/v/ - Video Games

Congratulations, you learned that MMOs are shit.

Good job.

A friend and I were thinking about playing again on a private server. Is Sunwell good?

An MMO is nothing without its community

>not making your own private server and doing whatever you want, including running around as part of a squadron with 4 alt accounts controlled by bots and killing everything in sight, using GM commands to skip any tedious shit

really improves the game, I only wish the bots were a little more autonomous, I'll give them equipment drops but they won't equip them unless I log in and do it for them

>Its like they took every single thing you could do in previous rpgs and casualized the shit out of them.

Why do you think it was popular? It was piss easy to play.

WoW was never good. It was simply 'better' than previous games in the genera. Namely Everquest with its frankly autistic level of bullshit. WoW simply took Everquest, made it actually playable by human beings, and made quests easier to find.

The understanding was that, at the time, Blizzard was the most legendary game company out there for post-launch support. Often releasing dozens of patches and updates to games after release simply to give their fans more stuff. The reason most people bought into the game was knowing that Blizzard going into the subscription based MMO would be like peanut butter and chocolate. In which they could pump out post release patches and still make money, and that the game would slowly improve into a true masterpiece as a result.

The reality, however, was that the early fixes were only done because it affected raiding. Literally the only thing they care about. People stayed interested for a short time because fixing class balance, combat UI, and actual combat mechanics were things needed to make the game better, but by Cataclysms launch the playerbase saw that Blizzard would rather re-invent raiding a 3rd and 4th time rather than improve professions, character customization, story agency, reputations, making content evergreen, player housing or any other aspect of the game. That's more or less the real reason that they've lost 90% of their players.

Now they've bitten into the poisoned bait. People will play Vanilla and have to look at it without the rose tinted glasses. Even as they enjoy the early leveling experience they'll constantly be reminded of just how badly they fucked up the rest of it. They'll be thinking about how literally no change past WotLK was good and most of the ones before that were meh. Without the excuse of nostalgia WoW will rightfully be destroyed as the unevolved piece of garbage that it is.

Wow was never any good. Biggest waste of time in my life.

Is there a way to make warlocks or priest capable of tanking in vanilla wow?

I want to do stupid builds.

IM FUCKING LOSING IT

>>15814546

locks sure just get soul link and spam scorch plus aoes

perhaps not the best for anything significant but locks can off tank and pull all the shit off the healer and mage if the tank sucks

if you are playing with friends you might be able to pull it off but I doubt anybody is going to take a lock as a tank for a pug unless they are really desperate and trusting

I've tanked 5 mans as a lock but that was sharing the tanking with another lock or a shaman

I think moonkin druids can also tank but I might be thinking of BC

I dont really know about priests but I do know that there was a 40 priest onxia raid so I guess there might be something there

>>15814646

I've seen vids of warlocks and priests tanking ony, I've also seen spells like searing pain that has high threat. was thinking of going Demonology and affliction for drain tanking and having the voidling tank off any extra mobs or two mobs while I tanked one mob via draining and gaining threat via searing pain. Using curse of weakness to lower enemy damage. Hopefully its possible to solo tank at low level dungeon.

>>15814077

>after all the end game content

translation: lol i, like, played a dungeon and a battleground so that means i finished WoW

#2 sounds like it should be obvious, it's an MMO. You're not supposed to be playing on your own, you're supposed to have a group.

But yeah MMOs in general are pretty shit and the WoW formula was just the best at the time covered by some thick nostalgia goggles thanks to autists actually having a good time with friends in it. Really WoW vanilla isn't much better than other MMOs around now, you're better off just playing a proper RPG.

>>15814942

Everybody saw success of WoW and decided that best way to proceed was to make countless clones of it. Most radically different MMOs like EVE Online actually pre-date WoW.

