From what was said earlier in this thread, Everquest developers still banned players/guilds for exploiting. I didn't play Everquest (and in spite of the very frequent "oh dearest Everquest!" nostalgia, I'm glad I didn't), but if they choose to crack down on players rather than resolve the major issues, that certainly seems much worse.

When I see someone in a Bentley pull up next to my Civic, I don't exactly think "I wish I could afford that!" I think "Jesus, don't you have something better to spend that money on than a car?" I'm really spartan like that, I dunno. :x

The point is that I understand what you mean, and Blizzard does too, but I doubt they're willing to make that much difference between gear. If you do, it inevitably leads to the other side of the spectrum bitching about how the gear they have is nowhere near that good. But honestly, we all got off on the wrong foot. If the gear going into Outland hadn't been so freakin' amazing compared to the crap from Azeroth, we wouldn't be so frustrated with how Blizzard has gone back to the policy of small increases.

Honestly, can you look at T4 set gear and T6 set gear and not think "Wow, T6 freaking OWNS T4"? I sure can't.

I'd hope that there are shades of grey.

Druids didn't get *that* much benefit of powershifting that it trivialized encounters, but it was fixed anyway.

In that sort of case, I think the draconian "we will not have our mechanics used in ways we didn't envision" detracts from the game more than a permissive acknowledgement of "hey, that's cool, and it's not gamebreaking - advanced players, go do your thing."

Every time a non-game-breaking mechanic such as this is removed/fixed, they are indeed dumbing down the game. They may be *right* to do it, but it takes away from the enjoyment some people get from the game, for an extremely small benefit (For instance, they can plan for 0.4% less raid damage due to feral druids not powershifting - number made up on the spot).

Yes but can you look at T6 and Spellfire gloves for example and say that T6 is that much better than Spellfire gloves? I sure can't.

Edit: or the new gloves badge reward.

There were some very interesting opportunities for some creativity nearing the release of Burning Crusade. 2/4 piece bonuses on 5 piece sets, and socketable items stand out as such an opportunity to customize your character the way you like. To make your character unique.

But look what has happened. Everyone uses the same 3 gems for all of their sockets. Meta gems (which have the most potential in my opinion) are pretty lackluster, and rarely provide any tangible benefits. Let's not talk about the wonderful world of socket bonuses. 2/4 piece sets bonuses should allow you to pick a piece that you can't live without, without sacrificing your bonuses. But the only options available for that open slot is usually just another item with a few more stats. Wow, consider my mind blown.

Trinkets are another area that could change a playstyle, or add some customization options. But in their constant quest to keep them balanced or scaling further than intended, they are all the same. "Here are some stats and a clicky damage/healing bonus. Enjoy!".

While Incription looks just as promising, I can't help but to expect it to be just as bland as Jewelcrafting and 2/4 piece bonuses are in practice.

Now who can forget the 15 plate helms in pre-TBC raiding that all looked the same.

Not that I assume many of you played Counter-Strike back in its beta form, but I was quite disappointed when they finally took away the ability to 'bunny hop'. Even thought it was explicitly against the rules in matches, it was something you took pride in knowing how to do and could kind of feel like you're exploiting a little bit on the public servers.

But how long do you give them to work on it? Original T1 sucked, hunter gloves with +2% dodge...YUM! And then they reitemized them and they were decent. T2 was decent and eventually when they came out with T3. That was perfect.

Its like Blizzard had a whole bunch of good stuff going on, like they started to "Get It" and then the expansion came out, they changed a whole bunch of stuff and had to reinvent the wheel so to speak. They made similar mistakes to what they made in Vanilla WoW even though they had corrected them by the time TBC came out.

This was probably mostly due to reitemizing stamina.

They hopefully will have a good idea of what to do in WotLK, and hopefully higher item levels will let them do things they couldn't before.

They didn't come up with a very good distribution. I think the biggest problem with jewelcrafting is simply the lack of available stats with which to customize. Currently, DPS has the widest array of choice and selection, because they get to balance multiple stats. Melee balances strength/agility, hit, crit, attack power. Casters balance hit, crit, damage, and (in some cases, like shadow priest) mana recovery. For healers, +heal and +mp5 outweighs just about everything else. For tanks, stamina outweighs everything. The socket bonuses are insignificant, most of them are worth about half a gem or so.

If they added new gems (and I don't doubt we will begin to see them), I'd like to see gems for haste, armor penetration, weapon damage, expertise, threat generation, block value, bonus armor, and even rework spell penetration to add additional damage by reducing an enemy's resistance below 0.

They have been experimenting with various trinkets though. You just need to know where to look. The new Darkmoon cards are wildly different than what we've seen before. [The Lightning Capacitor] is a pretty cool new doohickey, and it has some pretty darn cool interactions with hasty spells.

As previously stated... they *are* experimenting with new things, but they are doing it in small doses.

Too bad most of the best items in the game can only be bought via the trading card game or whatever.

What trinkets in the old game were powerful and varying in effects? Hand of Justice was one, Fetish of the Sand reaver, some of the BWL ones maybe, but other than that not much at all. While there is a lot of + value and + more value on clicky, there is plenty of cool ones out there like TLC, Scarab of the Infinite Cycle, DST, etc.

