Friday, August 27, 2010

Some things about WoW confuse me...

When playing any kind of game you'll always stumble across things that make you wonder how the designers and developers ended up choosing that particular solution for something, anything. WoW is no exception of course. Here are some of the things I have been wondering about recently, some of them are of a pure estetic matter, others actually a little more about game mechanics.

The vomiting druid
Love often mentions how much it annoys him that druid vomit when using Berserk. Well actually they get a bunch of leaves over their heads, but when standing behind a char as you usually do when playing it, it looks like a stream of vomit. What does leaf-burst looking like vomiting have to do with berserking? Looking at other similiar spells like Bloodlust, Bloodfury and Enrage, we can see a red line. They often include the character doing an emote of /roar or similar, and sometimes turning red (or big with Bloodlust, dunno about Heroism). But leaf-burst vomiting? No I can't figure what Blizzard thought when they decided that's how the emote for druid Berserk should look.

That's some really evil looking thing you have over your head there...

The lost totem

Did you ever notice that Tremor Totem doesn't give a buff? It doesn't give a debuff either. There is in fact no way to tell if one is up, other than looking around for it, or ask your local shaman if they used it. Well of course it -does- give a buff, since you can see it in your combat log as well, and it obviusly works, but it won't show in your buff bar for some reason. In a raid setting, this seems like a stupid solution. I can see that I am affected by Mana Spring, Windfury and Flametongue Totem and all the other totems also show buffsa or debuffs, I can even tell if I have Sentry Totem up! But not Tremor Totem? Why not? Would it really be too much to ask to have it show?

Hello there tremor totem

The trainers

There is no shaman trainer on horde side on the entire continent of Eastern Kingdoms, to my knowledge (if I am wrong, please tell me!). This is extremely annoying, because every two levels that I ding my shamans, I have to do all the damn travelling between continents all over again, and even without BoA gear leveling goes really fast nowadays. Why is this? And shamans aren't the only one who have problems with their trainers. I also bother me that some classes don't have trainers in certain cities. Rp you say? Come here and I'll throw a totem at you. If I want to level my warrior in Ghostlands or my hunter in Silverpine, I should be able to do so without all the hassle of having to run all the way to another continent or city to be able to train. Yet again there is the choice between rp-factors and comfy-factors, and in this matter I think rp is secondary. It's not even that difficult to invent an rp-story that makes all trainers reside in all cities. There's a druid trainer in Silvermoon right? And paladin trainers in Undercity? So why can't we have the other trainers get there too?

And I've always wondered why Blizzard haven't put any trainers in Outlands and Northrend? The reason is quite obvious, they want people to have an incentive to return to the "old world". It's not a good reason. It's like Sony removing back compatibility from ps3 because they want people to buy less ps2 games and more ps3 games. Then make better games for the ps3 silly, removing the back compatibility was probably the most stupid thing you could do! Ok it's a side track, but I am glad I got that out of my system. Anyway, Blizzard doesn't have a -good- reason for not having trainers in Outlands and Northrend. There are still reasons to go to the old cities, like the auction houses for instance, the probably biggest reason for people to return nowadays anyway. Not having trainers in the new areas is only making it tough on the leveling people, why would you want to do that? Well maybe they have it too easy now already and Blizzard wants this to have us waste time on something at least. Heh, I could almost make this into its own subject for a post. What do you think about the trainers?

The Flightpaths
It's not so much the flightpaths as the paths leading to them. In places like Orgrimmar, Stormwind and Thunder Bluff, running to the flightpath means you'll be dismounted. I know it's a minor thing, since all I lose is like 10 seconds but it still annoys me! It annoys me because I see no good reason for it to be this way. Love speculated that maybe Blizzard didn't want people to be able to stand with their mount ontop of the Wind Rider, but since you can do that in most other cities that doessn't seem like a plausible explanation. I think it's just so simple as to that damn RP-factor, again. And again, I have no issues with RP at all, I even think it's fun but it has its time and place and this isn't one of them. Please let me stay mounted when running to my flight path, there is really no good reason not to.

The LFG-Tool
I don't know much about the exact inner workings of the LFG-Tool and how it actually works when it collects people from all over into a nice little group. It's an awesome tool and to a big part responsible to all those alts I am leveling. Being able to do midlevel instances has just made leveling chars so much more fun imo! But how come, when I get a group and one of the dps declines, it says I am being put in front of tthe dungeon queue, but the tank/healer disappears from the group? Does the dps declining from this particular setup somehow make the tank/healer end up in another group? This is extremely annoying because it means that just because some other dude decides he didn't want to go after all (or just is afk), I have to wait for another 10 min for the tool to find my group a tank. I'd really like to know more about how that works...

Can you think of any other odd/weird design choices in the game?

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