>>15814942

>

>>15815007

It's funny reading this comic backwards because it shows that many of the complaints players have are solutions to problems they themselves raised. (I'm sure that's the intention of the author)

A lot of game design choices come not from what you'd consider innately good but from what the players currently are looking for. It might not be a good mechanic in a few years, it might even break stuff now, but the blame is at least partially in the players.

And other times, there's no real blame, it's just attempts at evolution and fixing problems. The Quest Arrow that a lot of people like to hate on for good reasons is one such case.

Having handrawn maps you gotta consult to orient yourself sounds like a really immersive experience.

Until you gotta open a menu to consult the notes\map every few seconds just to make sure you're going the right away, completely breaking the flow and killing the mood.

So Devs make a minimap that shows you the map you were constantly looking for without having to switch out of the game into a menu.

But then players complain they are spending all the time looking at the minimap, so devs make a compass with nothing to really look at, giving you the ability to get your bearings without detracting from the world currently surrounding you.

I'm sure there's bound to be better solutions to these problems and there's some incompetence behind the devs a lot of time, but it's an oversimplication to explain everything away with "casualization" or similar explanations that are, ironically, a very casual explanation of the real reason behind these designs.

Item loss on death used to be the standard in MMOs, but it's not anymore. Was that because devs want to protect the feelings of their wales and other players?

Or is that because the entire process of getting gear in the first place is incredibly tedious and if you were to lose it in PvP, the real consequence isn't the loss of those items but rather that you gotta go through that whole shit process to get them back? Or even that you were incentivized to engage solely in PvP to get good items from other players since it's faster and more fun?

I'd ascribe some fault on the devs for making the core gameplay filled with terrible padding for the sake of eventually getting a good item to use that they just can't ever take away from you anymore once you get it, that's the real issue, lack of "lose items on death" is just a symptom.

>>15814120

Do you niggers ever have any actual evidence of it being undertuned? Because for all of the times I see it posted, I've yet to see any actual evidence.

Also

>poor scripting

Bullshit. The scripting is fine.

Lastly, the pop is 1.5-2.5k, which is far from dead, and if you ever actually played retail, is about average for a retail server back in 05-07.

K3 is still broken

>>15814120

combat isn't undertuned, stop spouting that meme. It's as it should be on 1.12 fucking piss easy

1.12 talents and abilities make old azeroth content EZ. It's not undertuned as so much as done right.

It seems like no server wants to try and recreate Nost 1:1, even with patches or even try and recreate the patches 1:1 in terms of content. K3 is still broken almost a year after it launches and the other servers aren't that great either, with Kike's hope looking to shut down when classic comes out (regardless if classic is good)

>>15814186

sunwell is shit, you'll spend more time trying to log-in than playing the game.

>>15815412

Sunwell's WotLK server is fairly good, but their TBC server was the single worst pserver launch in history. A single guild, Bizzno, managed to get in constistently (and are all now over level 60), while thousands of others couldn't log in. And once you got in, it was the buggiest shit ever; charge broken, class quests broken, pathing fucked, druid forms fucked, it was like they didn't even test it.

>>15815007

alternate advancement, huh

tell me about the non-raiding advancement that was available to players at the maximum level that allowed them to get raid-quality gear or better

>>15815007

also, after reading that comic backwards, it seems like the issue is that, after vanilla, they didn't add difficulty to the acquiring of welfare epics or good archaeology stuff; it was just a grind that practically anyone could do, without the difficulty involved in raiding

>>15815420

To be fair it's less them testign and more like people didn't report it. THey do public testing and as a result shit gets broken often due to this.

It seems people weren't paying attention or were told it'd be fixed. I think another problem is they had things still waiting to be pushed before launch and didn't take time to do one last bug fix sessions before launch, pushed the fixes and ended up with more bugs.