Many of the better trinkets from BWL were nerfed. [Natural Alignment Crystal], [Lifegiving Gem] were the two that spring to mind immediately.

I'm actually excited too, I'm not assuming all aspects of the game are boring, but it's certainly becoming more monotonous and more homogenized, that's what my argument is, it continuously gets more boring as they're unwilling to give anything that's just a little bit neat.

Those are completely different ideas, that's not the whole "breaking the game a little" people are talking about, that's not finding cool fun things to do that not everyone does, it's adding more accessible raid content, and more guaranteed gear, not even close to the same.

New mechanics are the same thing. You ad armor penetration, everyone maths it out, everyone has x armor penetration, yeah mechanics live on, they live on and become standard. - armor was cool for a while, but you can't use it in pvp at the moment since it's all on raid gear, and when you can use it in pvp everyone will have it because it's on the pvp gear. There's nothing that's just different and kind of cool about it. It's just a new way to do the same thing.

Sure they're being cautious, I don't fault them for not having a full array of awesome new items with cool different things they do immediately on the horizon, nor do I claim that I'm going to quit or people are going to quit if they don't bring these items right now. But you're sitting here arguing that it's too hard to balance, and that they want to stick to talents, and they don't want ridiculous stuff in the game, which is not at all what I'm saying, which is why it sounds like you're just arguing against these suggestions.

No I don't want to have an overpowered item drop all of a sudden that now everyone uses because it's amazing in pvp. But they could pick a slot (someone mentioned trinkets) where there's always a cool /use or /equip or a proc, but they don't. The /uses are all just more stats (pretty much) the equips, more stats, the procs, straight damage or more stats. There's nothing that's just fun beyond if you had more stats anyway.

It's a separate argument from the main one in the thread I think, my argument related to the thread is for shiny stuff basically, but while we're looking at diversifying people, small cool things that happen that aren't overpowering, and are balanced with others, could add a lot of depth to the pvp game.

Honestly, reminiscing about old warsong with people on my server, we start laughing about the overpowered green whelp armor, the judges gavel forcing flag drops, the overpowered knockback proc on The Unstoppable Force originally. These were all amazingly fun, but the thing is there was no counter to them, so they were overpowered and nerfed. I'd just like to see Blizzard start making the effort to add cool stuff like this back in.





edit: And I'm not talking about things like Natural Alignment Crystal or Lifegiving Gem, those are overpowered because they scale infinitely with stats. I'm talking about things like green whelp armor, and The Unstoppable Force, that were fun, and OP because there weren't counters and other cool ways to handle them, but that in the right environment, could just be great flavor. You knocked my healer back with TUF? Well I have my sword and used it's /use effect to get a 5% chance to banish on hit, and banished your paladin! If balanced, it's fun. Yes if it's not balanced it's bad, but I'm not suggesting they don't evaluate things closely first, just that they look at the idea of it.

They scaled too well. Because those scaled by percentages, those were never going to be kept as is. The only way to ever upgrade off those is give an exact same trinket with a better percentage.

I do agree that interesting procs are fun. If more were added to the game, the main balance issue would be using several pieces of gear to achieve several such effects. If someone is wearing a chestpiece with a chance to put the attacker to sleep, with a shield that has a chance to cast a DoT when blocking, with gloves that have a 5% chance to silence the target, etc, *that* is where you run in to problems.

Fortunately, that is pretty easy to avoid if you confine these "unique" effects to one item slot, such as the MH weapon.

What if weapons fell into two major categories - those that boosted traditional stats (as most current weapons do) and then weapons that offered no traditional stats (and perhaps even had lower DPS than would be expected of their iLevel) but had very interesting procs or characteristics. This exists to an extent ([The Night Blade] and [Ravager] for example) but it's fairly rare among endgame items ([Shard of Azzinoth] being one exception).

Would melee DPS go for a sword that did fairly poor damage while at full health, but then grew stronger and stronger the more health dropped, so that it became the highest dps weapon in the game when at 1% health? It would be a very risky weapon to use - on fights with an AOE component, how does your healer balance keeping you alive versus keeping your dps maximized? On single target fights, how do you get low health in the first place without dying? Would this perhaps be the ultimate PvP weapon, despite having poor DPS at the beginning of the fight?

That example, while perhaps too overpowered the way I've suggested it, seems to be what people are asking for - something that changes the way you play the game, that offers a challenging meta-game in and of itself.

While it would certainly be fun (and would reward creative thinking) I can certainly understand Blizzard's position - they've put a tremendous amount of time and effort into creating a well-balanced game, and adding such wildcards at this point might undo what they've worked so hard for.


*edited because I need to learn to read.

Status symbols are for the most part being discussed on an individual level here - but something i've thought for a very long time, is that guilds don't receive any tangible benefits for their accomplishments.

If you think what an in game guild really offers, it is nothing more than a chat channel and a friends list, the guild has no substance. I guess the guild bank coming will marginally change this, but not in the way i would like to see.

