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  • AKRIOS I LOVE U BRAH. TO ALL THE ENDLESS WORLD PVP/DUELS/MUSIC SESSIONS/RANDOM FUCKING NONSENSE WE...
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Posts Tagged ‘opinion’

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Where WoW Stands at the Present

Friday, June 26th, 2009

After playing this game on and off, from hardcore to casual and back full circle, I’ve come to notice trends and get a feel for where things are at. I want to talk about where things are right now, and what future the game has from my perspective.

New MMOs, Waiting for the WoW Killer?

With a lot of new mmo’s coming up, a lot of people seem to be waiting for the next “wow killer”; the next big replacement. At the moment, although a lot of people see a lot of potential in Aion, I don’t think that will be a game that can really compete in the same market as WoW. The new final fantasy mmo and TOR both have potential, but I think they will aim at a different market, and they are both some time away.   It really says something about blizzard’s strength in the mmo market when the next game I see really ending wow’s reign likely being Diablo 3. Even though it’s not really an mmo, I think it captures the same player base that WoW currently holds, and has the production value and polish that WoW players have come to expect.

Why the Current Slump?

So where does that leave WoW? I think it’s pretty clear that right now, things are in a slump. When I say slump I’m reffering to general interest for endgame players. It’s no surprise as these slumps to happen fairly frequently, at least once a year. Think back to the period in BC before 3.0 landed, or even when it did. With Sunwell cleared and the gear being moot due to the looming expansion, a lot of people took a break and lost interest. Similar slumps happened in the month or so before Ulduar, in the time directly before BC, and generally every time that nothing seemed new.

What else is currently causing this slump in interest? Well first off, WOTLK PvP leaves a lot to be desired. Although it seems to be gradually finding some balance, and hopefully the resilience and other pvp changes of 3.2, WOTLK pvp is far too centered around 3v3 arena. A lot of people backed Blizzard when they made the decision to focus on arena, and more specifically 3s, but the problem here lies in that how often can you 3v3? How often does every team member have time to play?

The potential of each player as an individual has just gradually plummeted since WoW’s release, and although people are quick to say “this is an mmo, you should need others to enjoy it”, I think the days in which your potential as a solo player was greater gave a lot more motivation to spend time playing and building your character. Why build perfect sets when the majority of the result of PvP comes from the actions and decisions of the people you play with?

Another problem (more…)

3.2 Patch Notes, Huge Resilience Change, Rogue Impressions

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

The full patch notes can be found here.

The Resilience Changes

Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage over time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. The other effects of resilience (reducing critical chance, critical damage and mana drain effects) have not changed.

Well this is easily the biggest PvP change in this expansion thus far. I see what Blizzard is trying to do here. Their idea is that players do not have enough survivability in arena, people get bursted too easily. Unfortunately, I feel their solution is mediocre at  best, and will be greatly detrimental to rogues in their current state. Here’s why.

The problem with WOTLK isn’t just damage, its also healing burst. One insanely fast heal (that you have to guess to interrupt) already heals way too hard. On good healers, you have to guess if the healer is faking or not at this stage of wow to try to get an interrupt on the vast majority of heals, and penance is a complete guess because even if they fake it they can use two huge ticks for a full health bar. One heal should not bring a target to full every single time it goes off, especially when they have become so easy to get off. Nerfing damage without nerfing this will have a huge effect on the game’s structure and balance.

This resilience change is great in that it solves the problem of damage in PvP. Yes, it was too high, and this will probably put damage on a full resil target right about where it should be. But why not instead adjust stamina levels by 10-15 percent rather than resilience? Buffing resilience buffs healers and classes that can last an extremely long time (warriors, warlocks) and don’t rely on a quick slurry of burst and cooldowns. This change is going to see healing dominate this game , there will be no more double dps success (and I know this is already a non-factor but triple dps will be completely gone as well). Strong healing and survivability goes best with classes that last like warriors and support dps that never goes oom like warlocks or dks. Rogues are the MS class that will struggle the most with these changes because at the moment we have the least longevity as fights go longer when compared against the other ms classes.

We considered the idea that resilience acts like a debuff for heals, but we’re not happy with what that might do to the game. You’d be in a situaiton where sometimes you might not want extra resilience since it lowers your healing. Resilience is already something of a trade-off since it often comes at the expense of other stats (though hopfully less after these changes).