>>15814077

GJ you finally figured it out. WoW was a casual-as-fuck MMO with fucking horrible timesinks. This was known on launch. I never pursued the endgame because the game ultimately bored the shit out of me and quit WoW before long. Everything is soooo fucking slow in WoW. Once the novelty wears off (which doesn't even really exist these days) the game just becomes a drag, especially when you hit 60 and discover your endgame options are basically endlessly raiding the same shit over and over again or trying to do a fucking horrible PvP honor grind. There were a few ways to grind out decentish loot without being super raider or PvP freak but it was also fucking time consuming.

>3. The aspect of gaining better equipment was always a massive time sink based on RNG.

Strictly speaking you can get some decent (but not very good) loot through the AH and crafting.

>5. The game would never have been a success if it wasnt for the perfect timing, the complete failure of Everquest (near the end) and the addictive social aspect of the game.

They also advertised the SHIT out of the game (it had TV ads, even) and it had surprisingly solid visuals for a game back then. Flight paths were fun to behold simply for the flyby visuals.

If you want to experience WoW at its dullest, go level as a paladin. It will fucking amaze you how bad they are.

>>15814546

Ah, the legendary Tanklock build. That was a huge meme back in the vanilla warlock board but it was doable for dungeons. Searing Pain does double threat making it virtually impossible for people to pull aggro off of you. Warlocks also typically has more stamina and some self-healing abilities (healthstone, death coil, drain life, and also siphon life if 21 deep in affliction). You won't be tanking any raid bosses other than Twin Emperors though. I'm pretty sure they deliberately designed the Twin Emps encounter because of the persistent memeing and jokes about how Warlocks are meant to be a tanking class because they have more health, life tap, and exert giant threat (whether they want to or not). Other meme jokes revolved around warlocks being a melee class (because Firestone) and how Warlocks were free honor kills in PvP (they used to have double DoT duration with same total damage and death coil was 10min cd without a horror component - warlocks have no casting loss avoidance except for channels, so if someone is hitting them frequently in the face they basically cannot cast anything other than drain life and instant casts, plus they have weak slows and zero mobility without abusing consumables/engineering, so there's no escaping melee unless they death coil, have a succubus seduce, or have a voidwalker pop a giant shield while they try to fear, although they can still get stunned/interrupted out of casting with the VW shield up). As you can guess, rogues had a very easy time ganking warlocks, but instead of nerfing rogue bullshit blizz nerfed warlock fears.

Tanking SPriest is also doable. Shadowform is +15% phys resist and they have a massive armor self-buff in inner force. Gear some armor-heavy items, use some armor-boosting elixirs, scrolls, and maybe use Greater Stoneshield Potions and you have very good phys resist. Your threat is still shit though. Mind Flay does double threat at least but it has a cooldown and you have no other nukes in shadow but if you break shadow you don't get +15% phys resist. IIRC you can get giant amounts of threat with a failed mind control though. Still, I know people have tanked Onyxia with Shadow Priests before. If you want to be a complete weirdo you can even get the Zandalarian Hero Badge tanking trinket.

The Arathi Basin PvP set, PvP honor set, and Ironweave set all have massive armor values for cloth. There are also cloaks and rings and trinkets with high armor values. IIRC there's a Naxx robe with a fucking massive armor score too but if you are raiding naxx you have been wasting waaaaaaaayy too much time on this game. Ironweave is also somewhat of a grind for a meme set that has no fucking damage or crit, just a shitload of armor really. You're typically best off with PvP gear.

>>15814646

>locks sure just get soul link and spam scorch plus aoes

Correct, except it's called Searing Pain. If you are tanking phys damage use a Voidwalker pet for +10% phys resist. Voidwalker pet can also be sacrificed for a giant fucking shield. If you are tanking a mage boss use a Felhunter pet for +60 all resists. There's also draintanking when you just cast Drain Life and preferably keep a Siphon Life or two up so you heal as you take damage.

