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  1. #541
    Quote Originally Posted by rrayy View Post
    Excvept he isn't posting facts. That graph contains nubmers that are in no way provable because Blizzard stopped reporting sub number and nobody has any idea what they are anymore. People now outright make them up to fit whatever agenda they have.
    He was mainly mentioning sub count from classic through wotlk, when the game was at its peak, so he's right on that count.

    But yea, there is no solid proof what the sub counts were at since subs dropped substantially during WOD.

  2. #542
    Quote Originally Posted by JavelinJoe View Post
    I think you'll find its your attitude that is detestable FpicEail, you are the one on the attack here, im allowed to have an opinion, and frankly I dont care if you detest it, nobody else has ever said that my attitude on SV hunter is 'detestable'
    I'm allowed to have an opinion as well, and that opinion is that it's selfish and detestable to say something that pissed off so many people (and made many quit) is a good thing.


    Quote Originally Posted by JavelinJoe View Post
    Also you are factually wrong, Blizzard came out and literally said originally SV hunter was meant to be melee.

    What part of Hunter has the word Ranger in it anyways?
    Original Hunter manual from 2004 says Hunters are unique because they are ranged.

    https://i.imgur.com/kBVr5Uc.png

    So I am factually correct (as is usually the case). Hunters were always intended to use a ranged weapon. They may have had melee to some extent in the past and Survival may have buffed those melee aspects, but at NO point before Legion was there a Hunter spec that was intended to not have a ranged weapon and stick exclusively to melee range. Yes, that includes Survival when it still had Lacerate.

    P.S. The guy who said that Survival was meant to be melee in Classic and that it was returning to its roots in Legion was someone they pulled from Diablo and had no experience in WoW class design. This is part of the reason the sweeping Hunter changes in Legion turned out so badly.

  3. #543
    Quote Originally Posted by Th3Scourge View Post
    For the love of god, please remove set specs from the game. Your talent choices should determine your spec, not just arbitrarily selecting an option in a menu and *presto* now I'm a Frost DK and I have no memory or recollection of being able to cast a death coil.

    I play a class, not a spec. Without doubt the worst part of modern WoW is the class design
    exactly, they made "sub classes" out of something that was just a bunch of random basic abilities improvements
    BUT
    while I could easily see for instance rogue/hunter/warrior as single spec with wide variety of talents there are classes that are far more tricky and monks which are both thematically and mechanically pretty much a 3 classes glued together.
    There is also clearly visible disparity between "spec names" as some specializations answer question of "what's your specialization?" while others state outight their subclass, in a way like:
    Specialization: combat, feral combat, assassination, subtlety, fury - some of these names are dumb as F and some just silly
    Sub class: Brewmaster, Windwalker, Mistweaver,

  4. #544
    Quote Originally Posted by rrayy View Post
    Excvept he isn't posting facts. That graph contains nubmers that are in no way provable because Blizzard stopped reporting sub number and nobody has any idea what they are anymore. People now outright make them up to fit whatever agenda they have.
    Please read my post again. I not only mention Blizzard refusing to release numbers after a point, and I'll freely admit the graph stops mid MoP. The relevant part, is that if the numbers were compelling, they'd continue to post them. The numbers being the opposite of compelling, is why they stopped. I remember 2 or 3 quarters worth of investors calls where the numbers were reported as declining by 250kish each quarter, before Blizzard decided to stop reporting them altogether.

    I have no idea where the numbers are now, I even stated it would be interesting to see them. I doubt they are any better than they were in MoP, or WoD. But it would be interesting to see. I'd love to be wrong about a game I once had the biggest nerd boner over.

    Facts, are what I am posting. Feel free to disagree with me all you want to, but I am giving the facts. No agenda here, except to keep the facts straight.

    Quote Originally Posted by kaminaris
    Everything you said is your personal opinion which is nothing close to fact. Deal with it.
    Um, I posted numbers. Numbers independently verifiable as... fact. Go for it. I'll wait.

    Telling people to 'deal with it' is what you do when your argument is nonsense.

