Why Legion will still be stale in the end.

[Apexis]

The one good thing about Legion verses WoD, is I have not had beta access, so I have no idea how bad or good it really is or how much of the story or content will actually be scrapped this time. The way they gutted WoD, was shameful and it really screw up the overall story and theme of the expansion. I was not at all impressed. I have also learned over the years to not buy the hype and just play the game. If I actually bought into the hype, I would of quit the game many years ago.

Legion is just another expansion in a almost 12 year old game, its shelf life is only as good as the content they continue to put out. I know one thing, the content patches this time around better actually have content in them and not just slap something in to fill in the gaps for one big patch at the end. I truly wonder if they actually learned their lessons from what they did with WoD? I guess will see if they did in little more than a month.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Just about every game gives me the feeling of being stale just over time. Only thing that keeps me interested is the people I play with. Push comes to shove WoW like many games is just push the same keys in a similar order for hours on end while deciding to go left, right, back, forward during the process. You can build an impressive house around that with features and systems but that's the foundation. So once those system and features get made a custom to and familiar you are often left with the same stale thing. Time invested plays a big role in how fast and often. But it's eventual for me at least. The only reason WoW has lasted so long for me is again the people. Then of course how they change the systems each expansion. Love them or hate them these changes keep things fresher for me.

[Mirishka]

All expansions are stale at the end. Why did you feel the need to make a thread about this?

Pretty much where I stand. Some people like the sound of their own 'wisdom' I guess.

[Plutarch78]

He wants vanilla/BC back. Yeah no thanks.

[Alopex Major]

Basing Legion's mechanics on a game that people play for 2 weeks max per season was one of the most baffling decisions in a series of baffling decisions. That, along with the severe pruning, Blizzard enforcing its own brand of "class fantasy" on everyone, and the inherently grindy nature of artifacts are the reasons I feel like Legion will not be received well. But we'll see, won't we?

[Deleted]

Sure, some people may not like every aspect of the game, however, not liking the majority of the game... it begs the question, why even play by that point?

Because of inertia and loneliness.
I have met a lot of people in the game who openly admited they did not like the gameplay of WOW, and some of them did not even liked RPGs to begin with.
When asked by me why did they keep playing it, nearly always the same reason, for the company, for entering RC with some friends and talk.
This is a pattern i have also seen in D3.

[ItachiZaku]

The game has basically, always felt the same. Started in BC and I really don't see that much of a difference.

[Pantalaimon]

Basing Legion's mechanics on a game that people play for 2 weeks max per season was one of the most baffling decisions in a series of baffling decisions. That, along with the severe pruning, Blizzard enforcing its own brand of "class fantasy" on everyone, and the inherently grindy nature of artifacts are the reasons I feel like Legion will not be received well. But we'll see, won't we?

Your 2 week number is really off. Yes, there are plenty of people that only plya for 2-3 months in a year, but I highly doubt that most of the million of people that play pay a money or gold sub just to not even keep playing to get more than half of their money's worth.

Severe pruning has to happen for hte game to function, sorry. You keep adding 2 abilities for every class every single expansion with no prunes then you'll just end up with dps rotations that don't even utilize every ability before the first one is already off cd, big cooldowns that stack with big cds from older expacs that make pvp burst damage & healing awful again and that contribute to raid boss power creep that makes encounters like MoP style near one shots with each attack, and/or a dozen or more unengaging passives that contribute to classes playing themselves. Think my claims are far out there? See how close this could be to the truth with 5 expacs and no prunes (2 new abilities per spec * 5 expansions = ten things to add to the above problems I mentioned).

If anything Blizzard has been letting go of more of their class fantasy. Look at how much the race & class restrictions have been lifted from Vanilla to now. If you're referring to only certain specs being given certain spells that is to actually make almost every spec actually unique instead of simply having the specs more or less use many of the same abilities in slightly different ways.

[huehuehue]

Severe pruning has to happen for hte game to function, sorry. You keep adding 2 abilities for every class every single expansion with no prunes then you'll just end up with dps rotations that don't even utilize every ability before the first one is already off cd, big cooldowns that stack with big cds from older expacs that make pvp burst damage & healing awful again and that contribute to raid boss power creep that makes encounters like MoP style near one shots with each attack, and/or a dozen or more unengaging passives that contribute to classes playing themselves. Think my claims are far out there? See how close this could be to the truth with 5 expacs and no prunes (2 new abilities per spec * 5 expansions = ten things to add to the above problems I mentioned).

