Resist gear was good, why did they get rid of it?

[Glorious Leader]

My first post was fine, you just keep responding cryptically and now have settled on insults as the way to go.

Well done sir.

It was not and the fact that you cant see why is the telling part.

Thank you for the accolade. I will not be returning the sentiment.

[Gestopft]

Yeah...a cloak made out of black dragon scales protecting you against the deadly attack of an opponent...where have i seen this before...

And it was much better gameplay the second time, while still being meaningful from a RP standpoint.

[C20]

As someone who played a prot Paladin in TBC, having to carry normal tank gear, fire resist gear (Illidan adds), a max avoidance set (OTing the rogue on Council) and gear for Holy, I can tell you that I had about 3 spare bag slots for most of the game until Wrath. Wearing an incorrect set means you don't win the fight in many cases, while making other fights outright impossible to complete.

It's not a feasible system, and adds nothing to the game except an artificial gate that frustrates players.

[Selastan]

(3) bosses where the sole difficulty was based on preperation, not skill

Need more of that. Game is an open world RPG, preparing for a particular encounter is part of the experience. Making every encounter skill-based makes it lean closer to an action game. I want more DND and less DMC, dammit.

[Jastall]

I think you'd have to ask a Vanilla dev why they chose not to implement it, if they even considered it at any point.

You just damage their physical form, how about that?

Disregarding that, most elemental were immune against a variety of effects in Vanilla such as Bleeds or poison.

I think that's just an inheritely awful comparison, because you effectively just craft a token and nothing else, not an actual piece that you wear.

Back then, you crafted an actual item to wear (not just a token), which required a given profession to wear and required a variety of materials that come from different sources within the world.

Oh fucking please, the fact that hamper about how awesome SL crafting is, yet bash on green resistance gear is just so fucking hypocritical.
In both instances, most people just buy it off the auction house, so that system is about as "awesome" in that aspect.

And i want to underline, the green resistance gear was quite often the worst resistance armor, craftable items were superior to them, it's not like those were your only option.

As for the acquisition, that's just a plain joke on your part.

In order to craft_the_best_fire resistance gear, you had to gather Dark Iron ore, which you could find around / inside Blackrock Mountain, a giant Volcano.
To even learn how to smelt this ore, you had to actually learn it from a Dead Dark Iron Dwarf by making him an offering.
And then, said Ore could only be smelted deep within the enemies stronghold, at some lava river.
Finally, to actually forge the bars into weapon / armor, you had again venture into the enemy stronghold and forge at their own huge anvil.

Not to mention, it actually required materials gathered from the place where the most powerful Fire Elemental on Azeroth could be found, the Molten Core.
For example, Leatherworks required a special skinning knive to even skin those Corehounds, whose leather could be then also turned into powerful armor.

Putting aside that had to earn the trust of Dark Iron Turncoats to actually learn the recipes and not just let them fall into your bag from some random locations.

Yeah, let's just overlook all those mechanics and equate all of that to walking into the domain of blue satan, talking to his most valueable prisoner, who forges powerful armor for us without the guy who owns the place ever interfering.

Yeah...a cloak made out of black dragon scales protecting you against the deadly attack of an opponent...where have i seen this before...

The process you outlined is nice and all but 1) it wasn't required at all, as Classic has shown you really didn't need the "best" fire resist gear and 2) more involvement on the crafter's part didn't always mean more for the wearer (I know they were more often one and the same in vanilla, but not forcibly). Gameplay wise, a progression path towards a powerful item usable all the time and that's a core part of your build and begins with a crafted base is also far more satisfying than the long process to get fire resist gear (assuming you do it yourself) because you gotta wear it for a couple fights or die. Same for the Ny'aloatha cloak, which actually did shit besides stopping the unavoidable attack, setting aside the broken mess that were corrupted items.

