World of Warcraft: Legion

[Arkandel]

(I love how many game threads end up in the "Tastes Less Game'y" forum!)

So... Legion, the next expansion in World of Warcraft is coming out next month.

Given how easy it is to group up for PvE or PvP across servers these days it should be trivial for any MSBites to do so if there are any folks here who're going to be spending their evenings slaying demons anyway!

I'm probably going to go Horde for my main (currently I'm leaning toward a restoration Druid or Mistweaver) and my battle tag is Arkandel#2399 so... find me if you wanna do stuff.

[tragedyjones]

Well so much for any new games for a while.

[Insomnia]

Legion is fun. Demon hunter is fun.

Word of advise though, I would suggest taking the swoop button off of your main bar, at least until you leave the starting area because you can swoop yourself right off the cliffs. And as we all know from Alistair in Dragon Age, Swooping is bad.

I'm Moiren#1319

And also wow, Jaina is even more of a judgemental bitch, and I didn't think that was possible.

[Arkandel]

@Insomnia She was very bland pre-Theramore... she was associated with Arthas, then kinda with Thrall, what was she? A generic good-guy mage.

She's a whiny bitch now but at least she's got a personality.

[Sunny]

I will probably be playing.

[TiredEwok]

Someone pre-ordered the expansion for me so I'll be there. I am going to resist playing a Demon Hunter during the beta because I do not want anything spoiled for me outside of what little I have seen of their starting area during the alpha when Twich people were streaming it. I'll probably go Horde for my first one (yay blood elves!) and then make one for the alliance side at some point.

[RnMissionRun]

I don't think that I will bother with this one. The last several times that I reactivated my account, I ended up logging on only once, then cancelling at the end of the month. I think I am "Warcrafted" out

[silentsophia]

I don't honestly know. I keep debating, but my favorites are BM Hunter and Ice Mage, so I don't know how useful I would be.

[Arkandel]

@silentsophia said in World of Warcraft: Legion:

I don't honestly know. I keep debating, but my favorites are BM Hunter and Ice Mage, so I don't know how useful I would be.

For starters these days all classes' usefulness is normalized... given equal skill they won't fall too far from each other in effectiveness, and no one spec has anything no one else does. Blizzard's philosophy has been 'bring the player, not the class' for a few years now.

For another the idea is to group up and have some fun, not to go do Mythic raiding and world firsts, so who cares?

[Insomnia]

@Arkandel Yeah, she hung out with Arthas, sure, but if you go back and do the culling of Stratholme, she was pretty judgey then and left him. Arthas might not have become what he did if she had stayed maybe, and tried to stop him. (Of course I think he did what he had to do. Rock and a hard place, road to hell and all that.)

Anyway, I accidentally pre-ordered when I came back because I had to rebuy the game on US servers and surprise! Legion. The Beta has been fun, and since I like to play dress up, the inclusion of an armour tab finally for transmuting has had me running around gathering clothes and weapons. You don't even have to loot it, just see them, and they are account-wide.

As for useful, if all you ever do is LFM, so long as you don't go visibly afk, you won't get kicked out. Except maybe on Archimonde, and I've only seen that happen once.

[Arkandel]

@Insomnia One of the things I never quite liked on WoW until fairly recently was the absolute focus on raiding - not that there's anything wrong with it of course but I no longer have the luxury of just dedicating my time in blocks of 4-5 hours for wipes and progress. I can still play a lot but the playstyle of having to explicitly state you're taking a bathroom break or waiting for one just isn't something I can do.

On the other hand Rated Battlegrounds have been fun with the right group - you focus for 10-20 minutes, it's over, then you can take a break or do another. Or... 5-mans, I always loved those too because you skip the entire part of logistics -- maintaining a guild, leading a raid (which I've had to do so many times, it's like herding cats), maintaining loot order, settling loot drama... meh. With 5-mans you grab a couple of friends and off you go. Since I always play healers one of the 'rare' spots is covered, too.

And I hear you on transmogs! It's one of the things I'm looking forward the most in Legion.

[Kanye Qwest]

@Insomnia said in World of Warcraft: Legion:

Word of advise though, I would suggest taking the swoop button off of your main bar, at least until you leave the starting area because you can swoop yourself right off the cliffs. And as we all know from Alistair in Dragon Age, Swooping is bad.

Upvoted for Alistair. Eff world of Warcraft.

[Insomnia]

@Arkandel LFr is pretty much like that too. You just queue up and go, just like looking for a dungeon. It's especially easy if you go for ones that offer bags because others will be doing it as well.

And it's awesome for cash, I know have all the heirlooms (even the PVP trinkets because I wasn't looking) and am working on leveling them up.

Raids only take 4-5 hours now if you have a dedicated group and are trying mythics. Day time can be a bit slow waiting to get in, but nights pick up, especially the ones offering bags. And it's all personal loot too so you can get upgrades as drops, or the tokens which will have random stats for your spec.

