WoW: Warlords of Draenor

[Grumman]

Basically, if you pre-ordered the standard edition for the boost, Blizzard will upgrade your account, and just refund the standard edition key. Which you can.... pawn off on a friend? I am reading this correctly, right?

That looks right. You buy [Collector's Edition] plus [Standard Edition + boost], then keep the Collector's Edition and the boost, and give your friend the Standard Edition.

[Civil War Man]

Blizzard is doing a lot of stuff that seem to be designed specifically to pad the subscription numbers in order to avoid the bad press of a big loss in subscriptions just before the release or the bad press of a lackluster number of sales for Warlords.

The first example is the Horde chopper they spent so much time promoting. The only way to claim it is to log in once before September 30th. The effect is that even if you did nothing but purchase a 30 day game card, log in for 2 minutes to get your account flagged for the Chopper, and then logged off and let the account lie fallow until November, it still counts as an active subscription for the quarter because you logged in once.
Then there's the removal of the Legendary Cloak chain. With the 6.0 patch, no one will be able to start the chain if they have not already started it, and when Warlords comes out, the quests in the chain are being removed entirely, so anyone who has not completed it by that point will be unable to complete it. Keep in mind that they are not going to make it easier to get the cloak. The only hurdle they are removing is Test of Valor, which would still leave 2 Battleground wins, Black Prince rep, the Throne of Thunder quests (20 Secrets, 12 Runestones, the Heart of Lei Shen, and killing Nalak), completing some kind of "Know your role" challenge, collecting 5000 Timeless coins, and then defeating 4 Timeless Isle world raid bosses. So if Test of Valor was the one thing holding up your progress, you have somewhere between one to one and a half months to do the rest of that list. Oh, and the buff that increases the drop rate of the Secrets and Runestones is going away in 6.0, too.
Now there's this weird...I'm going to call it a promotion for lack of a better term. If you bought the Collectors Edition, you can also get a digital copy so you can play on the launch date while you wait for your CE to arrive. Then, when it does, Blizzard will let you change the keys and give the digital copy to someone else. That's right, this incredible deal gets you TWO copies of Warlords of Draenor for the price of two!

Honorable mention goes to them announcing they are also going to reset the names of all characters that have not been logged on since the beginning of Wrath, but I think it's pretty much a given that any players who have been gone for that long are never coming back.

At this rate, I half-suspect Blizzard is going to start drunk-dialing people with inactive subscriptions at 2:00 in the morning and start begging to be given another chance.

[TheFeniX]

The chopper thing is kind of dumb because they're missing out on pushing an entire faction to resub before launch. I guess they won't bother backing out of their "winner stays, losers pays" idea for getting the chopper. Also of note is that the JP heirloom gear vendors are going away for a while after 6.0, so some people might resub just to farm out the gear for alts.

I forgot to burn off all my excess JP before I quit, but I'm not resubbing just for that. However, I had a raiding buddy come back to the game who wants to get his "Ahead of the Curve" achievement and I told him if his pug times aren't insane like they use to be (he games late due to his job hours), I would dust off my DK and help him out. It's not like a 3-button rotation is hard to get back into.

[TheFeniX]

Ghetto edit:

Damn, thinking about it: I can't recall so much content being shafted WRT a new expansion. I just remembered that even brawler's guild is being locked until they get the WoD content up. While I realize they don't want people cheesing the content at higher levels (even though I consider it cheesy that I did it at around 540 when some people did it 40-80 ilvls below that), but with everything piling up, I can't really find fault with the "do everything to get people to resub, except add any new content for them to do" idea that's been floating around.

I mean, they can't even throw together a couple of shitty dungeons, scenarios, or raid bosses? Like, give me something besides "RESUB NOW OR LOST FOREVER!" for fucks sake. Thankfully I don't care about that kind of shit and got done what I wanted to either way.

[Kuja]

I mean, they can't even throw together a couple of shitty dungeons, scenarios, or raid bosses? Like, give me something besides "RESUB NOW OR LOST FOREVER!" for fucks sake. Thankfully I don't care about that kind of shit and got done what I wanted to either way.

Honestly from the feedback coming out of beta it sounds like if you're into anything but raiding there's not going to be jackshit at 100 either. A handful of heroics, a couple dailies, garrison building, Ashran (PLEASE LIKE ASHRAN GUYS).

Also a lot of the new model faces look atrocious.