>perhaps not the best for anything significant but locks can off tank and pull all the shit off the healer and mage if the tank sucks

Back when I played WoW I had waaay too much experience doing precisely this. I basically consider offtank an unspoken warlock role in dungeons, in that idiots will fuck shit up and you will end up pulling mobs off of fragile casters while desperately trying to stay alive. Voidwalker pets are generally great in dungeons for off-tanking purposes. They can temporarily offtank a mob and you can sacrifice them for a giant shield as they're about to die and pull the mob yourself with Searing Pain. Of course a Succubus is better for keeping a mob CC'd, but that's humanoid only.

>if you are playing with friends you might be able to pull it off but I doubt anybody is going to take a lock as a tank for a pug unless they are really desperate and trusting

Also you don't get Soul Link before level 40. Once you have Soul Link though, you can tank dungeons just fine. If someone throws a HoT on your pet it's pretty damn hard to kill you.

That said dungeon life is pretty fucking dull once you hit 60 and all the good loot is in raids. There's no raid tanking other than Twin Emperors anyway.

>>15814942

Making MMOs is a huge investment. The publishers want dependable returns and basically pushed for WoW clones because WoW is where the money was. No one really knew how to make an MMO anyway. That said there have been better ones. If you consider Guild Wars 1 a MMO it is definitely a waaay the fuck better game, and there are some decentish Korean MMOs that are still better than WoW ever was. Mabinogi is also a better MMO, although I believe it went to shit during successive content patches, and it was also a fucking horrible grindfest. One thing I liked about Mabinogi was that gameplay was more skill-based though. Before I got bored of the grind I actually enjoyed hearing noobs screech that the game sucked and it was broken and it's fucking horrible because they were like level 30 now and still dying to like level 10 wolves. They weren't learning animals and just wanted to spam their cool attack over and over again, so they died like idiots.

Guild Wars 2 is also a straight WoW clone, in large part designed by idiots who never played Guild Wars 1 and only played WoW. IIRC Community Managers went ban crazy and started banning all the people who hated GW2 for not being Guild Wars. But GW1 is still up so there's that at least. The GW1 code is way the fuck more efficient than GW2's so they said they're basically never pulling GW1 servers since it costs them so little to run them.

>>15816204

I'd sooner play MUDs than modern MMOs tbh.

>>15815525

It's rather unacceptable that every time you try and run Deadmines you lose connection to the server for hours at a time.

>>15816264

It'd be nice if my druid didn't get teleported through the fucking world and then crash the game randomly when I charge, too.

This shit needed atleast another month of solid testing in the 1-58 area alone before it was ready.

>>15816204

not really, hunter used to take a modicum of skill. To kite and do other neat tricks in PvP and in some PvE cases.

>>15816264

having to try for 2hours to log-in wasn't fun either.

>>15816143

for priest to get threat you could just use vampiric embrace and mindflay, it generated a lot of threat. But the problem with that is early game tanking, theres not much you can do about it other then mind blast. I havent tested it out, because I just wanna see how good they can tank early game then carry on onto 40 if it works.

>>15816143

if I was to try out this tank lock build, do you suggest I focus onto affliction first or demonolgy for better pet skills and effects.

>>15816713

Oh yeah, I reckon VE adds heal threat, so that's a convenient threat multiplier for you. FYI: The Troll Priest's Shadowguard spell got patched around 1.8 to no longer do any threat. It does do a shitton of damage with spelldmg gear though, esp. if you are tanking (it has fucking crazy spelldmg scaling, to the point that it's probably the only shadow priest that scales well). And I guess you'd still get heal threat off of it with VE. Undead Priests have WotF and Devouring Plague, which are nice for PvP, but DP scales fucking horribly (DoT has massive duration and you only apply half your spelldmg because it's a drain effect).

