GC Fail Once Again

#0 - Jan. 21, 2009, 6:45 p.m.

Q u o t e:

Using the old class descriptions to attempt to lawyer us into making changes is not a compelling argument. No brief text description is going to adequately convey to you what it is going to be like to heal a 25-player raid of an Arena team with a max-level priest.

While I will agree that one paragraph may not adquately define all aspects of a class, especially at 80, how about put 5-minutes worth of effort in updating the class descriptions? This is still the current description of the priest class http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/priest/

Q u o t e:

Priests are the masters of healing and preservation, restoring their wounded allies, shielding them in battle, and even resurrecting their fallen comrades. While they have a variety of protective and enhancement spells to bolster their allies, priests can also wreak terrible vengeance on their enemies, using the powers of shadow or holy light to destroy them. They are a diverse and powerful class, highly desirable in any group, capable of fulfilling multiple roles

This is obviously no longer true and is completely misleading to anyone new to WoW rolling a priest.

Q u o t e:

If you are unsure how to use a particular class or what they typically do in groups, the best way to get a handle on that, IMO, is just to read a lot of forum posts (and not just the official ones here).

Please direct me (and everyone here) to the post with new healer descriptions or do you mean anyone thinking about rolling a priest (or any class for the matter) should spend hours sifting through the thousands of user posts in order to piece together some idea what the class may be likeâ€¦

I’m sorry GC but your response about lawyering ‘us into making changes’ is absurd when two monthes after release of WoTLK your own documentation is still completely inaccurate.

Ghostcrawler

#23 - Jan. 21, 2009, 11:25 p.m.

Q u o t e:
What bothered me more than anything is how GC will defend anything and everything Blizzard does to the point of absurdity. In the grand scheme of things the character descriptiong may be small, but they are still inaccurate and GC still defends them. That said I'm sure that more than one person recently picked a priest to play solely off of the class description. The forum elite may know better, but the average person playing WoW for the first time probably doesn't.

Hmmm. I'm pretty honest about admitting mistakes when we make them.

In this case I think some of you are invoking the poor misinformed new player when what you're really getting at is that you don't like the priest class or think it mismatches the description. Are those descriptions outdated? Probably. Are they still doing their job? Probably.

My suspicion is that altering the old character descriptions would launch a lot of new forum threads. Players would want to argue about them or get upset because they felt like we changed the role. As much as people can obsess over words like "master" I think choosing those words would take far, far longer than 5 minutes. :)

And honestly, I don't think there is anything wrong with those descriptions, unless you are inflating "masters of healing" to mean "better than all other classes." The priest blurb mentions healing, shielding, rezzing, buffs and the ability to do damage. It even mentions diversity and the filling of multiple roles. Is it really worth spending a lot of forum bandwidth debating the nuance of what those words mean?

I feel you are giving too much power to those descriptions. They are never going to be able to convey what it is like to play that class to the extent that you are asking for (e.g. the role of the Holy priest when grouped with other healers doing raid healing). A player sophisticated enough to worry about role when raid healing probably isn't a new player. The shaman description says something about being the spiritual leaders of their tribes, but I don't think many players are honestly complaining about that aspect of the game not being well-supported.

If there are things you don't like about class, tell us that. Why spend so much effort analyzing the class descriptions targeted at new players?

P.S. Shamans *are* jack of all trades. They can dps in melee, at range or heal. They can do all 3 without changing form.