    The part that you seem to be missing, it doesn't matter why you quit. It doesn't matter if you still play. Objective numbers show the facts behind how many people actually played, and when. Objective numbers also show how many total players had made accounts up to a certain point. The numbers, that you refuse to acknowledge, which you continue to insist are 'my opinion,' show you objective facts about the success of any given version of the game, comparatively.

    Without getting mired in specifics, without accounting for personal anecdote, you can take a fucking step back, look at these numbers, and draw basic conclusions about the quality of the game from them. Players don't have to quit for any specific reason. We have real world numbers showing exactly when they quit. Keep trying to educate me on statistics... you don't even know what variables we're discussing here.

    You might as well be arguing newest battle pets objectively making BFA better than Vanilla...

    Quote Originally Posted by otaXephon
    Drawing an incorrect conclusion from unknowable information isn't a fact. It's a delusion. There's nothing to "deal with." It's a terrible argument that is easily defeated by a very small level of critical thinking.
    What is unknowable about released numbers? Are you even reading anything I've posted? Or do you just see some text and spew a bunch of nonsense to be contrarian? I'm not sitting here accusing others of delusional thinking or dismissing what you say with my 'minuscule brain powers.' You keep wanting to discuss nuance, personal experience, player trends, all kinds of nonsense that has honestly fluctuated so much over the last 15 years no one has a consistent experience to share about it. No one.

    If this were the I Remember That Time When thread where we sit around talking about the things we loved and hated about Wow, I'd be sharing all sorts of personal opinions on parts of the game. But I'm not. I'm simply speaking facts.

    I started by pointing out numbers being an indicator of when Wow was at it's peak design. It's hard to argue that any version of the game is better designed than the version of the game that originally launched and grew Wow into a titan in the MMO industry... which was vanilla. You can insist there was another better version, based on whatever personal anecdotes or favorite patch cycle you have, but the numbers don't support it. Blizzard can continue to release expansions every 2 years, call them the Best They've Done Yet, act like Wow is this super popular MMO that continues to Mold the Industry, and I'll continue to sit here and point out that it peaked in vanilla.

    Everything about it, from the design of the game to the love shared by everyone about it, Vanilla was the best designed version of Wow.

    Objectively.

  5. #545
    Quote Originally Posted by Eroginous View Post
    What is unknowable about released numbers? Are you even reading anything I've posted? Or do you just see some text and spew a bunch of nonsense to be contrarian? I'm not sitting here accusing others of delusional thinking or dismissing what you say with my 'minuscule brain powers.' You keep wanting to discuss nuance, personal experience, player trends, all kinds of nonsense that has honestly fluctuated so much over the last 15 years no one has a consistent experience to share about it. No one.

    If this were the I Remember That Time When thread where we sit around talking about the things we loved and hated about Wow, I'd be sharing all sorts of personal opinions on parts of the game. But I'm not. I'm simply speaking facts.

    I started by pointing out numbers being an indicator of when Wow was at it's peak design. It's hard to argue that any version of the game is better designed than the version of the game that originally launched and grew Wow into a titan in the MMO industry... which was vanilla. You can insist there was another better version, based on whatever personal anecdotes or favorite patch cycle you have, but the numbers don't support it. Blizzard can continue to release expansions every 2 years, call them the Best They've Done Yet, act like Wow is this super popular MMO that continues to Mold the Industry, and I'll continue to sit here and point out that it peaked in vanilla.

    Everything about it, from the design of the game to the love shared by everyone about it, Vanilla was the best designed version of Wow.