[Civil War Man]

Honestly from the feedback coming out of beta it sounds like if you're into anything but raiding there's not going to be jackshit at 100 either. A handful of heroics, a couple dailies, garrison building, Ashran (PLEASE LIKE ASHRAN GUYS).

Yeah, the impression I'm getting is that unless they release something even worse, putting all of their PvP eggs in the Ashran basket will probably be considered the biggest misstep of the entire expansion, if not one of the biggest missteps in the history of the game. And this is coming from someone who never did PvP. We're talking probably less than 200 total Honorable Kills for all of my characters, spread over my entire time playing. And I started in late Burning Crusade, played all through Wrath with a short break during 3.2, played all through Cataclysm with a 9 month break during Dragon Soul, and played through Mists before quitting for good the day after 5.3 launched (yes, I thought it was that atrocious).

I mean, just look at the options for PvP during the rest of the came. Vanilla introduced Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and Alterac Valley (and that's no including unorganized world PvP like Tarren Mill/Southshore). BC just added Eye of the Storm, but introduced Arenas with Ring of Trials, Circle of Blood, and Ruins of Lordaeron, and had world PvP objectives like Halaa and the towers in Hellfire and Zangarmarsh. Wrath added Strand of the Ancients, then later Isle of Conquest, the Dalaran and Ring of Valor arenas, and Wintergrasp. Cataclysm added Battle for Gilneas, Twin Peaks, and Tol Barad. Mists had Silvershard Mines, Temple of Kotmogu, Deepwind Gorge, and the Tiger's Peak and Tol'Viron arenas. Warlords adds Ashran, and nothing else, unless you want to count the Tarren Mill/Southshore battleground they are making available only for max level players during the anniversary.

Which reminds me, that's another "Subscribe now or you don't get this" thing. The anniversary editions of the Molten Core raid and Hillsbrad battleground is only available for max level players during the anniversary, and the anniversary starts after Warlords is released. So if you don't buy Warlords (or if you don't rush to level 100 once you get it), you don't get to participate.

[White Haven]

It...it...they're FINALLY doing a Hillsbrad battleground? Sonofabitch, that conjures a whole raft of memories from the post-Honorable Kill, pre-Battleground era...

[Highlord Laan]

Hillsbrad battleground? What the hell is there to fighter over? The writers fiat'd all that into horde territory. I expect them to have the forsaken take over and rebuild Stromgarde next, then tell Alliance players that fixing the Stormwind park is too difficult.

[Civil War Man]

The Hillsbrad battleground doesn't exist in the current continuity. The map is based on pre-Cata Hillsbrad. It and the max level MC raid were created specifically for nostalgia purposes, and will only be accessible during the 20th anniversary (though they have hinted that they might show up again in future anniversaries if they are popular).

[Kuja]

Yeah, the impression I'm getting is that unless they release something even worse, putting all of their PvP eggs in the Ashran basket will probably be considered the biggest misstep of the entire expansion, if not one of the biggest missteps in the history of the game. And this is coming from someone who never did PvP. We're talking probably less than 200 total Honorable Kills for all of my characters, spread over my entire time playing. And I started in late Burning Crusade, played all through Wrath with a short break during 3.2, played all through Cataclysm with a 9 month break during Dragon Soul, and played through Mists before quitting for good the day after 5.3 launched (yes, I thought it was that atrocious).

WoD is almost all the way across the board a "less for more" expansion. Fewer pvps, fewer dungeons (unless they add more in patches, unlike MoP), fewer raids, no flying, etc

But what's really striking his how across-the-board negative the beta reactions are. Reams and reams of posts coming out about stuff like how dull the new professions are with the work orders system and materials being gated. How garrisons aren't like a farm at all, but basically a mandatory part of questing. How questing itself is basically back to cata-style rails. How people miss flying at level cap. How certain classes (arms wariors are being the loudest) just arn't fun to play post-prune. How new character models (female tauren being the worst offender) are slapdash and ugly. How the story is still atrocious. How WoD zones look pretty but Blizz is messing with the graphics engine in a way that makes them look worse on high settings. About the only positive feedback I see on the beta forums is extremely generic asstonguing like "Blizzard is doing a great job! Keep up the good work!" with no real substance to it.

Which is...weird. Subsets of the wow populace have always decried incoming changes as the death of wow, but I've never seen a beta and prerelease be recieved so...languidly. People were hype for BC, for Wrath, and even for Cata and MoP even those performed much poorer. It really does feel like WoD is going to be the one that blows up in Blizzard's face.