There is a possibility that if fights go on for too long that dps casters may run OOM more than they should. That is something we may have to adjust, but we don’t think it’s simple to math out what kind of buff casters should be given at the moment. Note that the intent is not to turn every Arena match into a 20 minute slog. The intent is to have fewer 30 second matches.

I do see some people saying that healers were already in god mode and this will only buff them. Just realize that player perceptions or intentions are different. For one person, a healer in a 2 vs. 2 shouldn’t be able to keep their partner up alone. For another, having a 1 healer, 4 dps team in a 5 should be perfectly viable.

So what I take from that response is that they are aware that healers are already incredibly strong and are only going to get stronger. I don’t know how to respond to this specifically but it is bad news for rogues as they stand at the moment. Adjusting stamina would have been a much, MUCH more balanced and obvious statistic to buff to balance the game rather than resilience. At least we can say blizz is aware of the problems and has the right goal in mind, but where are these 30 second games they’re talking about? In 3s, yes things are slightly too bursty but games aren’t that fast. I really hope that their vision for arena is some kind of balance where people will die without ooming the opposition.

Shadowdance Change

Shadow Dance: Cooldown reduced to 1 minute. Now lasts 6 seconds, down from 10 seconds.

This change follows the sentiment of trying to make the games longer. Shadowdance, as it stands, is only good for its (more…)

Video Updates, thoughts on Isle of Conquest

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Well I’ll start by talking about Eviscerate X (10), a continuation of the series I left off in TBC.

When I last talked about this video it was in February. I can’t be specific about how far progressed I am at this point, because I don’t want to set any specific date for release. As I said last time I talked about this, in the past I’ve regretted rushing video production in the past and I’m standing by that. I’m trying my best to keep only the best clips for this video.

When I talk about getting quality scenes, I can kind of refer to Garthd’s recent video. Yes, I can find 1v1’s at the hodir dailies against players that die in a stun lock, but these are the kind of clips I immediately trash. I mean no offense to him because he’s a good player and I liked his past videos, but this video is a good example of exactly what I want to avoid and why I’m taking so long. Conversely, watching Gforce really gives me hope, kind of showing that 1v1 can still be epic and entertaining.

Unfortunately, world PvP is extremely difficult to find. When I started I thought, even though Cho’gall is bereft of alliance (about 8000 horde 80s, 1000 alliance 80s), I could go to the alliance if they won’t come to me by doing a lot of city PvP. While it’s still possible, Blizzard has made it so that when you attack anyone within a city, a guard immediately attacks you, making city PvP very difficult (especially as a rogue, because this takes away re-stealths). Not only that, as a rogue you lose the opener in city PvP because alliance has to attack you to flag themselves. Daily hub PvP isn’t what it used to be because every daily area has flying mounts (wtb Isle of Quel’Danas scenario).

I know it’s going to be a while, but I am making progress, however slow. Here’s what you can expect. Expect grenades. Expect health pots. Expect Metallica. Expect duels against the best players I can find. Expect bg 1vns. Expect world pvp 1vns. Even if this kind of video is dead, I’m not giving up and I will finish it eventually. It is still a while away though.

Arenas Vol. VI

I didn’t realize it but I should have enough clips for another arena video within the next week or two. Basically my process with these arena videos is that I just to fraps all the arena I do, go through them every so often and hang on to the clips I think are entertaining. Every few months I have enough to make a video, so once I do I edit them on and off for about a week and put it out. This series will probably focus a lot more on arena than duels from now on as I’m going to start saving and setting up most frapsed 1v1 with Eviscerate X in mind. You can expect this arena vid in the next week or two.

Isle of Conquest

Blizzard will be releasing a new BG in the next content patch. More information can be found here.

This BG seems pretty interesting, somewhat of an updated AV. It will also be the first to introduce (more…)

Thoughts on the new Overkill, No more In-Game tells

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

The New Overkill

I’ve had a chance to play around with the new overkill and I’ve come to a few conclusions that were generally what I expected going into the patch. Yes, it is absolutely and unequivocally a nerf from a pvp standpoint. You are essentially losing at least one instant ability from the old iteration of overkill in pvp in most scenarios.

