Shields just feel uninteresting to me. 99% of the time the choice to wear a shield is just "I give up some dps for better protection". The talents are all lame too, mostly just increasing the chance to block and the block amount, or doing damage while blocking.
Does anyone have any creative ideas for mechanics that involve a shield? Preferably something active, where the player needs to make a decision, or deal with a tradeoff or something.
In most games, adding "QoL" features is objectively only an improvement to the game. MMOs are an exception to this. In a game where your time is the most critical resource to success, anything that reduces the amount of time you spend to accomplish anything has an outsize effect on the game - the immersion, the feel, but also the balance. I was a little surprised to see how many people don't seem to grasp this, what with all the survival, management sim, and logistics games out there these days, but I suppose most people who play retail or want a retail-like C+ probably don't care for those genres.
People should keep this in mind when talking about Classic+. I would even suggest a rule of thumb, inspired by a quote attributed to Einstein: the game should be made as convenient as necessary to keep it's audience engaged but not more than that.
That actually leaves a lot of room for debate still. Questions like what is the intended audience, and exactly how convenient is necessary? I have an extreme example that might interesting to think about:
For the majority of Vanilla you couldn't see your enemy's cast bar. It wasn't until near the end that addons were developed that let you see them. I remember the first time I used one it felt like cheating. Being able to land a counterspell as a mage required not just reflexes but careful observation of your opponents. Back then "situational awareness" was challenging because you didn't have all this information at your fingertips. Many times you had to use your intuition about what to do in an unexpected situation. To those of you complaining about those of us arguing against QoL features, I say you're lucky we're not arguing to remove cast bars and all UI addons.
I don't actually think we should add zero QoL features. Instead, they should be evaluated based on what they do. If something allows me to skip the parts of the game I don't like, that's not a real QoL feature, that's a change to the design of the game itself. It changes balance, because now I'm not spending time on something, and it changes the immersion, that feel of the game that we all value. I think some of those features may still be worth implementing anyway, but don't hide behind the argument that it's "only QoL" and pretend it doesn't have any impact to the game itself.
Let‘s assume Classic+ is going to lean into the leveling game in contrast to the retail approach. instead of making it shorter or easier, what would make it more interesting and engaging? And try to be specific; everyone wants more content, but all content is not created equal. You could add a dozen “Kill 10 of X“ quests to every zone, but then please say why you think that’s all that’s needed.
Go give this guy a watch. He's brand new on Youtube, but has some really good in-depth perspective about how development works in the games industry. Unlike 99% of the videos out there, it's not a flashy hype video, but just pure discussion. This video is the start of a series about designing Classic+, but it starts with the foundation that Blizzard works off of: the money.
For example, the Horde has centaurs, quillboar, the Grimtotem tribe, and Worgen all menacing players early in the game, though there are plenty of other things (Echo Isles?). The Alliance I don't know as well, but I know they deal with gnolls, troggs, the Defias, Furbolgs, Satyrs, and Blackrock orcs. Probably some Worgen too.
In a Classic+, what would you love to see expanded on, and in what way?
I recently heard that Chris Metzen is a comic book fan. Given that he's back in charge of the narrative for WoW, I thought I'd take the opportunity to build a mind-altering ray to implant into his mind a master plan inspired by the DC Flashpoint and MCU nexus events:
At the end of the Last Titan, Azeroth awakens and destroys the world and goes on to obliterate the ordered universe, returning everything to the void. Nozdormu realizes that this is the ultimate End Time that his evil self, Murozond, saw. With this realization, Nozdormu transforms into Murozond, and at the last moment sends his children back into the past in a desperate effort to alter the timeline in as many ways as possible in an effort to find a future that doesn't end in oblivion.
And with this, the Retail timeline ends, but many other timelines begin. At some point, the Classic Anniversary servers experience a subtle shift in events. Meanwhile, Classic+ launches with a significant shift in events orchestrated by the Infinite Dragonflight. But it doesn't stop there. As the timelines branch and multiply in-universe, in the real world Blizzard licenses WoW out as a platform for the implementation of many different visions of WoW.
Obviously, this is cope. But it's a fun little fantasy, and who knows? Maybe after another two decades of running the IP into the ground, Blizzard might actually seriously consider licensing it out to anyone who wants to put a server together.
In the meantime, if the above story came true, and you had the opportunity to realize your own vision for an alternate timeline in the WoW universe, what would the premise be? You can pick any time out of the entire cannon, from the War of the Ancients time period all the way up to my fictional summary of the Last Titan.
This was inspired by Hades, which kept me occupied for at least 500 hours, so I thought it might be a good game to get ideas from for making classic plus last longer.
Hades has procedurally generated levels, but not like Minecraft. Rather it has a list handcrafted areas and it randomly selects from the list and combines them in different ways with different mobs and minibosses each time. What if classic plus followed this idea for some instances?
Even just randomizing mob placement a bit could be good. Take Wailing Caverns. Make the Leaders of the Fang spawn in different locations. Maybe sometimes two of them in one spot, or one on patrol. Molten Core is another instance where most mob placement feels arbitrary, so randomize boss placements.
Create multiple possible ability loadouts for some bosses, like Chromaggus. Maybe sometimes Arcanist Doan is casting frostbolts, and another run its scorch and pyroblasts. Maybe other times it’s arcane blast and missiles. Maybe sometimes Mograine wields a sword and board instead of his two hander.
Exact changes can be up to you. Doesn't have to be Lake Wintergrasp-style.
Asking for a friend.
Personally, I think I'd love pvp in Ashenvale or Azshara. The terrain is just so much more interesting to work around than in some place like Hillsbrad.
While it's probably going to be a while before the next generation of classic+ servers, I'm sure people are starting to work on them now. So in the interest of inspiring the next gen, let's have some fun theorycrafting and brainstorming. Who knows? Maybe someone building a server right now will read this and decide to use one of these ideas. Or maybe someone will be inspired to get into building pservers, and a couple years from now will release the next turtlewow.
Post something you'd like to see in a future successor to twow/ascension/any other past classic+ project. It can be a mechanic, talent, qol feature, instance, zone, premise for a patch/phase, or any other kind of content you fancy, including something you've seen before in another server. If you have more than one to share (I know I do), please try to separate them into individual posts so that it's easier to discuss different ideas.
I was wondering if anyone knows of any methods to make Playerbots better at PvP?
I’ve been experimenting with an Azerothcore single player server and it’s pretty fun. But I’m a big pvper and unfortunately the default bots seem to be about as good at it as completely noob pugs were back in the day. It’s fun to run circles around them for a bit but then gets pretty boring.
So does anyone know of any mods for Playerbots, or config tricks, or anything else that could help? Also, is there anyone working on improving them or is the module pretty much static at this point?