As for the Jailer not interfering, that's not a rabbit hole one wishes to get into. Every raid boss in WoW history waits in their throne room and doesn't do shit until you come to them, it's no different from the Dark Irons not trying to retake their one-of-a-kind forge once you've cleared out the nearby goons or not sounding a city wide alarm once the party has slaughtered a good fourth of Blackrock Depths.

Really there's just tons of reasons resist gear is no more. I don't think many people ever found it satisfying at all; at best they didn't mind but nobody actually found it fun, it wasn't interactive, it took up bag space back when it was at a premium, and it didn't improve encounter design at all. The RPG aspects are the closest thing to a pro and they were inconsistently applied at best.

It's the same with weapon skill really, as someone else outlined above. At best you didn't mind autoattacking those invincible/low level mobs for hours on end, but come on, let's not pretend that was exciting or meaningful from an RPG standpoint, not when "training" in this game otherwise meant paying some dude and learning your new skills instantly.

[Kralljin]

And it was much better gameplay the second time, while still being meaningful from a RP standpoint.

You mean, where it's a foregone conclusion to wear the cloak because any reasonable player wears the cloak as it was BiS throughout the enterity of 8.3?

I think you mistake "much better" with "pointless flavor".

The process you outlined is nice and all but 1) it wasn't required at all, as Classic has shown you really didn't need the "best" fire resist gear

And that's a bad thing?
Doesn't it give the player *more* agency and makes the whole far more dependant on the players / raids gear whether they use resistance or not?

I find this much better because resistances were never a mechanic "You need to wear X resistance or you die!", it was more like "it's recommended to wear X, but not mandatory".

and 2) more involvement on the crafter's part didn't always mean more for the wearer (I know they were more often one and the same in vanilla, but not forcibly).

You either had to help the crafter to actually craft the item or the crafter would charge you a price far above the price of the crafting materials, due to the more involved process.

Those items were usually crafted on demand, rather than to have them in stock.

Same for the Ny'aloatha cloak, which actually did shit besides stopping the unavoidable attack, setting aside the broken mess that were corrupted items.

The crux is however that, as said above, any sane player already will *always* wear the cloak when said content is relevant, hence the mechanic is actually utterly pointless.

As for the Jailer not interfering, that's not a rabbit hole one wishes to get into.

That's not a rabbit hole, the fact that such a crucial prisoner is completely unguarded is just completely contrived for the sake of player convenience.

[Keashaa]

resist gear is just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.
weapon skills are just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.
weapon speed is just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.
talent trees are just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.
ammo is just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.
class trainers are just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.

Gee the game feels really bland and not very RPG like, wonder how this happened....

Let's add...
Talent rows are just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.
Itemlevel / Items are just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.
Classes are just a silly pointless mechanic, won't matter if they remove it.

Let's switch to "Only skill matters" and we're fine.

[Akka]

Because at some point, you have to weigh the importance of RP (Or the ever-nebulous thing called "Immersion") against the importance of it being fun to play, Vanilla had a lot of things that were great for immersion (I suppose), but didn't add anything meaningful to gameplay (Hunter ammo, rogues crafting their poisons, soul shards as resource in bags), great for immersion, but little more than a hindrance in gameplay terms, and even Role-playing games should be "game" first and "role-playing" second.

That's... just an abysmal reasoning, leading to a bland, boring and hollow game. Immersion is by itself a pillar of "fun", that's why we use weapons and pretend to be heroes rather than just have lines of numbers and cells.

The post right under your own pretty much sums it up.

[username993720]

That's... just an abysmal reasoning, leading to a bland, boring and hollow game. Immersion is by itself a pillar of "fun", that's why we use weapons and pretend to be heroes rather than just have lines of numbers and cells.

Exactly.
Immersion is crucial to an RPG.
What's so fun about combat when all attacks hit their mark? there's no sense of suspense in that.

