Battle for Azeroth Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[rda]

After cata even shit tastes like delicatesse.

Actually, the more I look back at Cata the more I realize how big it was, it's just that half (or more than half) of the work went into the revamp.

The failure of Cata was very different from the failure of WoD. On the contrary, the reason BFA is not looking well is quite similar to what ruined WoD and plagued Legion.

[Doomchicken]

How about every spec I played being boring as fuck. Some are very bad (shadow priest) some are boringly strong (balance druid) but they all play exactly the same.

You get two resources. You use the first resource on weak hits that generate the second resource. You then use the second resource for bigger shits. Sometimes shit glows and you hit on the glowing shit for slightly improved abilities.

That's the fucking class design. For every class. Hell, every spec.

I like the new zones, especially Drustvar, but that doesn't change the fact that BfA is boring to play. The only reason I'm not just doing MoP with overleveled characters on the beta is because the Jade Forest story is bugged. So I'm just testing the effectiveness of classes in Silithus. The goblins are poorly optimised there by the way.

Every spec huh? Look, I can't disagree that some specs aren't any good, but hyperbole doesn't get you anywhere.

Edit: How many specs did you play exactly? Because if it's like 3 then that would make a lot more sense and sound more reasonable.

[Drekmar]

Actually, the more I look back at Cata the more I realize how big it was, it's just that half (or more than half) of the work went into the revamp.

The failure of Cata was very different from the failure of WoD. On the contrary, the reason BFA is not looking well is quite similar to what ruined WoD and plagued Legion.

WoD was fail from the beginning, it was bad a remained bad. Cata had fairly good start, but got worse and worse and worse and ended up introducing LFR.

[Deleted]

We'll never know how WoD happened dude. Some colossal fuck up had to have happened for them to ship twitter integration and a selfie cam as a "Major content patch".

I simple refuse to believe that it was actually planned. To me it feels like they scrapped some other idea mid-way to try and cash in on the Warcraft Movie.

For me it's the only plausible reason a group of sane individuals would believe "alternate universe time travelling orcs" was a good idea.

I'd feel the same way, except the Warcraft movie was so horribly away from the time window it literally released 2 months before Legion.

[Doomchicken]

I'd feel the same way, except the Warcraft movie was so horribly away from the time window it literally released 2 months before Legion.

Probably for the best. Considering how terribly received that movie was had it been released with legion it might of actually hurt legions sales. Well, maybe not...but It wouldn't of helped.

[Hitei]

A typical previous expansion had 2 traditional races. Legion had 4 allied races. The effort was much smaller, these allied races were lifted off NPCs. You are saying BFA is certainly going to have at least 4 allied races. If that's going to be the end of it for BFA, then that's again much smaller than 2 traditional races. This is my opinion and I hope it is clear. With all that, I am not saying that allied races are a bad feature. I am just saying that they are a low-effort one. Yes, they might still add up to a couple of traditional races over time. When this happens, I will say that the total amount of effort that went into allied races (perhaps even in a single expansion if BFA is going to grow to 8-10) is on par with what would have went into traditional races. Again, I hope this is clear, because I am not going to explain it for the fourth time.

Please stop. You are just being ridiculous and we both know it. The Legion allied races and first four BfA allied races were both made in the time frame which would have normally gone to the two traditional races if BfA had used that system instead.

If BfA used traditional races, they would have started working on those races mid-Legion (Just like they had already started working on Goblins and Worgen in 3.2, a year and a half before Cata launch). The only difference here is that they released the Legion 4 early to give people something to do and a reason to stay subbed.

I realize you really, really want to find a way where there is less effort happening here, but it just isn't the case. We are comparing 2 standard races to 8 or more allied races. That is that.

[rogueMatthias]

I always felt that WoD was just a pet project for the developers that got out of hand. It didn't serve any purpose but be a huge nostalgia-fest for Horde fans. The Alliance was unashamedly just tacked in there as an afterthought.

It could have been used as an opportunity to make some great new Horde heroes. Horde are bitterly low on classic heroes after all as most were killed because of the Good vs Bad nature of the original two games... but they were all just killed again anyway.

It bitterly destroyed any arguments that the Orcs are peaceful and noble and were only violent because of blood lust from the demon blood though.

[Nyel]

Actually, the more I look back at Cata the more I realize how big it was, it's just that half (or more than half) of the work went into the revamp.

The failure of Cata was very different from the failure of WoD. On the contrary, the reason BFA is not looking well is quite similar to what ruined WoD and plagued Legion.

Cataclysm was an amazing expansion for newcomers, altoholics and hardcore raiders (up until 4.3 and Dragon Soul). The expansion had nice raids, a great difficulty on heroic dungeons / raids (until they nerfed them) and some amazing zones (Uldum, Deepholme and even the love-hated Vashjir). If they would have had some better open world / raid content it would have been remembered as a better expansion than WotLK imho. I loved the first weeks of Cataclysm, was maybe my best time in WoW ever since Vanilla.

BfA on the other hand is right now making the exact same mistakes as WoD did and the only question in my mind is: why? Why Blizzard?

[Deleted]

From the new blue post.

"Artifact appearances that come in pairs (main-hand + off-hand) cannot be separated when you’re using two items. If you apply the appearance of one of these to your main-hand item, your off-hand item will use the appearance of the other, and vice versa.

Artifact appearances that come in pairs *can* be applied to two-hand weapons. A Shadow Priest can now make a staff look like Xal’atath, Blade of the Black Empire.

Some Artifact appearances are so awesome that they can bypass restrictions on some weapon types. However, even though some restrictions have been lifted, other weapon restrictions remain."

This really is some autism police levels of controlling 'fun detected'.

