#8 - June 26, 2010, 2:15 a.m.
Interesting post....
Q u o t e:
Setting up for failure. Current ICC Buff is setting up guilds for failure when the buff is removed going into other instances. I feel that currently the 25% buff is so high and that there is such a huge difference in performance between ICC and the rest of the world (13K dps in ICC vs 8K dps elsewhere)
We're not worried about this issue. If players understand the concept of a stacking buff then they will understand that going into new content without the buff will be challenging, but that the buff will eventually get them back up to allow them to complete the content.
We essentially always had the equivalent of the ICC buff -- we'd just nerf content overtime to make it more accessible to a broader swath of players. The difference is that the ICC style of buff formalizes the concept -- a player whose raid can't beat Putricide at 5% can look forward to the 15% buff.
We also don't know that we'll use the ICC system every time.
Q u o t e:
Too many abilities, too few keys. I'm starting to find that I have all these useful interesting abilities that I just cannot find room for on my bars, or on any keys that I can use effectively. In my opinion we should be limited to 15 or 20 abilities that we need to use to play our class to the highest play level. Currently with macros and modifiers, i'm still struggling to keep my key bindings below 20.
I think this is valid and we're taking a pretty hard look at what abilities every class and talent spec has to deal with. I'm not sure WoW would benefit from a hard cap on the number of abilities you can put on your bar at one time, but we can combine or remove abilities with very situational use.
Q u o t e:
Complexity of interactions between characters in PVP. In classic wow pvp had this feel to it that there were only so many things you could do. You had one trump (Trinket) and then you had to play strategically against everything else. Now it feels like that every class has a trump for every thing, plus they have their trinket and while knowing what to use in what situation is helpful, it's being able to use all those abilities in the short period of time that pvp happens that is problem. Knowing that I have one ability to get myself out of situation X does me no good if by the time i recognize situation x my window of opportunity is gone.
I have mixed feelings on this issue. In some ways the game has just evolved to the point where instead of just a few classes having e.g. control and defensive cooldowns, there are a great variety. It does mean you have to learn every class in order to go up against them, but we're also kind of okay with your PvP prowess benefiting from having a really broad knowledge of the game.
Q u o t e:
Supporting the national community at the degradation of the server community. I know that servers don't have the same feel of closeness that they once had. I like to attribute this to cross realm interractions (BGs and Dungeon Finder) and soon to be national BGs. I feel like this takes away from the internal community somewhat that should be allowed to flourish.
I think this is a legit issue and I definitely miss a little bit of the community feel my server(s) used to have. On the other hand, I'm not sure that's a good justification for long queues. Dungeon Finder can feel a little anonymous at times, but it beats the pants out of not being able to run dungeons at all.