No, these prunes are never needed. They're just design choices. I'm personally fine with them, but I don't think the game would become unplayable if classes had 10 more spells. Keep in mind some spells serve other functions than rotational damage/healing.

[Pantalaimon]

No, these prunes are never needed. They're just design choices. I'm personally fine with them, but I don't think the game would become unplayable if classes had 10 more spells. Keep in mind some spells serve other functions than rotational damage/healing.

The abilities fall into four main categories; rotational (short or longer cds), 'comeback cds' (Ie CC/higher damage/more healing/better survivability) that are longer or shorter as well, passives (both talented & those that are baked in), & fun abilities that are mostly non existent in the current form of WoW (Eg. Eyes of the beast, Eye of Kilrog, etc). Now some of these categories could be further divided into sub categories, such as comeback cds being broken up into 'utility' and 'oh-shit buttons for each role'. However, they all generally stick within the categories listed above.

This is actually a pretty complex issue that can't be summed up into Blizzard never pruning anything. For example, if I pulled the number out of thin air for how many oh-shit button abilities given to classes over the next five expansions & said Blizzard released three of them you then need to decide if the old oh-shit buttons that classes already had should be nerfed or not. If you don't nerf them then you WILL have burst damage/healing/survivability problems in pvp again. If you do nerf the old oh-shit buttons then you're simply appeasing the crowd that doesn't want pruning at the expense of the crowd that doesn't want nerfs. A similar problem arises if you keep adding utility abilities to classes without any pruning. You simply end up with a CC & CC-break shitfest in pvp again, and dungeons in PvE that are not challenging because everyone has multiple ways to single or AOE CC mobs. Pruning is essentially a stat squish for power creep in the actual character abilities themselves.

You say that you don't think that the game would be unplayable if classes had 10 or more spells. I then must ask how you would propose to handle how cds of rotational abilities would work in a World(of Warcraft) where each spec had that many abilities. If you don't increase the cds of the older abilities then you will generally end up with a priority system that theorycrafts which abilities will provide the top damage/healing numbers & there will be abilities that get left out because the top abilities will provide a higher output for using them twice in a given time as opposed to wasting globals on your spec's 10th or 12th ability in the rotation. If you do decide to extend the older rotational abilities' cds in order to ensure every ability is in fact used for every spec then you're going to have to mess with rotations anyway because even if you just tweak the cds the class will feel different during shorter raid encounters, or those with lots of movement.

PvP also presents another issue with no pruning. Even in the current game many specs have abilities that see minimal, or even no play, during pvp when compared to what that spec normally uses in PvE. In a PvP world with no pruning you'd probably still use all of the old & new utility & oh-shit buttons that would be in the game, but when you start having 10+ normal rotational abilities I can guarantee you that you won't be using all of them as you'll just be gimping your performance trying to juggle that many globals along with any utility you throw in there. Players wouldn't be able to even use all of those abilities in a typical rated pvp encounter before you'd end up dead. Pruning makes sure that you don't have a good portion of your bars, keybinds, or spellbook isn't full of stuff you aren't realistically going to be able to use optimally during PvP.

Now let's talk about raiding. I briefly mentioned that raid fights with lots of movement would screw with gameplay that didn't prune anything away. Why do I say that? If you have a very movement heavy encounter (such as Siege in SoO) you will potentially never execute a full dps or healing rotation when your spec has 10+ rotational abilities. The first four, five, or six abilities would probably be off cd long before you could even use ability ten, eleven, or twelve due to how often you might have to be moving around to follow the movement mechanics of the fight. Also, as I mentioned in my previous post, adding more big cds to each spec without stripping anything away will have ripple effects on what Blizzard needs to allow new raid bosses to do to actually attempt to wipe raids. MoP is a classic example. One of the factors that went into the 'fully top off, boss knocks raid down to 1%' model was partially due to classes having too many cds that provided massive healing bursts (in MoP's case it was dps having those abilities to provide burst healing at the same time that they could do burst damage). If you don't prune then raid bosses will be given that much more health & stricter enrage timers to compensate for the amount of dps cds. No-fail and one-shot mechanics will also increase in raids in order to compensate for the amount of tank & healer cds that never get pruned away.

If you want to get rid of pruning then you need to present ideas that will really convince Blizzard to move away from the character progression model that follows the 'trinity' rotational, cooldown, passive model that gives players two abilities from one or two out of those groups every two years.