[Alkizon]

A lot of interesting and essential things have been written here, but I would like to remind separately what people pathologically forget. This element, among other things (immersion, logic, lore, preparation, etc.), had design sense of progress: it reduced need for increase in inflation of gear's characteristics. This is not just "and also this", this is very significant bonus/addition to entire system, and most importantly, this factor is absolutely universal (not temporary/completely liquidated/depreciated) - relevant and logical for any content/next patch/expansion. Perhaps "pure vanilla" approach was a little dry, but I suppose if manipulate whole system of characteristics in gear at the same time, rather than twitch its different parts separately, everything will turn out much smoother.

Many, especially magic classes, were alarmed by behavior of such element (resistance) in PvP and PvE, but earlier there was characteristic of spell penetration for PvE, and for PvP this characteristic could, if question was correctly posed, be devalued up to 95% by presence of cap of resilience, everything can be easy and simple, you just need to not contradict logic.

Separate spit at those speaking about "very boring stats". These are characteristics, this is their purpose (their purpose is to help with differentiation of roles, their priorities and organization of progress - that's all, no any transcendental far-fetched rubbish) and right to be such (when they became "interesting", system begun to crack at seams, and design was falling apart, this was said before any "interesting systems" appeared and what happened after only proved veracity of such censor), talents are more interesting still not enough to overweight class' distinctive stuff, class mechanics are even more interesting - in that order and only that.

[Vampyrr]

So TBC does have some resist fights but not as many as vanilla. The first boss in SSC requires frost resist IIRC and what ended up happening was people would just skip him and do the rest of the raid. That and the fact players did not (as a whole) enjoy collecting resist sets for a few bosses led to Blizzard removing the requirement in WOTLK.

On enjoying TBC I would hate for you to have formed an opinion already. TBC launched with both T4 and T5 available. Blizzard has it phased to where you only have T4. We have an incomplete version of the original launch TBC right now. When the whole of TBC is released it IMO blows classic out the water.

Eh SSC had a resist fight and so did Black Temple with the Succubus boss needing shadow.

[Malania]

Because some people didn't want
(1) more Raid preperation
Resistance gear was, at least at the time, relatively expensive and people had to spend a lot of time / money just in order to pass a certain boss

(2) wasted bag space
May seem ironic in the light of certain other systems that Blizzard tried to out recently, but carrying multiple sets of gear isn't engaging to some people

(3) bosses where the sole difficulty was based on preperation, not skill

I am not necessarily agreeing / sharing those opinions, but i think those are the biggest factors.

Those "resistance fights" are simply the children of a different WoW, whereas the concept of those resistances was a very fantasy heavy approach, they are pretty weak in their actual gameplay aspect.
Some people perceive them more as an artificial barrier than anything else.

It's just one of those elements that makes sense in context of Classic / TBC, but would feel completely out of place in the modern game, because the modern game has simply chosen to favour accessability and gameplay over those old school RPG elements.

The majority of resists gear was crafted using standard mats and unique drops from inside the raid. Hydross (the earliest fight of TBC needing resists) required gear that could be done using greens. It wasn't that expensive.

It was as I recall simply dropped because they weren't beneficial to raiding. They were just an arbitrary thing you needed to have, and ability didn't come into it. If you didn't have enough mats to manufacture the gear or there were nothing on the AH you could scrounge for the key players you couldn't do the fight. It wasn't a fun mechanic.

Also it was random as hell. Al'ar didn't need fire resist gear for some reason despite being the God of Phoenix's? Go figure.

[lockybalboa]

Misread the title as racist gear lmao. I think I've spent too much time on Gen OT..

[Malania]

Eh SSC had a resist fight and so did Black Temple with the Succubus boss needing shadow.

Ironically BT gave you loads of drops so you could manufacture Shadow gear for Mother Shar'raz and you could beat her without it if your guild was fast at dealing with her teleports so they didn't kill your players. It didn't amusingly give you fire resist for Illidans adds...

[Blackmist]

I don't find "wear these items or you will die" to be particularly enthralling gameplay, if I'm honest. It's just another stat, and one that's only useful for a handful of encounters at that.

