Some interesting reading.

[Abijim]

http://www.wowheadnews.com/blog=198632/4-3-lfr-loot-changes-and-bind-on-account-mounts-in-5-0

[Kam`]

That's my "Blizztards"... hard at work, ruining the game without testing much. heh

Never admit to bad game design or warrantless nerfs directly; instead they rely on pushing loot changes live without feedback or PTR comments.

Oh wait...

"We apologize for the inconvenience." -Blizzard

Famous last words?

...

Thanks for the heads up, Jim

[SolusEmsu]

Huh... class-restricting loot which is already class-specific in its intent in the LFR groups because they are inherently low on organization? Sounds like a good thing to me.

There was nothing they could have tested for this. It has nothing to do with the system itself; rather it is a failing on the part of the players, either by not knowing, or by allowing them to roll Need on things they should not. Same as always with the Greed-Need roll system in the game, allowing any class and spec to roll on any trinket or ring, which sometimes means you get assholes (or possibly newbies!) who play Huntard and roll Need on Strength trinkets. Is still not perfect, of course, as it does not utilize spec (between Enhancement and Elemental, for example, on trinkets with Intellect or Agility). But hey, improvement is improvement. It will never be finished; ever on and on we continue circling~

[Kam`]

yeah, well, IMHO-

An upgrade is an upgrade, class specificity on loot hurts the game. Has nothing to do with raid organization or lack thereof.

I'd allow a haste trinket to be awarded to a Fury Warrior anyday, provided they earned it and wanted it; that it has +400 Agility is irrelevant, since everyone can use Agility- it is still Armor (Physical Mitigation), Dodge% (Physical Avoidance), and Melee/Ranged Crit%

My Mage's first trinket was a "Force of Will" from BRD because no one else wanted it...
Yeah, it's called PTR because that's where stuff is, you know, tested; also there is (or was) the /feedback command there (/bug was nerfed long ago). I fail to see how skipping peer review is beneficial to Anyone... ever.

As for newbies and assholes, they're irrelevant; they pay the same monthly amount that veterans and non-assholes do, and this fact has little to do with the reality that some players are being inconvenienced. Loot which has already been earned and distributed has been taken away by fiat, and customers have been directed to fill out an ingame ticket for a GM to exchange or replace their nerfed item(s) with comparable ones.

As for huntards rolling "need" on strength trinkets, would it make any difference if it were a rogue, a druid, or a freaking mage?

I miss Sham-tanks!

I miss Battle Mages!

I miss WoWRage's "last one out has to loot it" paradigm.

Recall what killed EverQuest... The exact same thing Blizz is doing now; expansion treadmilling; and everyone's avatars all looking the same; and the game becoming so dumbed down that shitfaced quadriplegic PvE-retards could stump roll a decisive raid victory for someone's PornTube channel, without even busting a stretchy band seal on a single diaper.

But I digress... and, ehm, I apologize for the preceding visual...

We can certainly agree on one thing:

"It will never be finished [...]"

+rep

<3

[SolusEmsu]

Agility no longer gives armor. Agility does still give Dodge, and Crit. However, Dodge has been made irrelevent to non-tanks outside of soloing, but someone in that level of gear no longer gives a crap about solo mobs. Even elites are easily soloable at that point. Hell, Zaka in his 2-tiers-behind gear no longer cares about the elites present in the game. Dodge? That is irrelevent. The Crit is not, though remember that Agility gives significantly less (~268Agi/1% crit versus ~179Crit rating/1% crit; at 85). In the same vein, I noticed that now Strength increases my Parry chance on both Apneumonix (warrior), and Solusemsu (paladin), and so in choosing between a Strength item or an Agility item "for the avoidance stat" is also a null point, now.

Haste for Fury warriors is also under debate at this point. Well, Haste is always under debate because it is a strictly mulitiplier stat which snowballs with itself and thus is only good when it is stacked to the point it becomes really good, and then only because of other base-increasing stats (attack power, crit) which it is multiplying. However, Haste is stronger as the base is longer; many warriors are now Single-minded Fury build, using dual one-handers, with a speed of 2.6 or so, as opposed to the two-handers which are 3.4-3.8. A reduction of swing time by 50% decreases the former by 1.3, but the latter by up to 1.9. Haste does more for a Fury warrior still using Titan's Grip, than one who is using Single-minded Fury, by increasing their number of swings-per-minute by a larger margin. But does the warrior know that? Maybe, maybe not. Haste is never a bad stat, but it has so many factors included into it that most people simply do not care to think about it. And then there is the matter of Fury generation, and whether it is better to have burst Haste procs or static Haste to give strong throughput...

Class specificity on loot is a consequence of the classes desiring different stats to make them strong. Zaka can still use Strength for attack power, sure, but Agility gives over four times the effect. Appy can use Agility for Crit%, sure, but raw Strength or Crit rating give 50-100% more. If a trinket has Strength + a Haste proc, it would be irresponsible for Zaka to roll on it against Appy; if a trinket has Agility + a Haste proc, it would be irresponsible for Appy to roll on it against Zaka. That people still do this is a failing on their part to recognize the intent of their class and spec in terms of stat accumulation. Your memories of sham-tanks and battle-mages are just that, and the game has gone against allowing them. It is sad to lose such flavor, but the problem is, even back then they were still not the optimal choices. Good enough, but not good.

[Ragepyre]

[Kam`]

Well, Sir, thanks for all the corrections on 4.X Agility and diminishing stat usefulness, etc; I happen to be helping a TrinityCore2 server fix 3.3.5a game mechanics and content for the next year or so, and can sure live with being partially correct about a game I don't happen to play anymore- for a variety of reasons.