    Objectively.
    The numbers you're quoting are completely fucking meaningless because we're missing key information Blizzard will never release. Once again, we don't know what kept people engaged and we sure as hell don't know what caused people to quit. (I said this in my last response to you.) You say it's "great design" that caused Vanilla to be as popular as it was, but unless you polled every player who played in Vanilla and a majority of them said, "Yes, I'm playing because the design is great," you're just filling in the blanks with your own opinion. On the flip side, even though Vanilla represented a period of growth for subscribers, we have no way of knowing how many players quit or the reasons why they quit. For all we know, every exit poll ever completed for the entirety of Vanilla could have said, "your game design sucks." The only correct conclusion we can draw from that graph is that during Vanilla more people started to play than those who quit. Anything else is guessing. As such, it is intellectually dishonest to support any argument with this incomplete information and it's even more intellectually dishonest to insist you're being objective when you're simply trying to "prove" your opinion is a fact.
    Last edited by Relapses; 2019-10-23 at 05:11 PM.

  6. #546
    I don't know what are the "metrics" that they follow to decide about changes, but if they had something right in Legion (was it just luck?) they made it many times worse in BfA, by removing abilities, removing artifacts and fubar'ing talents.
    I don't believe they listen to forum soldiers fighting for simplicity, because I don't think I've met any.

  7. #547
    There is a complete talent system overhaul coming that will be moving away from specs as we know them.
    Lead Game Designer

    YouTube Channel

    https://www.youtube.com/@Nateanderthal

  8. #548
    Quote Originally Posted by Unholyground View Post
    There is a complete talent system overhaul coming that will be moving away from specs as we know them.
    Source?
    The only way i will give up Archeage Unchained is with a deep talent system.

  9. #549
    Quote Originally Posted by Shadoowpunk View Post
    Source?
    The only way i will give up Archeage Unchained is with a deep talent system.
    It is the only way to keep people properly invested in their class.
    Lead Game Designer

    YouTube Channel

    https://www.youtube.com/@Nateanderthal

  10. #550
    Unpopular opinion i guess... it's not.

    i actually think that it's mostly on a good spot, especially if you take into the account the amount of factors involved. 36 specs, talents, benthics, azerite traits, azerite essences, ilvl ranges, 4 difficulties of raids, encounter design (single target vs cleave vs whatever).

    Sure, there are the occasional stand out classes (i'd say shadow priests right now, holy palas in regards to healing and the necessitity of rogue\shrouds in m+), but every class\spec is viable, and most are perfectly balanced.

    So no, it's not 'so bad', but it could use some tweaks here and there, and i'd rather they do weekly\monthly tweaks here and there to fine-tune it than wait 3-6 months to change some aspects. Also, give a sort of shroud to hunters (mass camouflage?) or some other class. But that's utility messing with class identity, so who knows.

  11. #551
    Quote Originally Posted by hulkgor View Post
    Unpopular opinion i guess... it's not.

    i actually think that it's mostly on a good spot, especially if you take into the account the amount of factors involved. 36 specs, talents, benthics, azerite traits, azerite essences, ilvl ranges, 4 difficulties of raids, encounter design (single target vs cleave vs whatever).

    Sure, there are the occasional stand out classes (i'd say shadow priests right now, holy palas in regards to healing and the necessitity of rogue\shrouds in m+), but every class\spec is viable, and most are perfectly balanced.

    So no, it's not 'so bad', but it could use some tweaks here and there, and i'd rather they do weekly\monthly tweaks here and there to fine-tune it than wait 3-6 months to change some aspects. Also, give a sort of shroud to hunters (mass camouflage?) or some other class. But that's utility messing with class identity, so who knows.
    Archeage Unchained has 220 classes.

    Dont give Blizzard any excuses.

  12. #552
    Quote Originally Posted by hulkgor View Post
    Unpopular opinion i guess... it's not.

    i actually think that it's mostly on a good spot, especially if you take into the account the amount of factors involved. 36 specs, talents, benthics, azerite traits, azerite essences, ilvl ranges, 4 difficulties of raids, encounter design (single target vs cleave vs whatever).

    Sure, there are the occasional stand out classes (i'd say shadow priests right now, holy palas in regards to healing and the necessitity of rogue\shrouds in m+), but every class\spec is viable, and most are perfectly balanced.