Guild Points. This is what i'm picturing, Guild Points - awarded for succesful killing of bosses (obviously something balancing this for pvp might have to be worked out, but i've not given that a huge amount of thought). Assuming, say, 80% of players were present at a boss kill, the death would register Guild Points, which could be spent on various things. Obviously, consumables such as flasks might be nice, but assets could be purchased - maybe the ability for a a guild to buy 5% cheaper repair costs for 10,000?! points. Better yet, in a system similiar to that of Lineage II, Guild Points could be spent on guild wide buffs, always active (i guess precluded from arena, or not?) buffs which stack with traditional ones. Possibly a 20, 40, 60 stamina buff, crit buffs etc - all varying costs, and guild wide in effect.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a huge issue for me, but I feel it would go some way to appeasing the 'high end' raiding communities' concerns over Status Symbols.


p.s. Guild Spell: 4500 GP : Teleports members to Hyjal Basecamp.

The idea I got for tabard is to make it a ~40 level item, and then everytime you kill a new boss of the current end game content with all your guildies it increases the tabard level of the guild by 1, while high end bosses giving 2-3. Every level has a pre set stats for different classes and the last 3 levels give 3 sockets.

New guilds can always catch up later on as every expansion adds new bosses to the game. However the guilds that have been around since a while will have a small edge when it comes to beating new content, which in returns gives a special feeling for being in an older, successful guild. This will also help alot with keeping the guilds alive instead of random disbands.

Just some idea really. There are so many things they can do with tabard concept.

PS: Or they can instead add effects like "decreases the cost of repairs by tabard_level%", "increases the duration of flasks by %" etc.

Achivement Points for guilds would be kind of an awesome thing, especially with nice, non-combat benefits like cheaper/free repairs, cheaper/free consuambles, etc. Guild buffs would be the worst idea ever, though, I must say, particularly if they were expensive and you could only have a certain number up at a time. Think about what it's like deciding between tank loot and rogue loot, except in this case the tank "loot" benefits every single tank simultaneously and rogue "loot" benefits every single rogue simultaneously.

If they do add something awesome for achievements besides perhaps larger upgrades between tiers of items, gameplay-changing things are probably the worst available options, particularly since they just represent part of the upgrades that you get for hitting another tier of content anyway...

Guild points as a system, especially one with buffs, would be horrible for raiding alliances.

I had the Primal Blessing pre-TBC, and it's still, in my estimation, the best set bonus ever.

Sure, the weapons weren't that great, but you turned into a freaking giant tiger-person. That was awesome!

But yeah, the game at 70 lacks a lot of the things at 60 that were just sort of cool.

There's a minor difference between those though. PMC compared to other healing gear still provided the same basic mix of stats (With the absence of Stamina causing the higher healing and mana/5 compared to other gear for PMC). The Spellfire and Frozen Shadoweave sets on the other hand provide school-specific damage which is unusual and puts the spell damage levels on both those sets higher than what would be usual for an item with generic +damage.

Well, I can't. T4 rules for druids (at least for dps) and some T6 items are definitely not in my list of gear upgrades, either because they would break my beloved 2t4 set bonus, or because there are pieces that are so close to it that I can't possibly justify that upgrade (e.g. since I dps a lot, how can I justify getting the t6 chest vs shadowprowler, and here I'm comparing a drop from the (currently) last boss in the game, and a simple LW craft with reagents from heroics and Kara). The t6 chest is better than the shadowprowler for dps, but it's not "wow" better.

The main issue here is that the analogies might apply to PvP (in particular arena) where people might try to find ways to counter popular combos, but it doesn't apply to PvE because in PvE there's a dynamic element (players) and a static element (content).

In M:tG when an idea becomes so powerful that everybody starts to use it, people develop other decks specifically to counter this combo. It happened all the time, and there's usually no need to wait for the next expansion for this to happen. In WoW PvE if a combination becomes imbalanced, then content gets trivialised and there's just no point to it any longer.

Anyhow I think, like many other in this thread, that what kills the joy is changing some aspects of the game that had, at worse, a very marginal impact on the game itself, especially if they were related to skill more than to a simple, automatic abuse (powershifting is the typical example here). Another change that they (thankfully!) reverted was that druids could (or could not) herb nodes in flight form. Did anybody really think it was imbalanced that druids could herb nodes in flight form? No, it was just nice.

Fixing major bugs is fine. Fixing any little detail that's not exactly working as intended or perceived as fair is not only overkill, it's killing the fun as well. People like quirks.

After rethinking the whole thread, I think the greatest change for me in WoW would be unlimited bank space. (well and no respec costs). I consider myself not really instinct driven but I'm really a kind of collector and hunter. I do have some limits (I'd never have grinded Timbermaw oder Frostsaber reputation in classic) but when I look at my filled banking slots I see that all my space problems could be eliminated by just dropping all the flavour stuff like tabards, pets, mounts. Yet: I love these gimmicks even though I don't use them often. Getting Eggbert was probably more fun than looting some epic stuff from raid instances - talking about the story one from one of our warlocks how sleepy willy slept while our Magtheridon tries went to hell was still good even after hearing it the fifth time.