Slanderman - A top Shaman theorycrafter, moderater of Earthshrine, Has Quit WoW

[Malikath]

Tl;dr

i love all the people who think anyone wants to read a TL;DR post-response.

[Cosmic Janitor]

I have to agree with him tbh. I can still stomach most of the things, I play with people I consider close to friends and I only play shaman as a very lowly ranked alt, so that all that obviously helps me enjoy the game still enough to warrant the subscription fee, but I can see how this might not be true for others. When all the box features are "meh" and even your class is utterly broken (and ignored) then there is just nothing left.

[Skildar]

Well maybe the shaman community is getting a bit tired of trying to be nice about it...

A LOT of feedback was posted in Beta about the shitty state of Shaman - other classes were getting tinkered with constantly while we sat waiting patiently and giving feedback. Suddenly it's near release and the class is still DESPERATELY in need of help and they come out with "whoops! Oh yeah...Shaman...uhhhhh we'll get to you in the 8.1 patch!"

Feels pretty bad.

I'm playing enhancement shaman and I've been following closely what happened with every change, and what he's doing is of no use... Yes elemental and enhancement are in terrible spot gameplay wise. But he didn't make his post about that issue alone, instead he made a long discourse about everything telling that none of the extension made sense and was poorly designed, rushed and whatnot. Clearly that's not the smartest way to go about anything, he's just alienating every member of blizz team who could actually give a damn about any of the spoken issues!

[Armourboy]

its on him/her how ? that he/she is enjoying the game instead bitching like child about each 1% of perfromance ?

99% of people never visits forums and still enjoy the hell out of game.

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then people are idiots who should stop hyping up early acces for streamers and take the game for what it is.

you dont like feature A or B ? dont fucking use it its this simple.

people bitching about lack of content ? likfe for real ? people bitching that previous expansions had more "content " ? what more content ? they mean those 5 dailies for golden lotus in MoP ? or 5 dailies in molten front in cata ? realy that was "more content" just because it gave you hc raid quality loot?

what more did you people expect ? you have mythic + and raid while casuals have lfr , WQ , warfront and island expeditions what more do you people want from this game ? to fill the hole in shallow and hollow everyday existence ? to give you source of purpose for life ? get real WoW is just a game it never was anything more or less. you made it into artificial 2nd life its your problem not game's

Have a drink and chill a minute. Nowhere did I say anything about a lack of content or all of this other bullshit you just blew out of your rear. All I stated was that with the way Blizzard talked up Warfronts people thought there would be more to it than a weekly version of Timeless Isle and a loot pinata scenario.

I'm about as casual as you will find on a site like this, I've had just enough time to keep up with emissaries, do the warfront rares, and cap Island Expeditions this week. You can take your 2nd life BS argument and stick it where the sun doesn't shine.

[Louz]

i love all the people who think anyone wants to read a TL;DR post-response.

Thanks, I love you to ;^)

[Lochton]

You don't have enough Azerite to equip his gear. Anyway, I wonder if there's a Retribution Paladin community leader who feels the same?

He's a shaman, I don't need to use his gear. I'll scrap it. Can always use the materials.

[quite an expert in wow]

Reckful came back to play WoW

[Thestuff1992]

Pretty much true with this post. Whoop-de-fucking-do that he quit. I quit back in April. We should make a retroactive thread about it.

Also with the community idea: I wouldn't listen to 80% of the the community suggests. They're all stupid ideas.

Nobody cares that you quit back in April. Why do you think there wasn’t a thread?

Slanderman and people like him on the other hand are a really big part of each class’ community. They create guides that help new players/casuals, they funnel a lot of their time into helping people understand what’s best and why it’s best and they devote even more time to reporting horrible class gameplay interactions to blizzard so it gets fixed because sometimes blizzard fucks up talent rows or adds abilities that just counter each other.

There’s plenty of reasons why there’s a thread for someone important in a community leaving the game, especially when he clearly still loves the game but can’t be assed to play the class/spec he likes because blizzard doesn’t listen.

There’s also a difference between someone like you or me making a suggestion and someone that spends hours of time studying and beta testing a class making a suggestion. I’ve been a lot more involved with the Hpal community since bfa beta and theorycrafters have a ton of really good ideas that would clearly benefit the class or game in a good way. However they also understand that with new additions comes new consequences so they plan for that as well.

TLDR: I and clearly many others value the opinions of theorycrafters over people like you (or even myself). They spend hours and hours going through the motions and pin pointing issues and ways to fix these issues but never get listened to and barely get responses from blizzard. Hell even some of the theorycrafters are game devs/coders and know exactly what they’re asking for.