I think you have something there with the number of gimmicks Blizzard is throwing at the playerbase. The chopper, the CE, the warnings about brawl guild and the legendary removal, the anniversary BG - it's all gimmicks. Blizzard comes across as hitting the panic button because either they can't or just don't want to work overtime putting in lasting content - getting the new models just right, or designing a few more dungeons, etc. Instead it's all "look at this promotion!!" or "hurry before it's gone!" On the subject though-

The Hillsbrad battleground doesn't exist in the current continuity. The map is based on pre-Cata Hillsbrad. It and the max level MC raid were created specifically for nostalgia purposes, and will only be accessible during the 20th anniversary (though they have hinted that they might show up again in future anniversaries if they are popular).

Back when I still played, I was always dead-set against the idea of a deathmatch BG for a number of reasons, and I think the TMVSSBG is...not going to go over as well as Blizz might hope. I'm not going to say it'll be a bomb, I'm sure plenty of people will enjoy it for nostalgia and the anniversary present factor' but I think a lot of players are going to end up giving it one or two tries and then ignoring it.

-100v100 is a lot of fucking players in a pretty small space. Remember the lag in Wintergrasp when it would get towards the end and everyone was concentrated in the keep? For some people, with the amount of players and spell spam going on, TMVSS is going to be a nice screenshot. That's going to harm the BG as players with better machines kill off those who don't, who will then hurt their team by forcing them to essentially eat an empty player slot.

-with no ilevel settings (and a 91-99 bracket) gear and healing are going to be king. Moreso even than in other BGs, where a less-geared and poorly-balanced team can defeat an enemy that might be stronger in strict numbers by outplaying them and gaming the objectives, which act as a leveller. But in a TDM there's no objectives aside from killing the other team. Better gear = you win. Period. A team that gets the balance tilted against them is going to have to outplay their opponent extremely hard to make up for it. Which leads into-

-if you think people scream and drop BGs now, just wait until you see a TDM. As above, in a TDM there's no way to level the field by being smarter at objectives. You just have to kill faster. And if the other team starts killing faster, people are just going to drop. Leaving the other team to kill even faster. I think it's actually smart move on Blizz's part to make TMVSS a temp bg, because I think players would burn out on a permanent one very quickly.

[Civil War Man]

One slight correction on the TMvSS BG. I hear they wised up and downgraded the number of players from 100v100 to 40v40. Probably because they realized that the former would make it completely unplayable for anyone with a bad connection or old computer.

[Kuja]

Ah, yeah that'd be smart of them.

[Sharp-kun]

*shrug*

I've not read a lot of beta feedback, but I've been enjoying it a lot.

[TheFeniX]

I'm interested to see if and how the nostalgia crashes and burns. I wasn't there for classic WoW, but part of the fun with impromptu Rebel vs Imperial battles in Galaxies was the haphazard way everything was put together: "FeniX, the Imperials are at our doors, quit fucking around in the Squill cave and get over here!" and the massive amounts of imbalance. Removing that and making it a structured battle is going to remove that element and I'm assuming it's going to be boring as Hell and this is ignoring the valid points Kuja brought up.

From what I've talked to guys about Molten Core: as much as people want to talk it up, it was actually an incredible easy instance. What limited the exposure were the ridiculous attunments, gear gates, class selection, and time investment. Basically, if you could get the right group together and it wasn't filled with morons, you were almost guaranteed to get it down. I talked to one guy who healed during the MC days and he just left his camera pointed at his feet to watch for fire and was basically playing Minesweeper with his healing because otherwise his FPS would crater.

Just compare the Lich King fight to MC Ragnaros (or any boss in there, really). Now, I'm not saying all fights need 8 million phases and one-shot mechanics, but I guess what I'm saying is: MC is easy enough to port to max level considering LFR is a meat-grinder anyways.

[Darmalus]

I was there for classic WoW, and I'll tell you it was ALL shiny newness and nostalgia.

Molten Core looked like every other lava cave, that is, and inside-out flaming dog turd. Nothing but the same muted browns, blacks and reds, people were constantly lost because there wasn't anything you could use as a landmark other than corpses, both player and NPC. Half the group was afk autoattacking, including me because I was a fire mage, didn't know about respecing and had a wand that did holy damage, so maximizing my DPS was wanding. During various boss battles my job was running a decurse macro, so I spun my mousewheel for 10-15 minutes at a time while reading a paperback. Also, LOOT THE FUCKING COREHOUND YOU AFK BASTARD!

