Mists of Pandaria discussion

[Concillian]

I don't remember there ever being a time where tank warriors were specc'd arms. I was on Shal and was only used in raiding as a add tank - and usually one of the first adds to die. (I'm thinking so that TD and I could begin our competition for who could be top dps warrior in tank gear THAT night - hint: TD usually won)

I'm thinking about 31/5/15, back when you could get almost everything of relevance in Prot from the bottom of the tree. Back when shield slam was just a funny joke.

-Jester

I don't remember that either. Never speced arms till Cataclysm.

I remember it. But I also remember Conc tanking as fury.

Arms. Actually I think what you remember most was me tanking with TUF in UBRS.and holding aggro with sweeping strikes. Note that content was tuned relatively low when a 2H "tank" who is holding aggro strictly by out-DPSing everyone else can easily be healed through.

This was part of Jester's point. The "golden years" are seen through rose colored glasses. The skill level of the playerbase has raised to the point that content like this would be absolutely laughed at. People created challenge by having shaman tank and 2H warriors tank. The talents were not significantly better designed than now, and people frequently ridiculed talents.

Let's go over some of the 31 point talents I remember:
Discipline -- A raid spirit buff. The only one in the game. One raiding priest per raid would be required to take this exciting talent. They werre guaranteed a spot in every raid no matter their skill level, because they had the spirit buff.

Holy (priest) -- holy nova on an 8 second cooldown. umm... how many priests regularly use holy nova in raids now that it's baseline and spammable? About as many who took this 31 point talent in vanilla.

Prot (warrior) -- Shield discipline was a cooldown that increased block by a percentage. Keep in mind bosses hit for 1-2000 and block amounts were double digits and not bassed on %. It also buffed the damage of shield bash the lowest damage ability a warrior had... that was primarily used as an interrupt.

I don't want to pretend that the Poke-Panda-Pack is not some kind of significant departure from the game as it is now, but all expansions have been significant departures. As talents became more focused and more of the irrlevent talents like wand specialization and throwing weapon specialization were eliminated to make room for refined and useful talents like the discipline tree rebuilt around bubbles and rogue trees around specific abilities, then of course there became less "choice". Shockwave, for example, was a great talent that has defined prot warriors since it's introduction. In vanilla talents peoplee would plow through all kinds of useless talents to get to a talent like that. The 'choices' were often which nearly meaningless talent do you take to get the awesome one.

Well, the panda pack gives the good ones and most of the choices are not really that meaningful. I see that as a LOT like vanilla. Most of the choices are not particularly meaningful. Mitigation between a 15 / 5 / 31 warrior and a 20 / 31 / 0 warrior and a 31 / 20 / 0 warrior was not hugely different. Why? Because many of the talent choices had little meaning... just like many of the Panda-Pack talent choices.

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Pokemon inside WoW? Not my thing, but who really cares? If someone else wants to, that's their thing. Why would it bother me if they want to do that and I don't?
Dailies for valor? Who cares? There's a weekly cap. It gives options on how to get that cap. Options are good. Nobody is forced to do them. Raiders can get their cap almost by accident (raiding), so why would any raider really care one way or another?

Let's look to the past from Blizzard's perspective listening to hardcore raiders:
- vanilla and TBC hardcore raiders complained about having to schedule and run farm content to gear up recruits and such. (MC bindings too). You may recall back handed comments like "MC snoozefest" and comments on having to dedicate 1 raid night a week just to attune a few people for T6 content.

What was Blizzard's response? No more attunements & easier recruit gearing via badges... The hardcore community reaction? "That sucks, casuals don't deserve raid gear!" Uhh... they changed it because you didn't like MC snoozefests and now you complain?

- Hardcore 25 man raiders in Wrath complained about having to run 10s and run daily dungeons and the PvP bosses just to "keep up" on badges.

Blizzard's response? shared lockout plus 7 weekly dungeons instead of 1 daily... Community reaction? All I log in for is raiding and then I'm done, I'm bored, this sucks.

- Panda pack is designed to offer alternatives for people to do. Now the game sucks because some of the options are ridiculous? What about challenge modes? It's like the baron run in Tier 0.5 That was a pretty fun challenge. Everyone already tries to complete instances quickly, now you have a leaderboard and can have contests within your guild or server? That sounds better. As I said before, Poke-WoW may be something you're not interested in, but who really cares if someone who is not you is interested?

You have to laugh at some of the reaction the more 'hardcore' have to the Panda-Pack. Blizzard has really done a lot of things due to feedback from raiders. They tried pleasing them, and every time Blizzard did something for them, the raiders would complain about it. Were they supposed to continue being abused for trying to cater to them?

I didn't like the early nerfing of T12 content, but whatever. I think Blizzard is tired of being bashed by the hardcore raiding community over every decision and now they're trying to make the game less about that. How many "hardcore raiders" now are the hardcore raiders of Vanilla? Who really is hardcore anymore?

I may or may not get the Panda Pack, but if I don't it won't be because I don't like stuff I won't do anyway, it'll be because I've been subscribed seven years now, with no significant break or lapse and a game can only be interesting for so long.

To some extent, I see the Panda-Pack as turning the game more Diablo-like than WoW has ever been. Low barrier to entry and lots of options for people who want to do whatever they want. I'd think people on the lounge would be a bit more open minded about that kind of thing, since Diablo games were kinda about creating things that you liked to do with an easy game. Blizzard is kinda doing that in the Panda-Pack, aren't they?