Unless one places the set of inconvenienced players within the set of "newbies who fucked up a loot decision based on not understanding their class, and not some other factor"-- you'll have to accept that players with previously-awarded LFR gear are simply being inconvenienced; having to fill out a ticket ingame and loss of a formerly-usable item; yes, they're being replaced by Blizz's award winning pretend-English-speakers... hell, most players will now actually wind up with upgrades...

Because, heh, they have no other choice.


I apologize for the inconvenience

[Ragepyre]

[Khanartist]

Reply for Brent

[Ragepyre]

Reply for Ed

[Beefus]

[SolusEmsu]

Replying to myself:

Testing now shows that Agility no longer gives Dodge to Warriors, Paladins, or Death Knights. It still gives Dodge to Druids, Rogues, and Hunters.

Blizzard has really, really gotten to the point where Agility is entirely undesirable for Warriors, Paladins, and Death Knights, while Strength is similarly so for Rogues and Hunters, though Bear Druids do still use Strength for attack power.

This loot restriction is therefore the result of the other changes they have made, to make the game more manageable for the players. Having to manage less stats ultimately makes you stronger by letting you focus on building more upon the stats that do still matter. The point remains, though: This change is simply the logical continuation of changes being made since pre-Wrath, and is thus not bad in itself. Class restrictions on loot do not hurt the game when the loot in the hands of the non-intended classes is worthless (the exception being use for transmogrification, but the restrictions are largely on non-showing armor items anyway, such as rings and trinkets.

[Kam`]

Consider the phenomenon of "an upgrade being an upgrade" anytime; as well as the unnecessary disappointment of loot dropping which no one wants, on top of loot dropping which -now- no one can even use-- if specific classes aren't represented on a particular raid.

If players want to wear all +stamina gear and pirate uniforms to beat content, they should be able to... every MMO that narrowed loot decisions and upgrade paths, and forced players to all look alike in the endgame has rightly been criticized for it; in some cases it was just the death blow (most notably DDO, Guild Wars 1.0, and even Sony MMO Games; EQ1, SWG, Vanguard, etc)

I do not understand the allergic reaction to players having "more choices" at their disposal; nor do I yet grasp the wisdom of dumbing down looted gear to "auto-award" status.

Games of "planned obsolescence" disinterest me, since they undermine my time investment by forcing me to remake my character collection or to change the way I have to play a given class at every significant version update or expac.

And no, not every game is like this, in fact WoW wasn't until they ran out of lore, and good ideas... and even good judgement; like partnering with battle.net

Again, sorry for the inconvenience of my iconoclastic criticisms; the reasoning behind them is unfortunately well-grounded in historical examples.

Drive on through, though... we aren't gonna agree on these sweeping loot changes.



Besides...

[SolusEmsu]

The problems are already stated, though.

An upgrade is an upgrade anytime, true, but these items are not upgrades outside of their intended classes. This is and has been a null thing since at least the middle of Wrath, due to the overall item level of stats on the gear. And, no class representation of a particular type making loot worthless? We have had that problem since at least TBC all over WoW, with 10-player raids giving absolutely no room for doubles if you want full representation. But then, if your Warrior and Paladin are your tanks, you then had no Plate DPS representation (until Wrath with DK's), and if your Shaman was Enhancement you had no Mail Spellpower representation, and so on. This problem is hardly new to WoW at all.

If players want to wear all +stamina gear and pirate uniforms and beat content, more power to them. Too bad it literally cannot work anymore, as at that point they would go squish as a tank, or do 1/10 their needed DPS, or run OOM at less than halfway through the fight if healing. This has not been doable since at least later in TBC, when the stats on gear simply started to get too high and necessary to perform.

Planned obsolescence is not new at all either, as your video states. All the way back to the first console games: Final Fantasy 1 had it; The Legend of Zelda had it; The Legend of Dragoon; The Legend of Legaia; Wild Arms... WoW has had it since, again, at least as far back as TBC. The new gear makes the old gear obsolete. It was less pronounced in vanilla WoW, maybe, but ultimately, T3 still made T1 look weak, and only usable for the set bonuses if they were amazing. Then, in TBC, the difference of stats based on iLevel made this difference more pronounced, and so on, from T4 to T6.

My argument was never that the restrictions were good in and of themselves. Rather that, in the way the game is now, with all of these problems intact, these Raid Finder restrictions (which as noted still do not affect guild-run raids anyway as they are different loot), in this full situation, it is not a bad thing to have them, because it streamlines the game. The other problems which cause this to happen, these are still problems, sure, but they are already built-in and would require an entirely new game to dispel.

I did watch your entire video link, but learned almost nothing. Specific details, names, maybe, but that idea is something I have known for at least 15 years since I first started playing video games and listening to the television. This is just another reason why I like Karl Marx and his ideas; planned obsolescence is just another prophecy of his about capitalism coming true. Planned obsolescence is just another result, not cause, of the overall capital system. In fact, several mentionings in your video have rightly been directly quoted from various Karl Marx writings! Religion and consumerism are, as mentioned around 49 minutes into your video, used as drugs to replace our communal memberships or social contacts which gave us our happiness. The drug has changed.

I do not agree with the direction, but ultimately it is how it is, and we might as well make WoW as good as can be made with its knowingly flawed design. Stopping the results at this point would not solve any problems. To fix the problem would require a full restructure from the ground up, in effect an entirely new game with different rules of "advancement" in it. I do not complain about these changes because they are a result of a string of causes, and it is that string of causes to which we object, not this result.