I always found it odd that pretty much every MMO the focus is on end game and raiding, when it's usually the smallest playerbase of any group. I blame Everquest. They weren't first, but Blizzard went and made an MMO based of their model, and ever since it exploded, everyone tries to be the WoW killer, so the End game mentality stuck.

But yeah, super easy now to LFR, you need a certain score, but if you do the timewalking events you can get it easily. (I came back at the end of April, and got a 6 month sub because it was cheaper in the long run and my gearscore is 685? Granted I've been sick and with nothing to do but it's not that hard now.)

[Arkandel]

Some Legion developer notes. Kinda neat, I like a lot of this stuff.

[bored]

@Arkandel said in World of Warcraft: Legion:

For starters these days all classes' usefulness is normalized... given equal skill they won't fall too far from each other in effectiveness, and no one spec has anything no one else does. Blizzard's philosophy has been 'bring the player, not the class' for a few years now.

This is actually kind of why I gave it up! There was making everyone useful, and making everyone more or less identical (about when Mastery came in), and as someone who had always maintained a variety of tank/mdps alts, it became much less interesting when the nuance and difference between them vanished.

But uh, you get to play the franchise's other star emo NPC now (thought I killed that bitch, grumble), so there's that?

[Arkandel]

@bored said in World of Warcraft: Legion:

This is actually kind of why I gave it up! There was making everyone useful, and making everyone more or less identical (about when Mastery came in), and as someone who had always maintained a variety of tank/mdps alts, it became much less interesting when the nuance and difference between them vanished.

Yes, that's a valid concern. I share it partially, as for example balance concerns were the reason so many builds had to vanish so that what talents you pick barely matter any more - as opposed to always seeking that sweet combo that catered to your playstyle - and worse, made leveling less exciting since the vast majority of dings mean almost nothing other than getting one number closer to your max.

But.

It still beats what we had before. I remember playing a dwarf Priest in vanilla and talking to other non-dwarves who were so annoyed - they picked the 'wrong' race so they didn't have Fear Ward which at the time was extremely useful in PvE, or when Chain Heal was by far the best AoE heal so if your guild was progressing in Sunwell all you needed was Shamans and maybe Paladins for the tanks. That, frankly, sucked.

Or! It used to be the game had zero ways of catching up to the power curve. Was your guild doing the third tier of raids in the expansion when you started playing or returned to the game after a hiatus? Hah-hah you were fucked, just fucked, because where would you find the gear to do tier 3 when tiers 1-2 were useless to everyone else at that point, and it was damn hard to talk 39 people into grouping up just to give you a chance of getting items. So either you were carried hard or you didn't raid at all.

WoW has evolved and it's solved big systemic issues on the way. The developers have made (in my opinion) mistakes as well but no one has done it for longer, or as successfully, as Blizzard has.

[Arkandel]

Double post: PvP changes.

[bored]

@Arkandel said in World of Warcraft: Legion:

@bored said in World of Warcraft: Legion:

This is actually kind of why I gave it up! There was making everyone useful, and making everyone more or less identical (about when Mastery came in), and as someone who had always maintained a variety of tank/mdps alts, it became much less interesting when the nuance and difference between them vanished.

Yes, that's a valid concern. I share it partially, as for example balance concerns were the reason so many builds had to vanish so that what talents you pick barely matter any more - as opposed to always seeking that sweet combo that catered to your playstyle - and worse, made leveling less exciting since the vast majority of dings mean almost nothing other than getting one number closer to your max.

But.

It still beats what we had before. I remember playing a dwarf Priest in vanilla and talking to other non-dwarves who were so annoyed - they picked the 'wrong' race so they didn't have Fear Ward which at the time was extremely useful in PvE, or when Chain Heal was by far the best AoE heal so if your guild was progressing in Sunwell all you needed was Shamans and maybe Paladins for the tanks. That, frankly, sucked.

Sure, it beats vanilla (my first char was a Druid, I'm familiar with 'l2 innervate' and people complaining when I spent DKP on MBB). But that's going quite a ways to make your argument. From BC through most of Wrath, basically everything was playable. And while balance might have shifted in favor of class/spec/build X for a given patch or tier of content, in general it was close enough that few guilds short of actual pro/sponsored level would bench a good player based on that sort of thing. It was much more a theorycrafting/forum bitching level of issue.

(Also I'd love to hear how a guild could do Sunwell without priests, I think you're forgetting the hardest boss :))

[Insomnia]

I played a warlock from the start, when you needed like 4 on Garr. And I was the only one because they were broken.

On the other hand my dad said he stopped playing because it was too easy, and he's the person responsible for getting me into gaming. I tried to lure him back when I started again, and he has no interest.

[Sunny]

Squee! Beta for me!