[rainhard]

In the Southern Barrens next to Hunter's Hill there is BfA music anyone knows why?

[Friendlyimmolation]

In the Southern Barrens next to Hunter's Hill there is BfA music anyone knows why?

There is going to be a Barrens warfront isn't there?

[Marlamin]

In the Southern Barrens next to Hunter's Hill there is BfA music anyone knows why?

Remainder from them working on the (possibly still to come?) Barrens warfront.

[rda]

This really is some autism police levels of controlling 'fun detected'.

It might be a technical limitation.

[Doomchicken]

Cataclysm was an amazing expansion for newcomers, altoholics and hardcore raiders (up until 4.3 and Dragon Soul). The expansion had nice raids, a great difficulty on heroic dungeons / raids (until they nerfed them) and some amazing zones (Uldum, Deepholme and even the love-hated Vashjir). If they would have had some better open world / raid content it would have been remembered as a better expansion than WotLK imho. I loved the first weeks of Cataclysm, was maybe my best time in WoW ever since Vanilla.

BfA on the other hand is right now making the exact same mistakes as WoD did and the only question in my mind is: why? Why Blizzard?

So apart from warfronts which you stated in an earlier post and class issues which happen in every expansion, what exactly makes you feel like this is going to be anything like WoD? Legit curious.

- - - Updated - - -

From the new blue post.

"Artifact appearances that come in pairs (main-hand + off-hand) cannot be separated when you’re using two items. If you apply the appearance of one of these to your main-hand item, your off-hand item will use the appearance of the other, and vice versa.

Artifact appearances that come in pairs *can* be applied to two-hand weapons. A Shadow Priest can now make a staff look like Xal’atath, Blade of the Black Empire.

Some Artifact appearances are so awesome that they can bypass restrictions on some weapon types. However, even though some restrictions have been lifted, other weapon restrictions remain."

This really is some autism police levels of controlling 'fun detected'.

Or it could be technical limitations?

[Veldoranz]

It's actually worse than WoD.


When did the core components of the game - gameplay, class design and combat fluidity literally become their lowest priority?

You can give WoD all the shit in the world but at least it's class design wasn't this fucking bad. Even if that is when the great prune kicked off.

Woah, slow down there cowboy. By this time in WoD's dev cycle they had canceled half the expansion. The class design may have been good, but the rest of the game was hot garbage (minus leveling). You got to max level and had almost nothing to do besides heroics for a week and raids. WoD was missing a major patch and raid tier, and was so massively unpopular that the game lost literally half it's player base in a matter of months.

BfA has had no cancellations that I am aware of, and seems to have a nearly identical end-game to Legion, minus a lot of the flashy stuff. BfA isn't looking amazing, but saying it's worse than WoD is being a bit dramatic, but I think you know that.

[Deleted]

Or it could be technical limitations?

I find it hard to believe they can't allow you to (f.e.) transmog only to your mainhand artifact without it requiring the offhand as well. Every artifact main and offhand is a seperate item.

Additionally, we are gonna allow you to mog staves to daggers, but god forbid we allow you to mog to Strom'kar as Fury and Light's Wrath as Holy. That's where we draw the moral line.

[Nevcairiel]

If WoD had M+ to give you something to do next to Raiding, it would've already been much better. And BfA has M+. And Islands. And Warfronts, and WQs are much better then Apexis thingys as well. They may also tune the Emissary rewards as the expansion progresses, they did that in Legion as well.

Even if you don't like some of those, it won't be a WoD based on the lack of content. No matter how terrible Azerite gear turns out, you'll still need gear upgrades, and you can run M+ for those, and Islands have a lot of collectible rewards, its not only about AP (which may or may not turn out to be irrelevant).

Personally, I'm also not that crazy involved with how a classes rotation "feels". Can you truely design a rotation thats fun on its own? You literally stand there, fight a training dummy, and have fun doing the rotation? I don't get that. I have fun doing the content, and for me its far more fun to have to react to what the content throws at me, be it simply by moving or using utility buttons to react to that. The rotation of my character moves into the background, its just something you do all the time anyway. How fun can a rotation be that its not boring after doing it for months?

[Doomchicken]

I find it hard to believe they can't allow you to (f.e.) transmog only to your mainhand artifact without it requiring the offhand as well. Every artifact main and offhand is a seperate item.

Additionally, we are gonna allow you to mog staves to daggers, but god forbid we allow you to mog to Strom'kar as Fury and Light's Wrath as Holy. That's where we draw the moral line.

Truth be told I wasn't sure what was transmoggable to what, but yeah I admit that does seem a bit weird now that you've used those other examples.

[Evilmoo]

I say, within 21 days of the launch of BFA, devs will host an ad-hoc livestream Q&A where Ian and some others will try to assure us not to cancel and that 8.1 will be totally different.
Hell it might even be 14 days.

[Doomchicken]

If WoD had M+ to give you something to do next to Raiding, it would've already been much better. And BfA has M+. And Islands. And Warfronts, and WQs are much better then Apexis thingys as well. They may also tune the Emissary rewards as the expansion progresses, they did that in Legion as well.

Even if you don't like some of those, it won't be a WoD based on the lack of content. No matter how terrible Azerite gear turns out, you'll still need gear upgrades, and you can run M+ for those, and Islands have a lot of collectible rewards, its not only about AP (which may or may not turn out to be irrelevant).

B-B-But the classes! Or something to that extent anyway.

- - - Updated - - -

I say, within 21 days of the launch of BFA, devs will host an ad-hoc livestream Q&A where Ian and some others will try to assure us not to cancel and that 8.1 will be totally different.
Hell it might even be 14 days.

I'd bet you that doesn't happen for obvious reasons.