TL;DR Abilities almost exclusively fall into four categories; rotational, oh-shit/utility cds, passives, and purely fun abilities. If you keep chucking two new abilities from two of the first three of those groups with no pruning of old abilities then there are logical ripple effects that WILL adversely affect raiding, PVP, & dungeons.

No pruning would lead to an overabundance of CC chaining & burst survivability/damage/healing in pvp, rotations that last so long that the last few abilities would be left out in order to play optimally (because the first few abilities would eventually most likely come off of cd long before the tail end of your rotation would be executed), long rotations that would never be fully executed during very movement heavy raid fights, MoP style 'fully top raid off, boss knocks raid down to 1%' raid models (but worse).

EDIT: It is also important to ask how long of a rotation should players honestly be expected to memorize for every spec. I'm exaggerating to prove a point, but should players really be expected to memorize 12, 15, or 20 long rotations/priority systems per class (not including temporary buffs, utility, or long cds) in a world with no pruning and assuming that WoW lasted for many many more years?

[RedGamer030]

"Why this thread will still be stale at the end."

[Nekobe140]

Yes, Legion will probably get stale at the end of the expansion. Almost every game gets "stale" when you're about finished with it, hence why expansions.

[Kickbuttmario]

Blizzard doesn't design by democracy, they design by committee. Blizzard HQ is a group of devs that have pretty liberal freedom to do what they want. This means that instead of directing people in a specific direction of design philosophy, the leads over at Blizzard give their devs a task and let them figure out how to best approach it. Often times, it's a team effort (like the systems team for a class) that does the legwork to create and implement changes to a class, which then gets implemented in game as if it was intentional directed design by a single person.

That's just never the case. You can criticize people like Ghostcrawler all day for 'letting X bad thing happen' when at the end of the day, he's just there to help his group of devs find their assholes. That's why X or Y change can make it live, sit on live servers for months (maybe years) and be a problematic change for all players, and still not get fixed by the devs. Just look at reforging. That's a perfect example of 'design by committee.' We think that it would be great to offer up a way to alter the rolled stats of an item to a degree! Let's do it in Wow!

And then 2 expansions later: 'yeah, we think it would be great to offer RNG generated loot with randomly chosen stats instead of letting players tweak their gear.' Reforging was removed, no matter how good or bad it was for the game. It stood in the way of RNG loot and so it went away.

The problem with Wow, and I've said this for a long time, is that the goal of the dev team is to produce disposable content and constant change. Both of these things disinterest long term players and give Blizzard a platform to be something different to new players each expansion or patch. Think about it. If X or Y idea didn't work the patch before, they just do something different and then market those features as the grabbing point for players who don't know any better (new players). That's why Wow is so cyclical, why the subscriber base fluctuates so much, and why this game is struggling to retain veteran players.

No idea why you ain't getting more love. +1 for your post. You hit the nail on the head.

Most posters here are generally posting from their own personal opinions, but still can't get what Blizzard is doing. I also thank puffypussy to getting it as well.

When Wrath came out with their design choices, I immediately realized that this was the expansion that shit was gonna go backwards, and I was right. Every expansion since Wrath was pretty much built around its philosophy and we had so many issues since then. They are always changing shit back and forth, why not change it to that design. I can't see the harm in all honesty. We had an expansion like WoD designed around Garrisons, which were basically facebook mish mash, and look at how that all turned out.

[Lochton]

All expansions has had a stale end, the difference is us, the players. We didn't consume content like locust back in the days, and now we're at the whining point where having an alt should go up to question at Blizzard. We're at a point where people rather want to be their own. This isn't about the game alone, but the players too.

Oh, and by the way, your statement is of course only a personal opinion, so you're meaning to say "Why I think Legion will be stale in the end".

I do think Legion might have a drought again, like every other expansion has had some, but people have just had more to go through. Good example, when The Burning Crusade hit, you still had lvl 70's in attempt to complete lvl 60 raids.

[Abillioncats]

You know it's cute that you people think you have any idea what you're talking about. Legion hasn't even come out, it's not even complete yet.

WoD is by far the worst expansion, which is more than likely why a lot of people have completely lost faith in the game. But how about we at least give Legion a fucking chance before we say it's 'doomed to be stale' eh?

[Packing an i5]

I wonder what it was about the burning crusade and wrath of the lich king that subscription numbers only continued to swell even after the expansions were nearly over.