Holinka back on the WoW Team as Lead Combat Designer

[digichi]

i wonder what happened to the other project, or if devs just shuffle like this all the time..

[Deleted]

The guy that gave us all the legion pvp changes now responsible for the whole game,.... Ok

[Velerios]

The guy that gave us all the legion pvp changes now responsible for the whole game,.... Ok

Even Legion was better than this. But yes, let's be honest: MoP was the last expansion where classes actually were fun. WoD began with the pruning, Legion continued it and BfA is a total shitshow, obviously. But if we compare BfA to WoD, then i rather have WoD-Classes than BfA.

At least the crappy GCD-Change didn't exist back then. Hopefully it will be gone in the future too.

[BadguyNotBadGuy]

Nothing else to say..

I quit during the entirety of WoD so i never experienced this first hand, but i thoroughly enjoyed that, thank you

[Deleted]

Even Legion was better than this. But yes, let's be honest: MoP was the last expansion where classes actually were fun. WoD began with the pruning, Legion continued it and BfA is a total shitshow, obviously.

Holinka joined blizzard 2012, right after pandaria, and stayed until August 2016, halfway into bfa development that is. An epic journey.. He was only responsible for pvp though, but man, he literally drove pvp into extinction mode..

I think what is happening to wow is what has happened to so many other businesses over time. People build something they are passionate about, it succeeds and grows. Over time, other people take over, that have their own agendas, irrelevant to the initial ones, and usually only about money. Than, surprisingly, things fall apart..

[artam]

The reverse is true, too. Stop rotating devs off Wow because they're good. That was a huge issue during Titan's heyday.

This as has to be one of the biggest problems WoW have, Team 2 leakage to other Blizzard game and out of the company, lead to major flaws on game systems and direction.
Oh well, at least we got great Art Designers.

[msdos]

I told my GM that despite everything, my only real wish is that they take a strong, hard look at these PVP talents, because they are extremely not good. They're basically there for no reason, this current dev team isn't utilizing them.

We could have some amazing PVP talents, but... For some reason they just aren't there. If a spec is struggling in PVP, the PVP talents are there so you can correct that.

[Kralljin]

Well hybrid classes can keep their roles at the expense said specs wouldn't so customizable compared to a pure dps class and lets be honest, class fantasy means nothing is the specs/gameplay in general is horrible

The problem is that you can't make that really work.
Like if you took Enhancement and Elemental into a single spec, how would that work?

We've been this road down before where two specs share a talent / skill pool, that was Feral from Vanilla to Cata.

Aside from that, customization isn't the problem, enhancement currently has pretty much 1-2 viable builds, Enhancement has a ton of dead talents currently, so even without a lot of customization a spec doesn't neccessarily work.

One longterm but ultimately bad approach to solving this is to make content even less difficult which consequently makes everyone overpowered to a certain degree. You get that now with gear progression through an expansion. Making it explicit would change the floor relative to difficulty for skill cap but no one has ever gone broke making a game too accessible.

Or they put in more unique buffs.
The backlash that came from the Shaman community would have been not as extreme if:
1.Tremor would actually be useful in Uldir
2.Bloodlust would have been Shaman only again (And drums nerfed or outright removed)

No idea why it's totally fine that DH and Monk have a buff only they can bring but classes like Paladin or Shaman cannot.

You wouldn't solve the problem, but you would lessen the impact of it, because between having a broken class but still a slot and having a broken class on the bench is still a difference.
You (to a certain degree) just move back to the Vanilla / BC model, bad class but has something that earns them a slot, not the best thing but better than just being a bad class.

[Rekz]

Holinka is actually one of the better devs. There are still a few good ones but most are D League and lazy AF. Holinka joining the team will be an improvement but it's a little late for BFA.

[Duckypoo]

Holinka had terrible ideas and made terrible choices. With him being out of PvP, WoW took a step in the right direction. Nothing good will come from him.

[Voltsmasher]

it's funny that any of you think it matters what dev is where.

the devs don't decide what's in the game anymore, the shareholders do.

the shareholders want you to grind and toil like the good little consumers you are, and they don't care if you're having fun doing it.

this will change basically nothing.

That's exactly right capitalism is the death of WoW remember the good old days when WoW was distributed equally and there was no concept of ownership and everyone shared WoW equally?

[Varlak]

For the same reason some people honestly think WoD was a better expansion than BFA. And why nobody seems to remember how hated Cataclysm was, to the point that the devs threw the old world revamp under the bus to justify how bad 80-85 was.

Once you get far enough out, and people find something new to whine about, everyone forgets what was bad about ye olden days.

nobody argue that WoD was a bether Xpack then BFA. Poeple argue about wich one is the worst. For real its sad new that he is back.

- - - Updated - - -

Well, kind of. He makes apologies, but only when it's past the point of doing anything about it, usually after an expansion is over and a new one is released. Which, from a company standpoint, is obvious - you don't admit a product is flawed, when you're actively selling it.

Note that he hasn't admitted to fucking up on azerite, he just keeps saying it's fine, it just needs "tweaking", and telling players that they just don't get why they're fun.

For the same reason you pointed yourself. He can't admit it was a failure till the end of the Xpack. Its pretty much how blizzard worked for the past few years. When it will be the time to build hype for the next expension they will rain down aplogies on all the bad stuff BFA has been filled with and will beg for pardon and promise they will come up with something new.

[Schattenlied]

1st day back on the job: okay guys, let's revert the GCD changes

*wow back at 12 mil subs, Holinka ascends to god-hood, the light triumphs over dark

the GCD changes are honestly the least of the game's problems right now... We need classes that weren't designed to only function smoothly with 30-40% haste, reverting the GCD change won't fix that... Heck, if we had classes that had smooth rotations with like 10% haste the GCD change wouldn't have even been that bad, and haste would be a bonus again like it's supposed to be (like every other secondary stat is), instead of a requirement.