>>15816728

Strictly speaking, Affliction is much better for leveling. A 3/3 Improved Voidwalker can tank pretty damn well though (it's also +30% threat to his threat generating abilities and +30% to his shield). If you're going to play Warlock then realize that the only time you should be eating and drinking is if you want a well-fed buff or shit. Warlocks use Life Tap to convert health into mana and use Bandages to heal up (always skill First Aid). When it comes to regular grinding, you should also have your pet (even the imp) tank a mob (two if it's voidwalker), fear another mob (or fear juggle two), and facetank yet another mob while you dot all of the mobs in the grave simultaneously. As long as you don't cast a lot of direct damage on your imp's target you won't steal his aggro. This tactic will cause your grind speed to pick up a lot. One-by-one'ing mobs is fucking bad and slow. Always grind down multiple mobs simultaneously with DoTs when you can. You can also use wands at beginning levels. IIRC there are some Enchanting wands that make some stupidly high DPS wands for the beginning levels that are even better than spamming shadowbolts. And if you have 2/2 Improved Drain Soul IIRC you need to get the finishing blow (not your pet) but finishing off with Drain Soul will give you instant mana regen to reduce your downtime further.

For PvP abuse Engineering and Alchemy are best. You can buy all the best alchemy items though. For PvE Tailoring is a must until you get a better PvE set than 3/3 Bloodvine (if you're tailoring/engi you can add Bloodvine Lens to that too). Alchemy has a bunch of sick PvP potions though (Living Action Potion, Free Action Potion, Swiftness Potion, Limited Invulnerability Potion, Invisibility Potion, Restorative Potion, and some others), PvP-handy elixirs (Lesser Poison Resist elixir iirc, used to give full-on poison immunity, now it just dispels like 4 poison effects off of you, but it uses an elixir cooldown which is like nothing instead of the potion cooldown so it's just free poison dispel), and flasks if you want to go nuts (Flask of Supreme Power and Flask of the Titans are the best, of course). Brilliant Wizard Oil is neat too (and does not vanish when you die). The Warlock's own Spellstones are also criminally underrated in PvP against non-priest spellcasters. Engineering has bullshit items like grenades, sapper charges, rocket helm, gnomish mind control cap (no longer works with Soul Link as of like 1.3 or 1.4, which also simultaneously destroyed the intended combo of Soul Link with Enslave Demon while you use Demonic Sacrifice because blizz is retarded like that, and this was never fixed since, but you can use 31 Affliction's Dark Pact to drain a mind controlled enemy out of all of his mana), Goblin Rocket Boots (great sprint on a low cd), Gnomish Rocket Boots (weaker sprint on a massive cd, but the boots don't explode, the main perk is really just that it has a separate CD from goblin rocket boots), Discombobulator Ray (instant cast slow) and Gnomish Cloaking Device (trinket that gives invis). There might be more, dunno. For a rare but great PvP trinket, Tidal Charm lets you stun enemies for 3 sec on demand. It is fucking awesome.

Horde Warlock has it best in PvP because he doesn't go up against Shaman Tremor Totem or Undead Will of the Forsaken. For Warlock racial picks Orc has the benefit of Stun resist (which is fucking amazing when it goes off) but Undead get Will of the Forsaken (you can also trinket or have a felhunter dispel this off of you). I tend to favor the Orc simply for the stun resist, but either pick works.

Even with all this though, WoW is pretty lousy and a giant time-consuming slog. If you're gonna play it, best to be a casual gamer and not one of those hardcore timewasting nutters. ZG alongside battleground rep grinds and like rank 8 PvP gear and BoE loot will usually net you some pretty solid gear without killing yourself doing one of WoW's infamously godawful endgame grinds. If you need to feel like those sick epic endgame grinders in PvP, just buy a Flask of Supreme Power (does not dispel on death) and use some Brilliant Wizard Oil and you will have like +200 spell damage and +1% crit. If you raid fucking molten core it's best to not 40 man it but instead split it up into two 20mans, since you can 20man molten core just fine (MC is really fucking easy if you're not retarded) and you will all get loot twice as fast that way, which is waaay the fuck better than grinding MC over and over again. I think AQ20 has some decent loot too, dunno. Just don't go full-fucking endgame grind or raid schedule, man.

>>15817326

>halp I have no attention span where are the meme pix???

>>>/4chan/