The big thing here is that the new overkill would be fine for PvP if rogues were a class that steadily trained the same target for the entire duration of overkill. As we are not, often times we will use it and have a lot of the energy go to waste. It’s also true that during the old overkill, you often got an extra finisher out of it during your initial stun lock. This usually would give you an extra 25 energy from relentless strikes, so not only are we losing the initial instant ability in our burst, we’re also losing the instant of an extra 25 energy.

The other PvP issue is the fact that often times if vanish doesn’t work we immediately have to prep and vanish again, essentially wasting overkill, and the last thing rogues need in pvp is for vanish working to be even more important. Simple solution to this would be to make overkill stack. This really wouldn’t be OP because it’s not like rogues will blow all of their vanishes in arena just to stack overkill at the start, if they did then they’ll probably be dead soon enough. It would just not penalize a rogue for having to vanish twice within 20 seconds.

In PvE however, this is a buff for single target encounters. You no longer need to pool energy to vanish which means you can use it at any time, so it’s one less thing to worry about. For aoe situations, however (ie. Hodir arena floor, freya’s ads, ect) it’s a bit of a nerf because aoe situations usually don’t last very long. Pooling energy for a full vanish fok spam with the old overkill was superior. Overall I’d say the benefits of this change outweigh the negatives for PvE, but in reality it’s not going to significantly change PvE damage or play style.

I will say that it was a fair nerf. If someone had a problem with rogues it was usually regarding our ridiculous burst damage, especially off the start. As far as nerfs go for PvP, this is reasonable. It cuts down on the strongest aspect of our class that could be seen as a bit out of balance without breaking the class. At the same time, it’s a pretty lame and uninteresting 31 point talent now, even when compared against premed, and more so when compared against adrenaline rush. I’d be happy if Blizz kept going with these nerfs to burst and gave us some survivability instead.

Personal Rant, In-game tells

I know I’ve given this sort of disclaimer before but I know I need to again; I’m not trying to be melodramatic and I thoroughly understand that this is a game. Since this is a blog and blogs are designed for people to bitch I think I’ll take that liberty.

Honestly, I try my best to be nice in and out of game. If I can help someone under reasonable circumstances, I will. If I can choose between being an asshole  or not I try to do the right thing. No one’s perfect and I don’t always do the right thing but I usually try to when I can.

When you start making videos or provide public opinions in this game (as I’m sure anyone else in this situation can attest) you will start getting in game tells, questions, and general attention. In the past I’ve tried my hardest to answer these as well as I can.

As time has progressed, however, the volume of tells I get has risen exponentially. It’s gotten to the point that I get an in game tell, on average, every 5 minutes I’m in game. Sometimes they are good questions, sometimes it’s people who just want to talk, sometimes they are stupid questions (yeah, your teacher was wrong when they said there are no stupid questions), or questions I’ve already addressed. Sometimes they are just outright hate tells.

A lot of the questions I get could just as easily be answered using google, or often times taking a few minutes to search through this site. Questions about using pve gear or strats against druid/plate teams as mage rogue are a bit frustrating when I’ve written full articles about it.

I appreciate that people enjoy videos that I make for fun. I try my best to share my experiences and relevant information through this site, but I’m aware that not every answer can be found here. I’ll try my best to continue to post relevant information to help people.

In the end what I’m kind of announcing here is that I’m finished responding to in game tells because I get way too many to respond. So if you think I’m an asshole because you’re server is down and you’re bored and you thought it would be a good idea to say what’s up or ask me something, and I don’t respond, I’m sorry. I just don’t have time to cycle through tells in the the middle of arena or a raid or even when I’m just dueling. I appreciate that people ask if I’m busy, but if I’m in game I’m not idling waiting to answer questions, I’m probably going to be busy.

If you do have a question or need to talk to me about something, the best way to contact me is feedback@roguerogue.com, which I cleaned out generally a few days ago and I’ll try to go through at least once a week. If I didn’t respond to a question you submitted, the question was probably outdated (my fault) or the answer was already available. Try to keep questions concise please. No offense, but I don’t care what server you’re from and I don’t have time to check out your armory.

I’ll probably have some updates about how Eviscerate x is going in the next article.

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