I think people are missing the point; the player characters are meant to be the next generation of heroes. They're not supposed to be nameless, faceless grunts. At least not anymore.
Lorewise we have done way beyond what thrall did to become a warchief, so am expecting to be one in the upcoming expansion.
"El Psy Kongroo!" Hearthstone Moderator
Power creep happened regardless of the weapon color, a Tier 3 weapon outclasses a Tier 1 weapon by far in vanilla it didn't even need to be legendary for that
Stat squish doesn't show it very well so here are the original numbers.
Soulseeker (Kel'thuzad Naxx)
Binds when picked up
Two-hand Staff
142 - 265 Damage Speed 3.20
(63.6 damage per second)
+30 Stamina
+31 Intellect
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 60
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 126.
Equip: Improves your chance to get a critical strike with spells by 2%.
Equip: Decreases the magical resistances of your spell targets by 25.
Staff of Dominance (Golemagg MC)
Binds when picked up
Two-hand Staff
126 - 205 Damage Speed 2.90
(57.1 damage per second)
+37 Intellect
+16 Stamina
+14 Spirit
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 60
Equip: Improves your chance to get a critical strike with spells by 1%.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 40.
- - - Updated - - -
There weren't enough legendary weapons across the board but the power creep across even vanilla tiers still massively stands.
Soulseeker makes grand marshal weapons look like simple toys even.
I admit I never killed KT 60 myself but I did kill Maexxna and her spellblade was already better then the Grand Marshal 1h spellblade.
I cleared about half of naxx, with tier2 mage set being superior to breaking the 8 piece for anything tier 2.5 or less then 6 piece tier3 at the time.
Really to be honest, the last time we were true adventurer was leveling 1-60. Tier 0 set made us sort of the start of our "hero" careers.
Obviously we felt somewhat humbled again exploring outland or northrend during leveling, but imo after defeating the Lich King we were permanent hero status for sure.
MoP made us do some more laid back things like running a farm or capturing pets as side activity, but the main goal was still to represent your faction and fight the evils (mogu/sha/korkrons).
We still had superiors over us then, moreso then now, but now many hero icons of classes are dead or depowered, illidan/velen/khadgar are still used to drive story.
Last edited by Teri; 2017-08-12 at 07:48 PM.
100% this. WoD and Legion went way too overboard with making everyone feel like a special snowflake. In Legion, it's even worse because you're the "top X of your class", and then you see EVERYONE ELSE as the "top X of your class" so what the fuck? Seeing thousands of other Archdruids just feels... wrong.
Dark Legacy Comics summed it up pretty nicely with Artifacts.
D&D makes you the pinnacle of your chosen class when you hit max level because ONLY YOUR PARTY exists in your DM's universe. There's only ~1-6 of you, no one else. WoW does it horribly because there's literally millions of other players ALL being the pinnacle of their class. That's stupid and makes no sense.
Still wondering why I play this game.
I'm a Rogue and I also made a spreadsheet for the Order Hall that is updated for BfA.
That's basicly only for gameplay reasons, theoretically in lore there's only 1 class hall leader wielding X weapon, they even tried to not have too many clones of class hall followers running around, but they won't make everyone elses weapon look like a common blue sword.
Still we aren't the end-alls, theres always some npc more powerful in some ways, friendly and enemy alike, we just need them to drive story.
Last edited by Teri; 2017-08-12 at 07:50 PM.
This is really the crux of it. It's not even necessarily about being a renowned badass or a nameless nobody, it's about the game imposing a prescriptive role on the player as opposed to an open ended one. The former works well in linear single player storytelling, the latter in games with a heavier emphasis on roleplaying and multiplayer. Right now WoW is trying to force a square peg into a round hole with its storytelling, creating a situation where the very existence of other players in an MMO stands in direct contradiction to elements of the core narrative.
It would still be totally fine if the player character was recognised as a hero (though ideally not by everyone -- you still need variety in these things or it becomes tedious), just so long as they were not the hero. The narrative needs to work in such a way that any other player could've potentially done the same things as you without contradicting the storytelling. I'd also go further than this and say that a narrative with as few prescriptive elements as possible and more opportunities to roleplay your character in a unique way would be of great benefit to the game.
