oldmandennis,Apr 25 2006, 10:38 AM Wrote:Well... are you hoping to progress your gear in this theoretical dungeon?...Durator is a silly argument and you know it.
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It's not a silly argument at all. A hypothetical epic-geared priest would presumably find such a hypothetical dungeon no more useful for improving his gear than a higher-level character would find Durator.
I agree myself with pretty much everything Jarulf has to say.
From one perspective, it's absolutely right to say WoW isn't Diablo and if you don't like it don't play it. (You can, after all, only play the game you have.). But one can also ask does the game really have to be the way it is? Myself, I don't think it does.
Balance in equipment doesn't bother me at all personally, so long as what I can get is adequate for what I want to do, and if it's barely adequate, all the better. (Most of Diablo consisted of being surrounded by people whose equipment was much better than mine, not always for illegitimate reasons, so I'm used to having bad equipment. ;) ) But there does have to be something I want to do.
I can understand people who PvP being upset by the equipment imbalance though. But IMO, irrespective of the arguments about the preeminence of raiding, the idea of balanced PvP, or that excellent skill can ever win out over excellent equipment in a game such as this one is a pipe dream, especially for an internet game where combat is necessarily averaged out over time to manage lag --- a point where the immediacy of D1's client side model really shone (despite all the resulting desync and cheating issues).
My main comment -- and I do have one -- is that solo play in WoW is extraordinarily routine. You grind experience essentially by mashing the same 4 or 5 keys from lvl 20 to lvl 60 (the class simply affects what those keys are bound to :) ). On the other hand, in the instances -- and no doubt raids -- monsters do all kinds of interesting things that require you to adjust your tactics.
It's as if Bliz wanted to make the outside, solo world as boring and uncreative as they possibly could to satisfy a moral imperative that people should group up and ultimately raid. (Something which I suspect comes from the underlying beliefs of the game designers, though I could be wrong. EQ, and EQ2, were certainly much more extreme that WoW in that respect, but it does seem that WoW -- much of whose success IMO is based on an apparent rejection of that philosophy -- ultimately adopts the same point of view.) There are surely all kinds of things Bliz could do to enhance the interest, challenges, and rewards for "category 4" players of WoW, but I don't think they want to.