Thankfully I don’t play a shaman, only time got my hands on ele/enh was during MoP and it felt really fun. Ele felt like a literal cannon even though it’s damage wasn’t great it was still very fun to play. Enhancement was also really fun and had little things you could do to maximize the insane burst window enh had back then. I play hpal and have since 07 and luckily haven’t really experienced any super bad gameplay. WoD was probably the worst time for hpal imo.

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so? good for him for protesting the proper way but can we not have threads about 1 dude or themselves unsubbing?

We don’t. We have a thread about someone important to a community quitting, not some random player like you or i.

[Deleted]

Another player quit the game on the forum, among thousands that quit in silence.

- Bye Felicia
- Can I have your stuff?
- Who?
- Nobody cares
- Stop making quit threads
- This is the best game ever

Stay classy, drones. The Wildstar drones remain classy even as their servers are unplugged.

[HumbleDuck]

He stuck though the WoD mess, so that just shows how crap shammies are atm.

Ele has always been crap with occasional minimal viability here and there. Legion was an exception, BFA though, when I played my ele on alpha, the first thing I did was to drop him as my main.

[kamuimac]

Nobody cares that you quit back in April. Why do you think there wasn’t a thread?

Slanderman and people like him on the other hand are a really big part of each class’ community. They create guides that help new players/casuals, they funnel a lot of their time into helping people understand what’s best and why it’s best and they devote even more time to reporting horrible class gameplay interactions to blizzard so it gets fixed because sometimes blizzard fucks up talent rows or adds abilities that just counter each other.

There’s plenty of reasons why there’s a thread for someone important in a community leaving the game, especially when he clearly still loves the game but can’t be assed to play the class/spec he likes because blizzard doesn’t listen.

There’s also a difference between someone like you or me making a suggestion and someone that spends hours of time studying and beta testing a class making a suggestion. I’ve been a lot more involved with the Hpal community since bfa beta and theorycrafters have a ton of really good ideas that would clearly benefit the class or game in a good way. However they also understand that with new additions comes new consequences so they plan for that as well.

TLDR: I and clearly many others value the opinions of theorycrafters over people like you (or even myself). They spend hours and hours going through the motions and pin pointing issues and ways to fix these issues but never get listened to and barely get responses from blizzard. Hell even some of the theorycrafters are game devs/coders and know exactly what they’re asking for.

Thankfully I don’t play a shaman, only time got my hands on ele/enh was during MoP and it felt really fun. Ele felt like a literal cannon even though it’s damage wasn’t great it was still very fun to play. Enhancement was also really fun and had little things you could do to maximize the insane burst window enh had back then. I play hpal and have since 07 and luckily haven’t really experienced any super bad gameplay. WoD was probably the worst time for hpal imo.

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We don’t. We have a thread about someone important to a community quitting, not some random player like you or i.

they are also the reason why game is so crazy overtuned for average joe player.

if it wasnt for people min maxing everything blizzard wouldnt have to tune game to such unaccesible levels to everybody

you know why people love vanills/TBC so much ? because it wasnt about min maxing it was about having fun in game. something which got lost long time ago - right about time when every beta/ptr got stripped to most basic elements exackly by theorycrafters.

[Misuteri]

While I don't know Slanderman (I think he entered the theorycrafting race after I'd bowed out), I think I can comfortably state that I understand where he's coming from. Given that, y'know, I was one of a handful of people in my era doing the theorycrafting for Elemental Shaman, and who quit because of basically most of the same kinds of things.

Elemental Shaman has basically always been a forgotten spec. Enhancement got some attention because Thrall is cool, Resto was a critical healer, and Elemental was "oh yeah, that exists too". They were consistently underperforming for entire expansions, and the devs, in my time, never really listened to the community. We'd identify an issue, explain exactly what the problem was, give them reams of data demonstrating exactly where it was, and suggest fixes, only to get dead silence from the devs (even in public acknowledgement of the issue, we never expected direct personal responses), with eventually a half-assed partial fix a solid year later, after they'd introduced another problem or three. The high point was introducing the ability to cast Lightning Bolt while moving, which made the class far more active and engaging, and a decision they reverted wholesale at the start of the next expansion, without offering anything to compensate.

Also, if you do this stuff for several expansions, you start to notice something. Not sure slanderman did, though I can see the roots of it in there. Blizzard doesn't introduce new systems each expansion in pursuit of iterative improvement and building on what came before. Each expansion they wipe the slate clean and start over. They'll remove or render pointless or awkward older systems, to introduce the new ones for the new expansion. The game never gets more complex or refined; it just becomes different. And when that difference isn't an attempt to resolve outstanding issues, it becomes clear that there's no interest in actually solving those problems. Just in keeping the players off-balance and running on the Skinner Box treadmill to try and get the cheese. When they get bored of cheddar, swap in some gouda or roquefort in the new "expansion". Same treadmill, new lure. Nothing ever gets better.

