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Originally Posted by Zoltar
Establish depth of gameplay? I could actually argue the converse. Take for example, threat management. When you can see exactly how much threat you are about to pull, quantified, you are being handed easy and concrete information regarding performance. You have little else to do beyond keep below a certain figure. You really have ZERO excuse to ever go beyond that point, other than perhaps your absolute failure to heed the information.
This is lack of depth compared to a situation where.... you simply have an estimate of threat. Say, green being non-threatening.... yellow being mildly... and red being significant or having pulled threat. For player to sit in the yellow range, and not press beyond into the red, without quantifiable information, you'd have to have a good understanding for what your various abilities do, and an understanding of how much you can press that edge. The depth in this case is how a person manages something that is unknown and unquantifiable. Even more in how they deal with a situation IF they pull threat. Do they panic and run around like a fool, or do they react in a manner that assists the tank and prevents their death?
For the player in scenario one..... their gameplay is.... "keep threat below specific value X"
For the player in the second secanrio.... their gameplay is.... "manage abilities and threat keeping it below red, be prepared to take action A, B, or C if I go into red".
I would contend that there is actually more depth of gameplay in the second scenario becasue you have to be ready to react to an event that MAY happen, whereas in the first..... unless you're illiterate, you really have no excuse. You know exactly what the trigger point is. The player in scenario two will have to develop an understanding of their avatar beyond "keep below value X' and learn what they can and can't do. They may learn that.... hey, I can't simply go full throttle. I have to ramp up a bit or I will screw up. And, if I do screw up, I need to be able to do other things. Yes.... in the first case the player MIGHT need to do those things.... but they really have little reason for it due to having exact information.
Agree with this. UI should always present useful information to the player. If there is something significantly lacking, it should be addressed. And yes, the basic UI for WoW is a far leap beyond what it used to be.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltar
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltar
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltar
The situation you describe with DPS meters..... you conflate the argument. "Lack of a DPS meter doesn't add anything to the game, it just takes away. It makes the developers less able to put in things like DPS checks to fights". Right..... cause DPS check fights are exciting. Instead of player having to react to various things, you need to 1) have gear improvements and 2) be able to mash certain buttons in a certain order or in response to a little buff/debuff icon. Yes. Such depth. You fail to mention that the dps meter doesn't take into account any other factors..... say, player A has to maneuver several times throughout the fight due to an AoE or other effect, and their DPS suffers because they are having to stop attacking.... whereas player B can sit parked someplace safe and wail away on the opponent. This is a typical situation for ranged/melee characters and has been..... but.... if we go strictly off DPS meters (which people do) we are losing the full experience. Or... in other cases.... Player A's DPS meter shows they had stunning DPS.... for the 60 seconds they survived.... but player B's DPS meter showed they had less, but they survived the full 5 minutes of the fight.
I'll agree in the sense that it CAN be a nice tool. At the same time, too much dependency on it takes away from the full experience.
With #2.... The plasma debuff and DBM. How does this add to the experience? If anything, it's reducing the challenge.... i.e. not knowing how much work you're going to have to put in on healing someone.... and negating it. If anything, it's a "nerf" to the intended design/purpose of the debuff, if not the fight. The intent was to design something that would challenge the healers. To have a player that they will try to heal and not know when they will have success. Instead, it's a situation of seeing and knowing exactly what's coming next.
Also consider.... how might he game design be different if players did NOT have these tools? Right now, Dev's KNOW you have these tools, so they're having to fine tune fights to very tight parameters, lest a fight be deemed "unchallenging" or "too hard". Again, a fine example.... Ragnaros at Firelands release. It was a fight tuned so tightly to a difficulty level that just could NOT be accomplished without all of these tools and even then, it wasn't going to be done unless it was executed in near-robotic fashion.
I mean, honestly..... and this is a true bastardization of what you describe as being necessary to an MMO.... you're essentially saying it needs to be a planned experience. It's like going on a date, knowing that.... at 8pm, you will leave dinner.... at 8:30pm, you'll make out in the car.... and then, assuming you have rubbed your date's butt the right way enough times.... you'll make your "check" and get some nookie at 9pm. Wtf happened to the excitement of not knowing what's going to happen next? What happened to the experience of having something unplanned happen?
Really, that is the route this has gone. Raid groups no longer go into a boss fight and sort out the challenge for themselves. They no longer go against a boss and say, "Oh hey.... did you guys notice that debuff.... looks like a skull? Yeah. I had that too. It did a ridiculous amount of damage. Healers.... can we clear that off?" Now we watch videos and strategy guides. We get our intel on our enemy beforehand without having to pay the price of gaining it ourselves. The "problem-solving" aspect of boss fights is pretty much gone. Instead, it's a matter of getting people together and rehearsing algorithms. It's no wonder why people burn through this stuff and are then bored f**king senseless.
As if this doesn't happen still. People jump guilds all the time. They get the stuff they need from one group..... and then jump to another guild that may want a skilled player in order to gain more prestige or to raid on the level they think they deserve. That has so very little to do with why previous tier gear is made obsolete. My old guild WAS a "farm league". We took the raw player... built them up, taught them.... and then watched them run off to "hardcore" guilds. So,Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltar
And your plan may sound good in theory, but falls apart in reality also (see what I did there?.... unsupported conclusion also).Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltar
You're only correct so far as WoW is concerned. Only the newest and latest matters and that's largely due to gear. If previous tier gear was still suitable and in demand for current tier, people would still regularly run previous tiers, as was done in TBC. People still ran Kara because honestly, a lot of that gear was still viable for the next tier up. parts of what have broken that system is justice/valor gear. A large part of what brought that problem on though was the RATE of improvement in gear. You simply could NOT step up into the current tier of raiding anymore. In TBC..... BLUES from dungeons in some cases were still desirable, because the stats on the stuff were RELEVANT. Now..... t12 gear is at a SIGNIFICANT DISADVANTAGE comapred to t13.
Huge part of the problem was that "raiders" needed that ego stroke to feel better than their counterparts. Killing a boss wasn't enough. Having something shiny to show for it mattered also. That something shiny needed to be considered better than what the other guy carried, otherwise, "why do it"? What resulted was essentially a "WoW-Cold-War". WoW has been in an 'arms race" and it's getting to the point where devs have looked at it and gone, "Sh*t. How are we going to manage this?"
Oh, the other part of the problem is that PvE and PvP become increasingly difficult to balance. That gear that works nicely for going 6-10 minutes against that 100mil health boss doesn't necessarily scale well against another player with 160k health. We might have to make resilience reduce damage values by 40-50% in order to make it function.
OK........
All that said. Zoltar.... I'd love to see a 'raiding' MMO. I think WoW would be actually a GREAT platform for that. Regular raid content released, say, on a quarterly basis. I also think that to accomplish that, Blizzard would have to separate PvP and PvE and prevent crossover between the two. The two do not play well together and keep getting worse. Blizzard would also have to pony up, accept what they have become, and start managing WoW very differently in the PvE aspect, quit playing lip service to "leveling" and simply engage in the meta-leveling of gear in a rational way. To clarify...... get back to a real "raid progression". "Leveling" in WoW is dead. The only real leveling going on anymore is in gear acquisition.
