Could Retooling Game Mechanics Have Made Vashj'ir Work?

[jzhbee]

I love the zone Vashj'ir. Every time I level up a new character I go through it in entirety. I dont have problems with the three dimensional nature of it. To be honest, I only had issues with ground targetted abilities, like Heroic Leap or Death and Decay.

However, a lot of people intentionally avoid it at all costs, citing frustration with its underwater nature. Is it the fact that quest objectives can be at higher elevations? Ground targeting? Atmosphere?

And is there anything they could have done to fix these issues for you? Maybe retooling ground targeting abilties to function with a target as the centerpoint? Having better indicators for the entrance to the caves?
Or os Vashj'ir unsalvagable to you?

[Phaelia]

I love the zone Vashj'ir. Every time I level up a new character I go through it in entirety. I dont have problems with the three dimensional nature of it. To be honest, I only had issues with ground targetted abilities, like Heroic Leap or Death and Decay.

However, a lot of people intentionally avoid it at all costs, citing frustration with its underwater nature. Is it the fact that quest objectives can be at higher elevations? Ground targeting? Atmosphere?

And is there anything they could have done to fix these issues for you? Maybe retooling ground targeting abilties to function with a target as the centerpoint? Having better indicators for the entrance to the caves?
Or os Vashj'ir unsalvagable to you?

I also always level through Vashj’ir. It’s by far one of the zones that hasn’t gotten stale for me, as Mt Hyjal is actually the worst. I have played every class except warrior through it, and I will admit ranged characters tend to thrive as opposed to melee but it’s not even that bad. I hope it doesn’t scare them from doing something like that again, and Nazjatar doesn’t count, as that zone is horrible.

[Mirishka]

Love the zone myself, wouldn't change much about it.

[Relapses]

It took four expansions but Blizzard eventually realized that a Z-axis and WoW do not mix. No amount of retooling could have saved the zone from being fundamentally flawed due to the way that WoW operates.

^{we're not going to talk about Behemoth, okay?}

[FelPlague]

love the zone so much, but mostly cause back then we didnt have many placed aoe spells as lock, most were based on your location.
but with how destor lock is now for example i may have some problems.

so i wouldnty change anything really... as well hopefully if there is any place that can be aoed, it will be near the sea floor where aoe can be done.

[lollerlaban]

Because it's a shit zone since the game is dogshit when it comes to Z-axis combat. Nevermind that a majority of your targetted spells can't be used which makes it even more frustrating.

[Resheph]

The problem was not the zone but the players. The design was great, and it was filled with great storytelling. But a vocal group of players just wants to rush to max level and sit in a capital whining about lack of content 10 days into an expansion, and for some weird reason their opinion seems to matter to Blizzard.

[Alvito]

It is pretty, but so is flowing lava. I don't want to touch either.

[Alvito]

At the very least, I think you'd need to enable cast @target for spells that use targeting reticles.

For some of those they would have to completely rework the games physics. Things like monk statues or totems falling to the ground, pets pathing in absurd ways. Some spells they don't want you to be able to cast at target or you would never mouse over aim it anymore and depending on macros shave 2 clicks off the cast.

[LuminaL]

it is one of the best and most detailed zones in the entire game, no other zone come even close to the details and works went into this zone, truly a shame that it isnt as popular as it should. just look at zones like voldun or stormsong valley, they are good, but creating them combined probably took 1/10 of the effort put into vashjir.

I dont mean new zones arent beautiful or complicated anymore, hell they are even more complicated than older ones, but believe it was the point when blizzard started to care less and put a less effort into their zones detail wise.

[jzhbee]

For some of those they would have to completely rework the games physics. Things like monk statues or totems falling to the ground, pets pathing in absurd ways. Some spells they don't want you to be able to cast at target or you would never mouse over aim it anymore and depending on macros shave 2 clicks off the cast.

Tbh, the spells you always cast at primary target shouldn't have ground targetting anyway. If Infernal didnt have a stun portion, it wouldnt matter if it was cast at target.

[Razion]

I feel like the speed bonus they gave you in the zone could have been more generous, and then at that they only give you the ONE mount to work with - so it would have been nice if every mount could have been allowed to move at the speed of the seahorse you unlocked while in the zone. Kind of like cold weather flying - but underwater mount speed specific to that zone. As well, the ceiling went up a lot higher than it needed to. The zone as a whole could have been a lot closer to ground level so that that there was a lot less vertical travel in general. As well, it was common for things like kelp forests to really obscure your vision. Caves as well were a whole lot less obvious in terms of if entrances you were looking for were up or down on a given really tall rock-face. If all caves (or any other indoor kind of place) were more or less kept closer to the sea floor, it would alleviate a lot of confusion on where to go when a world map points you to go into a place. As a small aside, the hubs in Vashj'ir were really small and weren't nearly as populated. We didn't get a whole lot of towns or cities or anything to really interact with in Vashj'ir, as most of the time it was just one to three NPCs holed up in some tiny little pocket with MAYBE their equivalent flight master if you were lucky. And as another aside, I didn't feel like the Flight Masters (or seahorse masters, whatever you wanna call them) went very fast, considering just how much area you had to cover as Vashj'ir was honestly probably really over-sized. And in the same vein, the Flight Master equivalents weren't nearly as prevalent as they were in other mainland zones, and could even sometimes be hard to find (and which, hubs with flight masters should never really be hard to find). By extension, even if you knew where a lot of the areas that would be beneficial for you to get to, a lot of them were phased so you couldn't interact with most of the zone unless you had progressed through it linearly so there wasn't much room for exploration... which, as an underwater zone, would normally be a pretty big boon.

There were also a couple of areas that took up absolutely gigantic portions of the maps - like the giant maelstrom-like whirlpool or those gigantic shelled creatures could take up a ton of area that which you couldn't exactly go through because of how narrow the entrances for these were usually located and the exits and such probably didn't line up with your normal travel trying to get by them after you were done going inside them for honestly not very much questing by comparison. As well, the Sandy Beach area above Vashj'ir was pretty nice, but you almost never got sent back up to it. With how long and large Vashj'ir was, it may have been a little exhausting being underwater there for so long, so I almost feel like in the case of Vashj'ir it would have been beneficial for them to utilize a little bit above the water with the shore as well. It was nice you sometimes went up to the ships, but these breaks were often incredibly short comparatively. Maybe some of the masses from the ocean like corals and stuff could have gone to that level to kind of make pseudo-land areas to go over. It's kind of a shame the underwater zone didn't take place in more frigid temperatures, as it would have allowed for walking around on top of the zone as a kind of second layer which would have been a very natural and great way to break up the zone. Also I don't think they ever incorporated any underwater volcanoes, and that may have been another cool motif they could have worked with.