Sure, there's iterative gains in graphics and in new class options, but the fundamental gameplay and balance issues aren't ever really addressed, and as a theorycrafter, your entire focus is on identifying gameplay and balance issues, so they can be addressed. It's disheartening to throw that much effort into the winds and have it turn out to be utterly meaningless other than in defining how little the developers care to fix anything.

While the specifics slanderman mentions are new, the pattern isn't. It's the same reasons I quit, in Mists of Pandaria. I came back briefly in WoD, and quickly left again. I haven't been back. Don't expect I ever will be, at this point. And this is why; nothing's changed.

That may all seem really negative and like I'm shitting on people's fun. If you enjoy the game, go nuts. I'm specifically talking about the experience of being a theorycrafter in WoW; it's a completely different outlook. Unless you're the special kind of crazy who'll throw on a movie and spend two hours spamming Chain Lightning at practice targets to get useful proc chance data, I doubt you've got the same kind of perspective, and that's okay.

This is about the best summary I’ve ever seen on the reality of WoW from a class design standpoint.

I mained a warlock for years and hated re-learning the same class over and over again every expansion. In the end there was seemingly only one good spec for each class every expansion. Sometimes there was 1a and 1c but you were never going to get selected for anything but LFR if you were in the 1c spec.

Hybrid classes were almost never top 3 of their alt specs. As a shaman I loved healing them, hated playing DPS as them for obvious reasons.

WoW is a treadmill, reskinned armor, reskinned mounts, every now and again a new animation type for those mounts blah blah blah. Every 3-6 months they give you more of the above. Every two years you re-learn your class and get new art. Oh and you may get some grandfathered title or item that new players won’t ever get and give you your snowflake status.

That IS the game.

As Endus said, if that’s what you enjoy go nuts.

[Nefarious Tea]

Can't quite blame someone for having enough of DPS Shaman being Blizzard's red-headed step child since, well, release basically. Especially Elemental. The art team seems to like them, they have kickass visuals. The gameplay designers, however...

I mean real talk the art team seems to just love everything. They've been the real MVPs for the past two expansions, 100%

[Malikath]

Ele has always been crap with occasional minimal viability here and there. Legion was an exception, BFA though, when I played my ele on alpha, the first thing I did was to drop him as my main.

it wasn't crap in MoP, not even close.
the thing is everything has gotten worse since WoD, for nearly every class/spec combo.

[Flarelaine]

That this gets an infraction. SMH MMO-C.

Well, it is trolling.

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^this is what shitposting without reading anything looks like guys.

don't be this guy, read the thread and don't shitpost.

I've read the thread and I still agree that every single person leaving wow gets blown up these days into yet another "sky is falling" thread. This is the first I find that actually has merit, but I see where that shitposting comes from. It would be easier to have reasonable discussion if people could cut down on the wailing.

[HumbleDuck]

it wasn't crap in MoP, not even close.

That's the minimal viability part. It was ok, but as far as I remember it was no where close to locks.

[Super Kami Dende]

Someone I've never heard of quit a Videogame. The sky is falling mode engaged?

Honestly it feels like people will jump on any "popular"(?) Person quitting the game to try and validate their tiring opinions.

[Faesroll]

Who cares, he's just another player. and also lol at the "massive amount of feedback" a 3 paragraph document

[Thestuff1992]

it wasn't crap in MoP, not even close.

It was pretty sub par for a lot of MoP dps wise. Gameplay wise it was extremely fun to play and so was enhancement. Enhancement was fucking insane during mop as well, the burst capability was just ridiculous.

I was around 15 when mop came out and shaman was my alt. I went into normal with a guild group and saw this enhancement shaman bursting insane numbers I asked him questions for hours and he answered every single one. Forgot his name but he helped me understand the spec a lot more.

As for ele, it was a literal cannon. LB after LB after LB was just so much fun. Hitting lava burst, having it proc from mastery and then having it proc giving you a free insta LB which again procs the mastery was just insanely fun. Ele mastery back then was essentially multistrike but it fit in so well with the spec. During lust you’d be throwing out hundreds of Lightning bolts and lava bursts and EB was included in that if you took it. God it was so much fun. Damage was pretty bad though.

[Primemrip]

My bad. I meant the druid example as one of the very very few times they actualy listend and that it provides good results.
The sad part is, that they don't do it enough.

They still fucked it up because the class is gimped without stars.