WoW Going EQ in terms of loot

[prescient63]

Originally Posted by Nerion

Answer is simple. Stop fucking making games progression completely on gear alone...

Fuck cockblocks and vex thal keys. Other than that I don't see what checks you are going to have that isn't gear. Anyhow, I'll be happy to deck my bard out in 500hp gear in another 20 levels....

[xilsharn]

Beastlords are fucking overpowered. Awesome pet, decent nukes and pretty damn good melee = ftl. How is it right that a hybrid class is better than BOTH of its parents?!?! GOD the other day I saw this BL soloing giants in the BoT towers, how is that balanced SOE!?!!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Nostalgic sarcasm, btw

[James]

Originally Posted by Kais[]

i'm somewhat curious to find out where they take the storyline. Illidan is dead, Arthas presumably will be. What's next? all out war between the Alliance and horde? Lothar reborn to assault Thrall?

What loose ends are left, what characters still exist that we haven't seen?

Cue the list of expansions from pre-beta document leaks or some jazz HERE.

That said, Emerald Dream, Uldum, the Maelstrom...it's a fairly long list.

[Zbkuk]

So a tank that has "50k hp" with no other context to the story is somehow inherently a bad thing?

[James]

Shit I got some FFX characters with 99,999hp. That shit was mad hot.

[Agraza]

Lateral advancement, a.k.a. resist gear is the best system currently in place for WoW to offset mudflation.

Furthermore, a better implementation of bane weapons would be a decent way to step back the growth in dps for all players. Something that is equal to a normal upgrade regardless, but has a large increase when used against the appropriate target would help after you put a boss on farm status or need to clear a zone within X time to spawn extra bosses or complete quest steps. They could introduce it entirely in the form of sockets and specialized enchants. The code already exists for "AP/Spellpower against Mobtype", but only gets used on weird out of the way stuff.

Inscription is going to be one more hurdle for good players to prepare for their content of choice, and it isn't gear based. It is like AA-Superlight. They could go the other way and make inscription super cheap and expendable, but I keep hearing it referred to as enchanting for spells.

They can use the systems they currently have in-game, and develop a few others with minimal work, to decrease the rate of mudflation. But they've already stepped BACK from resist gear and all sorts of whiny cunts can't see the possible introduction of bane weaponry even if its done better than EQ.

The question then is...why? They don't care about outdating old content. They can refresh it whenever they like. The consistency of their game world appears to be completely irrelevant in terms of difficulty. Until they introduce their version of Outfitter with built-in storage for alternate gear sets, no one has the space to facilitate this kind of design anyway.

[Duppin]

Originally Posted by prescient63

Fuck cockblocks and vex thal keys. Other than that I don't see what checks you are going to have that isn't gear. Anyhow, I'll be happy to deck my bard out in 500hp gear in another 20 levels....

Yeah, that's the problem. Everything that's ever been presented as an alternative for non-gear progression, has been more retarded than gear progression was in the first place.

I don't think there is a better answer.

[Aria]

Don't really think it's a huge deal, however I think they went overboard with stats. I think if they gradually increased the HP and other stats over the expansions it would be a lot easier to stomach than what we're going to probably see.

That said, I don't think it's going to really make the game any worse. If you think about it, almost everything is going to scale the same. For all the extra crazy DPS you'll pick up in the expansion, bosses will have more HP. For all the crazy HP you'll get, bosses will hit harder and priests will heal for a lot more. If they left the numbers the same then the game would be far less interesting and progression wouldn't mean much for a lot of people. Let's face it, a lot of people (fearing to say most) play this game to get better gear with bigger numbers.

[Jait]

I get the feeling James would like to take some of you out back and beat you with a stick.

It's Mudflation. There's no solution short of P-wipes, Alternate Advancement (hence the name), or revamping the character progression system every other expansion. But if you think you have one, post it. But most of us ancients have learned to live with it. And even enjoy it to some degree.

The title of this thread is just a reminder that there's still a want to make comparisons to "The last great thing", rather than improving on all the great innovation WoW has brought to the market.