    So no, it's not 'so bad', but it could use some tweaks here and there, and i'd rather they do weekly\monthly tweaks here and there to fine-tune it than wait 3-6 months to change some aspects. Also, give a sort of shroud to hunters (mass camouflage?) or some other class. But that's utility messing with class identity, so who knows.

    you're looking at it from the perspective of balance and balance only.. it's not about balance, it's about design

    raid difficulties and ilvl ranges do not matter when it comes to design.. really nothing should come in a way of class design, it's by far the most important part of the game

  13. #553
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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadoowpunk View Post
    Archeage Unchained has 220 classes.

    Dont give Blizzard any excuses.
    yeah and hardly any of them are balanced.

    At any point in time theres like 20 meta classes in archeage.

  14. #554
    Quote Originally Posted by TheRevenantHero View Post
    I prefer the talent system now to the abombination of talent trees we used to have. Besides, there was no variety back then either. You either went with a certain build or you handicapped your character. It was the illusion of freedom of talent choices when in reality you just gimped yourself if you did whatever you wanted.
    Disagree. Talent trees can open up more than the 3 specs most classes have. Can't speak back then in Vanilla but current Classic is right now evident of that. As a warrior there is some variety in tanking specs, going deep def prot, impale prot and the coming popular fury prot. Locks spec around Demo/Afflic with Ruin when it comes to PvE, others play with a spec knowing they will keep an Imp out. tBC had hybrid specs and so did Wrath to a point (though rarely because last points where often that strong).

    Cookie cutter build will always exist when a good build is discovered and known but talent trees so far have offered more of those cookie cut build than the current pick spec/play spec.

    OT: Pretty much agree with OP in most cases. My spriest and lock are shelved until those classes are revamped again and atm the only fun dps spec for me with the toons I have is Unholy and Prot Paladin.
    The wise wolf who's pride is her wisdom isn't so sharp as drunk.

  15. #555
    Quote Originally Posted by Grimbolt View Post
    yeah and hardly any of them are balanced.

    At any point in time theres like 20 meta classes in archeage.
    You mean there is a set of classes that perform better than others? Im shocked! Who would have guessed? Incredible discovery.

    I made up my own class and im absolutely sure it will be viable in PvP.
    It probably wont be the best, but it will absolutely be viable.

  16. #556
    Quote Originally Posted by Craaazyyy View Post
    you're looking at it from the perspective of balance and balance only.. it's not about balance, it's about design

    raid difficulties and ilvl ranges do not matter when it comes to design.. really nothing should come in a way of class design, it's by far the most important part of the game
    I'm looking at the perspective of balance at various types of difficulties, encounter types, duration of encounters, etc. Balance doesn't just matter at the highest end of Mythic Raiding, it matters at every single type of content and difficulty, hence why i think they do a good job.

    As for ilvl, how classes 'scale' also matters, at lot. Again, you can't just look at balance at 440+ ilvl and ignore the rest.

    It's really not that simple.
    Last edited by hulkgor; 2019-10-23 at 08:57 PM.

  17. #557
    Quote Originally Posted by hulkgor View Post
    I'm looking at the perspective of balance at various types of difficulties, encounter types, duration of encounters, etc. Balance doesn't just matter at the highest end of Mythic Raiding, it matters at every single type of content and difficulty, hence why i think they do a good job.

    As for ilvl, how classes 'scale' also matters, at lot. Again, you can't just look at balance at 440+ ilvl and ignore the rest.

    It's really not that simple.
    again it's not about balance, it's about design though

    these things are completely different

  18. #558
    IMHO Classic was both the best and worst point of class design, and looking up info on Classic only helps remind me of that.

    Blizzard has no idea wtf they were doing with shaman, paladins, or druids. (And the sad thing is, I think they did know what they were doing with Warriors, the class that was broken as hell and basically S tier at everything they did with at least one of their specs.)

    TBC was overall the best point of class design. Every class had strengths and weaknesses. No classes were useless. Hybrids served critical roles in groups without taking the place of "pure" DPS classes.

    So how did it get as bad as it does now? First of all, you have to ask yourself whether it's bad. A lot of people felt that Cataclysm's talents were bad, and Mists of Pandaria's talents were a step in the right direction. Really, I can see why people felt that way. Same for WotLK to Cataclysm (you had to go down a talent tree before going into another in Cataclysm, and got abilities right away for picking one).