It was just a way of gating people from completing the raid too early.

Gear needs more interesting and varied effects rather than a handful of very boring stats.

[dwightyo39]

Resist gear wasted inventory space. It also allowed for awful situations where melee could become basically immune to anything a caster could do in pvp.

[I HATE CHAOS]

Resist gear is disliked for the same reason alternative power is. It simply adds a grind for grinds sake and the boss could always function the same way by being property tuned.

[GreenJesus]

Right now people rightly complain that they have 4+ slots locked due to domination gear and leggos. These items actually deliver some kind of gameplay change as compared to not having them. Now suppose telling the same people that they have to lock even more slots as well as still collect good items for other encounters, and that these items do nothing except serve as an ID check on whether you can attempt the boss at all. A boss that isn't mechanically more complex when you're actually fighting him but simply has a binary distinction on whether you can live through something or not.

Ditto with boss immunities. Yes, it certainly makes sense that a guy made out of fire is immune to fire magic, but I'd really like to actually play my class and spec rather than be arbitrarily locked out of doing so for some vain attempt of realism, while Andy up front is chopping at him with a fucking sword because that same commitment to realism doesn't apply to convection.

Yeh. If fire mages cant hit the fire elementals, then warriors should need a special enchant or something that is able to hurt an elemental. How is an axe supposed to hurt a being made purely of fire?

[bigbleach]

Started up in Cataclysm and somehow Classic vanilla stole my heart. I do not seem to enjoy TBC as much as I did with Classic. I really liked the idea that you couldn't just equip BiS for everything and go ham at it. Some bosses required you to have a ton of resist gear to counter them for example.

I really liked that idea, and I didn't mind to go back to Maraudon to farm resist gear. I even took my time to farm out Cenarion Hold rep and since I was a Blacksmith in gear specialisation I could make items with resist gear on top.

I really love this idea. Things weren't time-gated either. You could sit in AQ20 for a few weeks to farm reputation in a passive way, or you could do this tedious grind. Me myself, I just completed the quests in Silithus and took my time with AQ20.

Was really a nice pace of change. When I went back to retail it's just gear with stat sticks with not much concept given to them. Just "sim it bro" is often the conclusion. I'm a tank in retail so my gear to equip is "just the highest item level"! Literally that. Nothing much depth to that I'll say.

resists were kinda like... idk. uninteresting. I say that because its just another set of items to collect, use a few fights, and then they just take up space. If they are sought after BoEs, they will be higher in price. The gear you work to collect through everything else is set aside for...? Reasons. They could theme a raid around a certain damage type and let pieces drop within the raid to slowly mitigate the damage as you gain drops. Would give a natural power progression to groups every week that wouldnt overly inflate the ilvl (im looking at you titanforging) between raids and they could have smaller ilvl increases. Each piece could be like 1% damage resistance, giving you 16% with full gear. But then it would feel bad to walk into the next raid and be getting hit for high numbers again, to watch it slowly go back down. I just never liked how they put it in the game and I'm happy that I never had to interact with it. I didn't raid in vanilla or classic. It seemed so silly to collect terrible gear for the sake of resistances and didn't feel like it was really valuable. Just more stuff along with your consumables and everything else in your bags.

[Gouca]

I'd say you're pretty retarded if you think me going to the AH for 20 min to buy bullshit frost resist green BOEs for Hyrdoss was good game play or a critical RPG element.

Why is it people like yourself seem to think basic RPG elements are tedious bullshit no one but the ultra neckbeards that can draw Illidan's tattoos from memory enjoy as fun? There's plenty of ways to make it so you have to grind/build something to beat a challenge, an actual basic RPG element worth preserving, within game play that aren't just money/time sinks which is all WoW's resistance fights ever were.

Did you genuinely just defend the azerite power farm? For vanilla and TBC the sources of resistance gears were from dungeons and raids. I hardly see the correlation of spending money/time for them outside of your general playing hours.