Oh yeah?

I love Slug's posts, along with wodin's and gurg's. Not that I don't value everyone's opinion but I find that these people constantly challenging me intellectually to examine the topic from different angles.

Slug how would you feel in this scenario. Next patch blizzard decided there wasn't enough 20 man based progression, and they introduced some new/restyled bosses in AQ20 with nefarion caliber loot (ilvl 8x purples/blues). And some of these pieces could be gathered in strat/scholo/DM/etc (paralleling the solo portions of the current idea).

I guess I am different than slug cause I feel that diminishing the work I did is irritating but not alot I can do about it. Same thing happened when computers went into the main stream and worked to increase peoples productivity and made each task easier. I dont really respect the work people had to do back when records were kept by hand or when each copy of a book was hand written. Not alot I can do about it; it is the future of things. The future of WoW is that blizzard will force feed the casual market so they never get too far behind the upper crust of the wow society. If there was no pvp I dont think you would see this become such an emphasis by blizzard but because they dont want to make everyone that doesnt have the newest and brightest get one shotted in pvp they will always do it. Soon tier 1 will be out moded and if you dont upgrade from your tier 2 then they will pass you up there also.

:edit: cool got a spikey.

Of course we'd be bothered by that. But there's a couple of differences between what you're suggesting, and what's actually happening.

First -- the tiers of loot. The best new items will rival some low-end MC loot, not Nefarian. We are basically 1.5 to 2 "tiers" of loot beyond these new 1.10 items. I have +520 in spelldamage gear on top of good stats; I sincerely doubt these casual-friendly items will come anywhere close to that.

Second -- the difficulty. We really don't know how much work is involved in getting one of the epic pieces completed. How hard are the quests? What do they involve? Does it involve getting 10 Righteous Orbs? 5-manning Drakk? What, exactly? We just don't know yet. Obviously, if easily obtainable Nefarian epics came into play while he's still basically the top of current raiding content, then I guarantee you we'd feel differently.

Third -- the time frame. It's been close to a year since MC has been fully cleared, and we're seeing the low end of those items arrive in a more casual-accessible form. If the patch after Naxxramas comes out, I can go and solo Plugger in BRD for equivalent loot that I'd get off of Kel'Thuzad -- then yes, of course I'd be pissed off. But I don't see that happening, honestly.

If a year and a half from now, casual players have access (note: not *easy* access) to an item that comes close to rivaling what I have right now from Nefarian, it wouldn't bother me too much either. I can't think of any other way to prevent just a continually expanding gap between raiders and non-raiders honestly -- other than, yes, forcing them to raid.

Errr. Could someone link a picture of the stats of one of the new sets?

click the link on the first page(first post in fact).

I'm so glad I learned about this a few weeks after selling my blue pieces

Unfortunately, I too ditched parts of the Elements set that I had for my shaman. Damnit.


On the other hand the gauntlets DE'd into a Nexus Crystal so...

It seems unlikely that you will actually need to turn in your old set to get the new one.

Is this the first MMORPG you've ever played? Blizzard isn't exactly reinventing the wheel here.

Thrill did an excellent job of answering the question directed at me, so I'll let people read that and know he pretty much mirrors my thoughts on it. Instead, I'll hit this statement up:

I see it that way, as well. In Everquest and other past games where PvP was more of an afterthought than a main game idea, there was never a huge rush to jump-start later additions to the game. PvE balance was everything and PvP balance was a kind of a side project that was mostly disallowed from having an effect on the PvE functionality of the game.

My biggest issues with WoW thus far have been their nerfs to various PvE skills, functionality, or gear due to PvP-oriented reasons. Anytime you're changing a working PvP functionality because it breaks PvE or vice versa, you have a bit of a problem and are likely approaching things from entirely the wrong angle.

An excellent example of a needed fix for both sides would probably be SS/WW, negative resists, or the original warlock beta ability to banish virtually everything. Those functions were horribly broken in all versions of gameplay, so they were not something that had a particular bias and negatively effected or rebalanced one side in order to fix a serious issue on the other. An example of a PvP oriented change would be Invis-O-Mages. While they were complete and total BS in PvP, invisibility itself wasn't a horribly broken PvE ability. It could have easily been tweaked into balanced PvE, but balance in PvP is always a nightmare with skills like that and the rogues would've whined due to stealth being all they've got.