    IMHO, Cataclysm was the best "casual" talent design, while WotLK or TBC (bear with me, I don't remember exactly what they were at the time... it's been over a decade, lol!) were the best overall, allowing creative builds but encouraging players to go down a talent tree for the powerful ultimate talents on the bottom. I mean classic is okay, but the talents don't make a big impact and none of them are really 'wow'ing you. Many of them are designed a bit haphazardly, tons of them are useless, and many specs are just outright broken... either too good, or too weak. But I digress.

    How did it get this bad? Simply put, Blizzard tried to improve the game and make it easier to get into. I'd argue that they largely succeeded. And I don't think the game is in a terrible, awful state in regards to talent design. I feel like class design is a bit bland and boring, but in many cases it's more fun and engaging than it was in WoW's earlier years (talking TBC and WotLK, not the simplicity of Classic/Vanilla, which is poor to compare to).

    WoW has a lot of problems, but for me, this is one of the smaller ones. Class design is largely okay, and classes are surprisingly balanced. I'm actually pretty happy with how things are right now. It's everything else that makes me want to quit the game. That said, I miss talents every day and I would love to go back to them...

  19. #559
    Quote Originally Posted by kaminaris View Post
    1. Yes it is more diverse, you can't use Shroud by any other class than rogue, can't have summon stone, gate and candies anything other than warlock. Each class has something unique and useful. In Vanilla nothing of that was useful as you spent most time spamming 1 button. Thus making mage exactly the same as warlock.

    2. Homegenization is a buzzword that anyone can interpret as they see fit. I see vanilla warlock completely homogenized with mage.

    3. Vanilla would soon die out if not for TBC, player retention was terrible.

    Number of subscribers means jack shit if none of these players stay in game. Like Vanilla and TBC. It was those fixes and changes up to Wotlk that made it last.
    1. If you spent most time spamming 1 button, you're probably playing the class wrong.

    2. Homogenization is a buzzword. You even used it in the most "buzzwordy" sense of it.

    2.5. Vanilla Mage and Vanilla Warlock are... vastly different. I have no idea how a person of even moderate awareness could draw that conclusion. Something tells me you never played the classes to max level, and that's why you're saying this nonsense.

    3. I don't think you have any real information to support this claim. This was a a turbulent time for Warcraft no doubt, but it was, for the most part, on the rise. It's very dishonest of you to pretend to know exactly what player retention was like beyond your narrow perspective of your realm and your immediate peers.

  20. #560
    Quote Originally Posted by Black Goat View Post
    1. If you spent most time spamming 1 button, you're probably playing the class wrong.

    2. Homogenization is a buzzword. You even used it in the most "buzzwordy" sense of it.

    2.5. Vanilla Mage and Vanilla Warlock are... vastly different. I have no idea how a person of even moderate awareness could draw that conclusion. Something tells me you never played the classes to max level, and that's why you're saying this nonsense.

    3. I don't think you have any real information to support this claim. This was a a turbulent time for Warcraft no doubt, but it was, for the most part, on the rise. It's very dishonest of you to pretend to know exactly what player retention was like beyond your narrow perspective of your realm and your immediate peers.
    Please dont:
    https://www.icy-veins.com/wow-classi...owns-abilities
    https://www.icy-veins.com/wow-classi...owns-abilities

    Warlock:

    Apply and maintain your assigned curse.
    Apply and maintain Corruption Icon Corruption if allowed.
    Cast Shadow Bolt Icon Shadow Bolt.

    Mage

    Use Fire Blast Icon Fire Blast and Arcane Explosion Icon Arcane Explosion to finish off enemies about to die.
    Maximize Winter's Chill Icon Winter's Chill and Improved Scorch Icon Improved Scorch stacks on the enemy.
    Use Frostbolt Icon Frostbolt if Frost-specced, Fireball Icon Fireball otherwise.

    like 80% spam single ability

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