TMvSS was fun in the sense that it broke up the tedious leveling process. The participants were a wide range of levels and gear who mostly had no idea how to use their unbalanced and often poorly designed abilities. We waded in, drunkenly oblivious to strategy or tactics, and eventually wandered away with the thrill of having done something other than collect bear asses but little understanding of what just happened. I'd guess that even BG bots would be like PvP gods compared to us back then.

And for all my negative remarks, WoW was still head and shoulders above it's competition back then.

[Lord Revan]

Alot of people seem to forget or don't even know that 90% of the early vanilla raids' difficulty was getting enough people with good enough resist gear, I mean MC, no fire resist, impossible at lvl 60, with suffient fire resist cakewalk, unless you used greens and didn't have the spell/attack power. same was more or less true of DWL but with the need for Ony scale cloak.

something I assume we all can agree was a good thing was the "removal" of bosses that need to resist gear to be beaten as it made thing that was outside the encounter the ultimate arbiter of success.

[Civil War Man]

Alot of people seem to forget or don't even know that 90% of the early vanilla raids' difficulty was getting enough people with good enough resist gear, I mean MC, no fire resist, impossible at lvl 60, with suffient fire resist cakewalk, unless you used greens and didn't have the spell/attack power. same was more or less true of DWL but with the need for Ony scale cloak.

something I assume we all can agree was a good thing was the "removal" of bosses that need to resist gear to be beaten as it made thing that was outside the encounter the ultimate arbiter of success.

I don't know if that was 90% of the difficulty. From the horror stories I've heard, it sounded like the difficulty was more evenly divided between people wrangling, players being generally clueless, poor class balance (like Warriors being the only tank class that could reliably tank anything), and gathering the proper gear and consumables to get around class problems or fight mechanics (besides resist gear, I remember hearing stories about players farming Felwood for, IIRC, Demonic Runes so they could regen mana in raids).

[Lord Revan]

Alot of people seem to forget or don't even know that 90% of the early vanilla raids' difficulty was getting enough people with good enough resist gear, I mean MC, no fire resist, impossible at lvl 60, with suffient fire resist cakewalk, unless you used greens and didn't have the spell/attack power. same was more or less true of DWL but with the need for Ony scale cloak.

something I assume we all can agree was a good thing was the "removal" of bosses that need to resist gear to be beaten as it made thing that was outside the encounter the ultimate arbiter of success.

I don't know if that was 90% of the difficulty. From the horror stories I've heard, it sounded like the difficulty was more evenly divided between people wrangling, players being generally clueless, poor class balance (like Warriors being the only tank class that could reliably tank anything), and gathering the proper gear and consumables to get around class problems or fight mechanics (besides resist gear, I remember hearing stories about players farming Felwood for, IIRC, Demonic Runes so they could regen mana in raids).

maybe not 90% but my main point was that most of the "difficulty" of vanilla raids came from external issues rather then internal, I mean could think of a boss encounter that was utterly 100% impossible to do if everybody in your raid didn't have 1 specific item that dropped or was crafted from materials that dropped from a different raid being introduced now, yet Nefarian in Blackwing lair was like that since you needed Onyxia scale cloak to deal with Shadowflame.

[TheFeniX]

something I assume we all can agree was a good thing was the "removal" of bosses that need to resist gear to be beaten as it made thing that was outside the encounter the ultimate arbiter of success.

That and needing 40 people with said resist gear which is basically a huge time investment. This was my problem with MMOs at the time: it was far less about skill and much more about just grinding. As many complaints as I have about WoW now, at least the better you get at a fight, the more you can cheese it. And with Mythic going 20-man only, Blizzard also doesn't have to balance between 10 and 25 man, which lead to a lot of guild drama due to the ongoing debate on which one is easier/ gives the best rewards.

Anyways, there's already a lot of backlash against the tanking changes for 6.0 on the PTR. Even with epic loots, your survivability is changed. Many fights, I only have to pop specific cooldowns if things get hairy, but supposedly even at my gear level (568 IIRC, been a while and I logged out in my Ret set), even trash can lay you out because Blizzard wants tanks to be much more reliant on healers. I'm suspecting Cata level DPS queues as Tanks bail like they did with the tanking changes to just Paladin alone at the end of LK.