I've said for years that something as simple as a cosmetic dialogue choice at the beginning of a quest chain where you tell an NPC who you are would do wonders for the roleplaying and immersion aspect of WoW. If you had the option of telling your primary questgiver that you were a great hero of the Alliance/Horde, an adventurer looking to make your fortune, or a simple traveller just trying to do the right thing, then players would have a chance to become infinitely more engaged in the storytelling experience.
Whenever I play WoW these days and do major story stuff I'm always stuck in the mindset of "this isn't canon", because none of my characters are the people the narrative is claiming them to be. Despite the overall quality and presentation of the storytelling being a lot better these days than it was in the past, I'm more disconnected from it now than ever simply because it insists on trying to jam a single player narrative into an MMO.
Last edited by Wondercrab; 2017-08-13 at 12:46 AM.
I've always that the group of adventurers are just a group of 12 mercenaries (1 for each class). That they always just did stuff for said faction because it entailed money and new stuff.
Man, imagine how much of a shit hole Azeroth would be without these adventurers.
So many people that can't separate Lore from gameplay.
Lol what are you talking about? The special characters would be the canon lore heroes. We ARE NOT CANON. Hctaz the level 110 Death Knight is not a real fucking thing in the Warcraft universe. The characters like Thrall, Jaina, Arthas, Tirion... those are the people who aren't nobodies. THOSE are the people who are supposed to be somebody.
The problem I have with it is that it just doesn't make sense in lore and for any form of roleplaying (not even talking about roleplay that happens on RP servers, but just as general immersion).
I'm pretty sure that lorewise the lich king was defeated by the alliance, not the horde, same for other bosses. Yet, my freshly dinged 110 blood elf paladin her achievments were only:
Killing Dar'khan
Killing some syndicate guys
Killing Alliance in andorhal
Helping a caravan and some paladins
Killing Cultists
Some outland stuff (which I shouldn't even be acknowledged for since I was fighting against Illidan which now appears makes me a bad person.)
Killing Trolls in Zul'drak
Killing Vrykul in Icecrown
Killing nage in vash'jir
Helping Pandaren
Then somehow I'm the leader of an army. The only thing I did as the great and awesome leader was pick up treasures.
Because I'm the greatest treasure gatherer in the world, all the paladins decided that I should pick up the Ashbringer, from my pal Uther, whom I only met once.
An other problem with this whole power creep is, where the fuck does it end? How does it get explained in the lore without retconning shit load of stuff? Why isn't Kadghar leader of the mages and other such heroes, or are we stronger than them as well?
They should never have made it in-game canon that every player was at every battle. It should have stayed as a gameplay mechanic and the player should just have been given credit without giving specifics. It's basically pissing all over the lore while we don't actually exist in the world since a book wouldn't even mention us. Next book with someone like Kadghar, Kadghar won't even remember that guy that ran all over the broken shore and argus killing thousands of demons and slaying Kil'jaeden while also freeing the Titans and being mr. Superfuckingawesomepants.
As someone that enjoys the lore, I have to ignore 90% of what happens cause in the end the player won't matter in the lore anyway.
If we were "nobodies" again, people that want to be some sort of champion can still imagine they are. How it is now people that want to be nobodies can't as long as they can read.
It is blizzard that can't seperate Lore from Gameplay in this case.
Tldr: Player power creep ruins lore. You won't even matter in the lore and in the end is just blizzard telling people they are too stupid to think for themselves of what they are in the World of Warcraft (Adventurer/Mercenary/Hero/Soldier#34059) as was possible in the past.
Last edited by mmoc911be2cf14; 2017-08-13 at 01:40 AM.
As oppose to farming xxxx boss for a new weapon to drop to up those power levels for absolutely no reason other than feeding the grandeur.
Your arguement is rather flawed tbh.
Every new expansions stuff is "special" and powerful in that content. Artifact weapon are not new in that respect. Just rather than farm new weapons each tier you upgrade a single weapon for the expansion.
You could make en green and call em uncommon weapons, they'd still be the same lol
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men: Jean Rostand. Yeah, Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair colour!.
Classic: "The tank is the driver, the healer is the fuel, and the DPS are the kids sitting in the back seat screaming and asking if they're there yet."
Irony >> "do they even realize that having a state religion IS THE REASON WE LEFT BRITTEN? god these people are idiots"