[Suineg]

You people are retards.

Just because a piece of gear has more stats on it then one of a previous level/expansion does not mean that we are experiencing "mudflation". Seriously how else do you think they will keep people in the game and raiding.

This game scales the gear to the encounter quite well and that is more important then the exact stats on the gear. You want to see big numbers look at EQ2 stuff.

Don't even get me started on inscriptions. They can't even do something simple like have your buff tooltip show the proper amount received from a talent. I still can't tell if it's Improved Fortitude or Divine Spirit by the buff tooltip like I should. This has been a problem since day 1. Add in an inscription and you are going to have to fix that.

[Arbitrary]

WoW is just a bit too standard to really be able to combat mudflation any better than it already does with the ILevel system and carefully planned progression.

If expansions were much more about the next episode of a long running epic fantasy story than leveling and gear acquisition, and it was the story that keep people interested instead of wanting bigger numbers on their character sheet, I think you'd really have something.

[Shabado]

There is no mudflation, not in the EQ sense at least, in WoW.

Because of ilevels your healers hps combined with tank survivability scales pretty much directly with boss dps. EQ was screwed up due to armor caps, avoidance gear doing jack shit (omg +dodge on my gear that doesnt do anything that I can verify in any way? Sign me up!) and shit

If a raid does 10k dps, and a boss needs to live for 6 minutes, it will. If a raid does 100k dps, and a boss needs to live for 6 minutes, it will.

All you are mudflating is the old content, which is pretty much redundant with WoWs model.
Your new shiny gear doesnt do anything other than get you back to where you were before, only this time with a new boss.

[Salshun]

I fear WOTLK is going to be:

"Man, we went to this new island, and all the gear is twice is good and the monsters hit twice as hard! It was just like Plane of Po-uh, I mean Burning Crusade. I can't wait until 2 more expansions when we're soloing Illidan".

I mean my god. You want an example? How hard was Trakanon when he came out? Not too easy. Now mediocrely equipped druids solo her for lunch.

I mean even from a lore sense. In Burning Crusade you had Illidan as the last boss. IN WOTLK it will be Arthas/Lich King. Now, in the story, those two fought, and they seemed pretty evenly matched. They were rivals. Is Arthas going to be 10x more powerful than Illidan to adjust for expansion/inflation? Doubling mob hp and gear stats is NOT an upgrade.

What I also fear is the skipping of old content. The Blackrock dungeons are fucking fun, but no one goes anymore. Hell no one went to Naxx because of how fast BC dropped after it did. I think Blizzard needs to go back and regear those instances to increase popularity because new players are missing out. I know 75's that first dungeon was Black Temple. Fucking sad.

[Suineg]

Naxx they are revamping already.

I agree but I disagree. Going back and revamping them will kill a lot of immersion for people that have been playing since launch. However they are going to run out of "known" content soon. Just because it was in an RTS game they based it on doesn't mean that's all there is to the game. They can make up whatever they want. FFS we have Draenai don't we and everyone knows the travesty that is their back story and we are fine with it.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

Every expansion all the stuff with rating on it is going to halve in value for those stats, and you will start trying to build important stats like defense and hit back up. Then you'll be working on your next important stat. Two raiding gear progressions in a row went like this -- I believe the MT of Drama (first nef-killing guild) was crittable. Your mitigation% per AC also scales inversely per level. We're getting to the end of TBC and all I want is some expertise and more of the same stats otherwise, but I'm about the same mit% as the end of vanilla and about the same on defense relative to my level.

When WotLK comes the process starts all over again. Maxing out your most important stat first as budget allows, then you start filling other shit out and getting other numbers up. The only things that are scaling on a straight line are base stats, heal, and damage. Tanks will be back down to like 50% mit and struggle to get uncrittable again, healers and nukers will be running OOM, nukers will struggle to cap their hit...etc.

Other than that, yeah I expect much bigger numbers at the end of this expansion than the end of vanilla, and same with the next. In other words: SO FUCKING WHAT.

Who cares?