Re: Dev Watercooler -- The Role of Role

This is regarding Ghostcrawler's post about what to do with specs. This bit of writing does give us, as players, a bit to think about when it comes to attempting to understand what is going on in a dev's mind when the final hammer/anvil strike gives us a "new" character every expansion.

I'm fairly certain that their minds are made up with regard to Mysts, however, I'd like to give a little bit of input from a five-year veteran of the game (as if we didn't have enough opinions floating around).

When I first started the game, I was incredibly confused. I was on a warrior that I still use as my main today. I had no idea what roles were. I did understand that some classes healed and some classes were harder to kill and some were meant to do damage, but I didn't realize how much of a part of the game this decision would be.

I wanted to level quickly, which means that as a person who attacks a lot of bad guys for quests, I want to do damage. I understood that there was going to be a tradeoff between defense and damage, but I wasn't yet sure if there would be a point to adding at least a bit of survivability. Regardless, I had to pick one of two DPS trees. One of them looked like I could swing one weapon. One looked like I could swing two weapons. I wasn't naeve enough to think that two weapons would always be better than one. I just though that swinging two weapons looked cooler. I chose the two-weapon tree. I also put a few points into the protection spec. There's nothing wrong with living longer.

Some of the more frustrating bits of info that I discovered as I was leveling were 1) defense didn't make any difference unless I spec'd all the way into defense, then I couldn't kill anything. 2) Unlike most classes, warriors had no way of healing themselves. I accepted that. I was a warrior, afterall, but there was nothing that we had to make up for that. I felt like I was forgotten in some way. Apparently warriors at max-level were pretty hardcore. I wasn't a part of the world at that time.

Fast-forward a bunch of years; the only thing that remains un-changed is that defense is completely meaningless unless you spec deep into prot. The only defense that matters is called "resilience," which I can only say with a deep growl, as my time constraints can now only allow me to be a part of one half of the game.

Everything else is different. I can take on ten things at my level. I can heal while fighting. Questing is a blur, since I don't have to walk across the continent to fulfill some sort of quest objective, I don't have to grind through certain levels and I can actually run dungeons to get meaningful experience and loot.

After all of that, I'm still just as confused as ever with my class. I know how to play it now, but I know that it won't take long before all stat priorities change and gear is soon to be going to the vendors. As an added bonus, I know that I'll get some new abilities and some old, worthless abilities will soon become my best ones. PvE is dissilutioning because everybody's clamoring and spending all of their time over things that are going to be replaced in a few short months, which causes them to become short-tempered, which makes raids... an unfortunate experience. PvP is looking to be a better soloution to how I spend my time, except that my internet is unstable. I'm currently distracted by pet-collecting, which is now my WoW game. I don't do anything but that nowdays.

Essentially, since I already know that the devs intend on making changes, try to make the changes more permanent and meaningful. If hit rating is the best stat until 8% miss rate, keep that as close to the same as you can. Don't add any new stats like defense rating. You already have defense. Since it has been a worthless stat since day 1, do something with that, maybe? The changes you make to classes will be pointless if you're just going to undo it all in the next expansion. We don't need new combat abilities. In a nutshell, those will always be the same. "We press this button first instead of this one now and instead of pressing x and y, we'll press x and z and forget about y until w happens." We need new "other" abilities. I'm sure that your dev team can come up with some new, interesting stuff. If you're there to create, then create. Don't just rearrange.

TL;DR? Bother somebody else's thread :P

Discuss.