These two completely seperate worlds of statistics, functionality, and calculation should not hold sway over one another at all if you wish a true balance in your game, IMHO. Easy to say. Near impossible to do. In the past MMOG's, balance due to time invested wasn't really an issue. All groups of players pretty much equally benefited from new additions to the game. If something was below your main raiders, it was still fun to screw around on and you weren't missing anything. If something came in above you, all the better. Now you had an easier means in which to achieve goals you already had.

Time invested meant getting to kill things the moment they showed up or explore things before everyone else. If you didn't have a level 60+ character by the time certain EQ expansions went in, oh well. You'd get there eventually and if that content wasn't used anymore by that point, it would likely be due to much better content being in full force.

There came a time in many of those games' development cycles where the devs had to say "Okay...we're completely erasing the usefulness of these old zones with upcoming content...but they've had their time in the sun and the game needs to move on." I would be both surprised and disappointed to see newbie expansion characters doing Scholomance, RFK, or the like in as serious a fashion as we all came up with them. I don't think expansion characters should have to. There should be so much more content available by then, they shouldn't have to.

In the PvE-centric games, it became easier to gear up through different means, but there was never a serious pressure on any individual or the developers to keep a static balance of any sort. The difference in WoW is that they have specific realms in which they feel obligated to hold a reasonable gap between player skills. Even on PvP realms in other games, PvP was never the main focus. In WoW, there has developed a rather large subsection of people who do almost nothing but that, so Blizzard is being forced to address their concerns.

It boils back down to what I felt was their biggest mistake in WoW development. They tried to forge two seperate games into a singular experience and the nature of the genre just doesn't allow for it to mesh very well. Half-Life 2 was a great game. Starcraft was a great game. That said, they do things very differently and for important reasons.

I'd much rather see someone try to churn out Half-Life 3 and Starcraft 2 as seperate and very polished entities than see a thrown together attempted mixture of Half-Starcraft-Life in which the very core elements you loved both previous games for were dilluted if not completely erased for sake of hybridization.

I think WoW could have been the best MMO-PvE game to have hit shelves in history, hands down. I think it could have easily blown away anything that has come before and most everything that would come after for a very long time. It's a damn solid game. Look at what all it has accomplished in spite of the many things it has working against it, at current. Seeing it as a strictly PvE balanced game would have been incredible, no doubt.

That said, it's WARcraft so I've never understood the concept of a PvE server to begin with. I can't imagine a strictly PvE version of warcraft any more than I can imagine a multiplayer version of Nethack, so I don't know what else they legitimately could have done without wrecking lore/immersion in a serious fashion. I might not kill Newladin or Elfan sometimes because they have renounced their lameness and begged for acceptance in spite of their most unfortunate and unfair births to alliance parents. But mostly?

The entireity of the alliance cheered that pretentious jackass Arthas all the way from childhood to murdering his own father before they realized he was a worthless, weak-minded moron of an individual. Any halfwitted Peon of an orc would've killed his sorry arse before he got to grow up and become what he currently is.

Damn you to hell in advance for blood elves, Blizzard. I don't want those kind of people playing horde. I'd rather lose the war and die a man than link up with a bunch of freakish elven wankers and dishonor my ancestors by accepting their help.

Call me oldschool, but I feel Thrall has sold me out. If I had a cave, I'd go sulk in it with my succubus, felhunter, and imp (my useful pets) and plot some form of ritualistic murders to call down demons worth having in my service. Maybe then I could secure a group of like minded individuals and focus on creating a worthwhile splinter horde cult that doesn't get repeatedly smacked down by level 20 Barrens kids or roaming silithid hunters...

...
*ahem* I digress... Sorry.
...

I think a 3d WoW-styled action game balanced and based strictly on PvP could have been very interesting as well. I always felt that Battlegrounds and World of Warcraft should have been two seperate games, perhaps linked in more trivial ways than they currently exist if linked at all. Both sides of the game could have been much better off for uncomplicating it in that fashion. Unfortunately, that's not a very realistic goal to have had, so we get what we get.

