Comic for Wednesday 9/4 (Early High Res)
I am not at all interested in WoW Classic; I played it the first time around, that was enough, thank you.
But I am amused by this idea that, basically, you now have a complete roadmap for the changes the game will go through for at each expansion, right? ( I have to assume they'll eventually updated to TBC and WotLK etc, because people won't stick around on Classic if it's "get to level 60 and that's it")
And while I think every class, at one point or another, has been really strong, there hasn't really been any point in WoW's history that I can remember the consensus being "yeah, all the classes are balanced right now." Almost all of the classes have been in shitty places, too.
Usually you pick a class in an MMO and you don't know what the future holds; in this case we know exactly what it holds. So do you invest in a strong class now, knowing the clock is ticking until they get the nerfbat? Or do you invest in a weaker class like Warlocks, knowing they get strong in TBC? Or do you just pretend winter isn't coming, and enjoy the here and now. ;)
Comments (7)
Note sure they'll be doing TBC, tbh. I mean, the call was for _classic_ specifically, not a restart of the WoW progression a decade and a half back. I know that if they do TBC, some will quit because they wanted classic specifically, and some will pine for WotLK. And when WotLK goes out, with its hilariously trivial first few raid tiers, people that wanted classic will *definitely* quit. That all said, I have zero intention of playing classic, because I remember how jacked up it was. During classic, there were exactly 9 raid-viable specs per faction (1 per class, plus fury warriors). If your class possessed a healing spec, that was the *only* raid-viable spec for your class. Warriors were the only viable tanks, because no one else could reach uncrittable. Mages were forced into Frost, because the first two raid tiers were completely and totally immune to fire damage. Hunters spent most of their time just auto-shotting, because they had no mana regen options. Warlocks were forced into Destruction, because the debuff limit on targets made Affliction impossible. Hunters had to carry several bags full of ammunition to raids, and warlocks had to spend an hour or so before raid collecting soul shards to summon the lazy slackers than can't be arsed to run to the raid instance, and to make healthstones one at a time and then manually trade them to people. Ya, no thanks.
It took 6 days for 40+ people to level to 60 and clear Molten Core. What you do is play each class when it's OP, because you know exactly when that's going to be and - despite all the Classic fanbois pretending WoW was ever hardcore - it's never taken much investment to hit endgame.
Ideally, Blizzard uses this opportunity to make different choices for character class changes. While I have no interest in playing classic these days (I did that enough when it was first released), but it would be a great idea to take things that worked in Warcraft Prime and leave out the pain they ended up causing their user base. I'd like to see a Blizzard that isn't tied to the mistakes they made in the past.
It never sounded to me like that was their goal here. Like with Classic, they basically took patch 1.12 because they considered that the most "complete" patch representative of WoW. So I would expect them to launch TBC in a similar manner, and so forth. I don't know how much manpower they'd devote to actually going back and patching/reworking old versions of the game.
I reaaaaalllyyy feel this needs a guy with a sandwich board and a tin hat running small in the background.
My stable of alts seem to reflect every time the enjoyment was nerfed out of a build and I jumped to something else. Of course, these days, I don't know why you'd use something other than demon hunters. Double-jump and glide completely transform maps where you're not allowed to fly until you've soaked up every bit of content there is to be had in a region and ground it into oblivion.
Or do you over-commit and start with what's powerful now, then use that to pre-emptively gear future toons in anticipation of the future patches? And then you get to be ruined by the slight changes to the future patches they implement to better "balance" everything the second time, which simply means neither the build you started with or worked towards are actually best any more... again.