone else has the problem…
Welp, a wee bit disheartened by yet another reset of talent points, and the new scheme for spending “all five of them” :rolleyes: is wholly uninspiring. They might as well do away with them entirely and say “Here is your character, these are its skills”. I was pretty disappointed. Gaining a talent point was at least a minor pleasure, especially if you knew where you were going to allocate it, to build up this or that particular extra skill.
I get that this is more of a lumping effect for efficiency’s sake. But it still bugs me. I want the original way of choosing my skill tree back when it was a point per level. And to split it between more than one tree as I saw fit. And the choice to “pick” my mastery spec. Things were more interesting. Once.
Logged in a few of my level-85s just to poke around a bit. Crap, I was only away for six months and completely forgot most of the keyboard shortcuts for opening the various interfaces.
Logged in my rogue … WTH happened to poisons? Rogue trainers don’t tell me anything, and poison vendors are now just selling empty vials.
) You can keep your pandas. Orcs and trolls for me!