To me, trying to mix the Quake experience with D&D has always seemed similar to a person suggesting Rugby-Golf. I'm sure it would be an interesting game, but balancing would be overly complex. I'd rather play either of the two games (or both) as seperate, balanced, and polished versions of their core self.

(Okay, I'm lying about golf because they don't let me hit anyone. Rugby all the way. You get the idea, though.)

In other news, the set bonuses on Blizzard's under development page(http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/) got changed. The warrior and paladin 8-pieces are now 6-pieces, and the 8-pieces are uniformly 200 armor. Who says they don't listen to player feedback(read: the warlocks bitching and moaning about the 200 armor set bonus).

The paladin set took the biggest nerf -they removed the 7-piece 10% immunity to fear and the 5-piece 12dmg bonus, and moved the 8-piece to 6 pieces, only instead of proccing 140 spell damage, it now procs 95 spell damage. Ouch. The 3-piece is changed to 40AP, which is much, much worse than the 12dmg. From the perspective of an intelligent paladin they bent it over with the strapon from Se7en.

As far as the other sets go, the warrior gained AP, lost the crit and parry bonuses, and had armor moved from 3-piece to 8-piece.

The new "formula" seems to be:

2 piece:40AP/23dmg depending on class type
3 piece: +8 chromatic resist
6 piece: interesting effect goes here
8 piece: 200 armor

All in all a big step back in quality. Sad :(

I would very much like to know why the 2 piece blue caster set bonus is more +damage than 3 piece arcanist

Because Blizzard realizes that only bad mages wear Arcanist and they're trying to hammer home that point.

and the epics -> blues movement continues

Purple is only one step away from pink.

I can't quite figure out what you're trying to say here. Can anyone else?

Ehh I'll give it a go anyway. We haven't seen the rogue chest yet, and the NS chest is a quality piece of material that nonetheless has <s>nothing</s> little to do with the discussion.

Did that answer your...uh...questions?

Meh, whatever, I meant to talk about the whole set

If they wont be straight up quests or whatever to upgrade existing pieces, what will it be then? Drops we'll have to farm? Quests we'll have to complete? I wonder...

As long as my gear is a cut above (god willing a noticeable cut above) that of the average casual player who gets in half my normal play time and rarely raids, I’ll be happy. I’ve always believe that the end-game has existed for three distinct reasons; (1) to keep organized, active, and dedicated players busy (2) to provide for a interesting and difficult encounters (this goes both ways, I honestly want to believe developers want to both challenge themselves and their players with boss) that simply couldn’t be put into scale inside of a 5 to 15 man environment (3) and lastly to allow for character progression though loot / quest for the type of players I listed above as both a reward and incentive to keep playing.

So for me as long as new raid content is added, the new boss fights in said content are fun and challenging, and they drop some sort of loot that makes my character’s stats / attributes better than the average player I’ll be fine. However like the old saying goes, the devils in the details.

This is basically offtopic but I don't think a new thread would be appropriate. I think Blizzard can largely circumvent this issue by allotting item points(if we should call them that) for items obtained in PVE on stats that will allow their owners to progress in PVE while not granting them an across the board PVP benefit. For example, if bosses were made higher level than they are now and chance to hit or +weapon skill items became necessary, PVE oriented guilds could accumulate gear that allows them to progress in their sphere without it having too drastic of an effect on PVP. Raiders can and should have an upperhand in PVP simply due to the amount of time they spend on their characters, but if Blizzard took this itemization path we wouldn't have to worry about things getting too ridiculous because a good percentage of the ilvl of their items were used to grant them stat bonuses on things that aren't too beneficial to PVP.

Reading over that, it seems like I just said the exact same thing three different ways, I hope I have made myself clear.

Various resists, spirit, mp5, threat altering effects, etc. This is exactly what they did with Tier 1 and 2. There's a reason the r13 pvp sets are superior in pvp for most classes. With AQ sets, they apparently went away from this principle and tossed all the iLvl points into useful PvP stats.