Can't say I'm complaining: FFXIV is lousy with tanks because it's just so fucking easy. If you've got the gear and can cycle what CDs you have: the rest is up to the healers. Unlike in WoW where little time is spent healing my Paladin because my gear is slotted well enough I can outheal everyone on certain fights. A shame because I spent most my time gearing up my tank, but the new guild we're in wants more good DPS: It's my Cata experience all over again.

[Civil War Man]

maybe not 90% but my main point was that most of the "difficulty" of vanilla raids came from external issues rather then internal, I mean could think of a boss encounter that was utterly 100% impossible to do if everybody in your raid didn't have 1 specific item that dropped or was crafted from materials that dropped from a different raid being introduced now, yet Nefarian in Blackwing lair was like that since you needed Onyxia scale cloak to deal with Shadowflame.

Yeah, that does fall in line with what I've heard. Apparently during Vanilla and even BC one of the biggest barriers to progression was less the difficulty of the bosses and more the existence of other guilds. Namely, guilds regularly got stuck at certain tiers because guilds that were further along in progression would poach their most promising members to fill out gaps in their roster, because it was easier to recruit geared players from the previous tier than it was to start re-running all the previous tiers to gear up a new player or an alt. So a Naxx guild might recruit a Warrior from a guild doing AQ so they have enough tanks for 4 Horsemen, causing the AQ guild to do the same with a BWL guild, which then does it to a MC guild, and now the MC guild has to gear up a new player from scratch to replace the tank that left.

[Darmalus]

Yeah, that does fall in line with what I've heard. Apparently during Vanilla and even BC one of the biggest barriers to progression was less the difficulty of the bosses and more the existence of other guilds. Namely, guilds regularly got stuck at certain tiers because guilds that were further along in progression would poach their most promising members to fill out gaps in their roster, because it was easier to recruit geared players from the previous tier than it was to start re-running all the previous tiers to gear up a new player or an alt. So a Naxx guild might recruit a Warrior from a guild doing AQ so they have enough tanks for 4 Horsemen, causing the AQ guild to do the same with a BWL guild, which then does it to a MC guild, and now the MC guild has to gear up a new player from scratch to replace the tank that left.

This is what happened to my guild in BC, spent the entire expansion stuck in Kara (and later ZA). We kept trying to build up to 25 man, but we kept losing people to poaching. Eventually our GM got fed up and we just formed a single, reliable 10 man group and told everyone else in the guild if they wanted to raid they best go elsewhere.

My experience in MC was slightly different, since it was a multi-guild alliance trying to scrape together enough warm bodies to blunder our way through, which is probably why there were so many organizational issues.

[White Haven]

...Would the name 'Mirax' ring any bells, Darmalus?

EDIT: For clarity, I am not Mirax.

[Darmalus]

...Would the name 'Mirax' ring any bells, Darmalus?

EDIT: For clarity, I am not Mirax.

If we did meet, please don't take it the wrong way if I don't remember you.

Darmalus, troll mage on the US Malfurion server. Guild was Horde for Hire.

[White Haven]

Oh good. That would have been slightly odd. And no, I wasn't Mirax, but he was the...exceedingly outspoken organizing foce behind just such a multi-guild coalition, so I had to wonder.

[Kuja]

Well, Titan has officially folded, to the surprise of absolutely no one who's been paying attention for...a long time now. This cements my belief that Rob Pardo left Blizzard not because of squealy noises about women and SJWs but rather because he was getting frowned on after having worked on Titan for years and produced no headway, followed by a transfer back to WoW to work on WoD which was soon catching hell on its own. Now, I don't point a finger at Pardo for single handedly fumbling Titan or anything - sometimes projects hit pitfalls that are nobody's fault, sometimes they hit walls, sometimes bad things happen - but sometimes enough bad things happen that someone is going to catch hell for costing the company money. It's pretty clear that transferring Pardo's team over did WoD no favors; if you believe the rumors they essentially walked in, scrapped a great deal of what was already on the books and practically restarted the entire expansion. The WoD alpha-betas have subsequently been a mess with stuff like the Karabor/Bladespire-Ashran debacle and no-flying exploding across the playerbase, and of course the stuff we gleaned from Tom Chilton's interview.

Still, as much as I loathe elements of the wow dev team, it's a bit sad to see Titan's official end without so much as a screenshot of what was in the works. It was supposedly a new IP which might have been a breath of fresh air at blizzard, which is now increasingly dependant on its holy trinity of WC-SC-Diablo and while they're still quite financially stable, the latest iterations of their beloved trio haven't garnered much goodwill.