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[jsnlxndrlv]

I may not play the game, but it feels like most of my friends do. Hell, even the girl I dated back in high school has posted about her character on Facebook. Now that you guys have an entire forum on the subject, I'm hearing about it more than ever—yet I still mainly find myself reading incomprehensible analysis of particular mechanics, or whatever. While I have a bit of anthropological interest in conversations like that, most of it's pretty opaque. Like, I only just learned what PUGs are last week, but I guess I'd be interested in learning more.

For example! On Saturday I watched my former roommates take on Rotface, Festergut, and Dr. Putricide, or something. They only managed to kill Festergut, though. What's the story there? Why's Rotface's voice so goofily high-pitched, and why is Dr. Putricide so interested in sharing good news? Do Horde players fight these three, as well? If so, how do they justify having two opposing factions with so much overlap in goals?

Also, I guess the Auction House is kind of a big thing? How is it that Doom or whoever can basically be a robber-baron and single-handedly control all of [arbitrary resource] in the game's economy?

If there's only three different roles (Tank, Healer, DPS), why have so many different race/class combinations?

Proselytize WoW to friendly non-players here, I guess. And a reminder: the "I feel <emotion> about WoW!" threads are that way. Please keep that discussion over there, and we'll keep this discussion here.

[sei]

If there's only three different roles (Tank, Healer, DPS), why have so many different race/class combinations?

The short answer is that some people enjoy complexity.

There's no detail in that, though.


Those 3 archtypes break down into sub-specializations.

Healers and DPS pick, by virtue of which class they roll and how they spec it, whether they want to focus on healing/smashing the fuck out of one or two things at a time, or healing/smashing many things at a time, but not (per capita) as hard as they would be if they went for a single-target focus.

Tanking specs are a little different (for death knight).  One spec gives you more "oh, shit" buttons, while another makes you better at getting the attention of many monsters at once.  The latter is pretty much unused.  I do not believe that Paladin, Warrior, and Druid make that same decision, because they only have one tanking tree.


On top of the role specializations (many-targets vs one-target), Blizzard put certain attributes that augment the abilities of other people in the party/raid on certain classes.  Shaman damage is unimpressive, when all is said and done, compared to that of a rogue, but they bring buffs that rogues don't bring, so it could be said that in the absence of other shamans, the shaman contribution to a raid's damage output is comparable (or higher) than that of a single rogue.  Blizzard possibly thinks this is balanced.  (They have also talked about giving other classes Bloodlust, a BIG short-duration haste buff, and possibly a shaman's most significant contribution.)

My theory about why some of the classes are handled this way is that Blizzard is providing non-competitive players the opportunity to contribute.  They let someone settle into a "bitch" role (being responsible for providing a buff or debuff) at the expense of personal glory, but in exchange, expectations on them are a little lower than they might be at the top of the DPS pyramid.

This means you can be a shaman who fucks up the order of damaging abilities he uses (priority system, or skill rotation, depending on class), but no one cares that much, provided that you keep dropping your totems and using Bloodlust when the raid calls for it, and provided you don't get yourself killed.  This is because 80% (or whatever) of the use the raid gets out of you comes from you being there and using abilities that strengthen a bunch of the other players.

Meanwhile, if you are a Rogue, Death Knight, or any class with a "greedy" spec that focuses on personal DPS, rather than filling in buffs for raid DPS, you have to be putting forth more effort for the raid to be getting 80% of your character's potential out of you.

I'll edit this post later.  I have a lab report to finish.

[Shinra]

Rotface and Festergut are the semi-retarded creations of a character based almost entirely off of Professor Farnsworth from Futurama. (hence: Good news, everyone!)

Auction house barony is a game in and of itself. Essentially, it works like the commodities market - you enter the market with a specific amount of money and use that money to manipulate commodities. You ideally buy low and sell high - some commodities are always worth money (minerals, leather, certain types of food) with the price of said commodities varying based on the day of the week, the current market trends, etc. For example, the price of rhino dogs spikes when the rhino dog quest is available, or the price of stamina/expertise food goes up on tuesday because it's a big raid day and the first day of the raid week.  Other commodities are low in value or virtually valueless, or trend constantly downwards until an event comes up or a new patch launches, at which point their value spikes. You can manipulate these commodities by anticipating these events and preparing to sell when the spike hits - Doom did this last christmas with eggs and glasses of milk, which jump in value for the christmas event but are completely worthless the rest of the year. Manipulating the auctionhouse requires time, willpower, and an initial monetary investment, but for some people it's a big part of the game.

While there are three different roles, the various classes play each of those roles differently and fit into different slots. Additionally, only some classes qualify as pure roles, while others qualify as hybrid roles or support. Shamans for example can either be ranged DPS, melee DPS or healers, and underperform as pure DPS, but they provide substantial damage increases or survivability increases to their groupmates. A rogue on the other hand is just a melee DPS, but they do a lot more damage than the melee DPS hybrids because they're meant to be a pure DPSer. On top of that, the various different classes and specs that can do things excel in some areas where the other classes do not, and all play differently - some people adapt very easily to the playstyle of a warrior tank, whereas someone else might be more comfortable tanking as a paladin, druid, or death knight.

In high-tier play, each build has a 'rotation' - a set of prioritized abilities they order based on importance based on optimal data provided by persons with an understanding of the math behind the game - depending on your specific talent build, your subspec, and your class, the rotations of two characters can be completely different, varying in button presses, how forgiving the rotation is to mistakes, and in overall complexity. For example;

A destruction warlock is a caster DPS; their rotation consists, in order of priority-

Curse of Doom (if not up) / Curse of Elements (if noone else is providing this ability)
Immolate (if not up)
Conflagrate
Chaos Bolt
Incinerate

Wheras an enhancement shaman (a melee support DPS) will have a rotation that looks like this:

Feral Spirit (if off cooldown)
Shamanistic rage (if off cooldown)
Flame Shock (if not up)
Earth Shock (If flame shock is up)
Stormstrike (If debuff is not applied to target)
Chain Lightning (If Malestrom Weapon stack = 5 and # of enemies in range =2+)
Lightning Bolt (if Maelstrom Weapon stack = 5)
Stormstrike
Lava Lash
Fire Nova
Lightning Shield

The result is two classes which are very different in playstyle while providing a similar role. One person might not enjoy the warlock, but have fun playing the shaman, or the other way around. Having as many classes and specs to play a narrow range of roles affords players a greater variety of options and insures that players can have fun playing the role they want without getting stuck with a less enjoyable experience by playing a class that might be too complex, not complex enough, or just not the right feel/flavor they would like.

[sei]

Would have been better off comparing demo lock to ele shaman.

[Shinra]

yeah, but I was comparing two classes /specs I knew.

[Doom]

Also, I guess the Auction House is kind of a big thing? How is it that Doom or whoever can basically be a robber-baron and single-handedly control all of [arbitrary resource] in the game's economy?

Powered almost entirely by human stupidity and laziness. While admittedly fake gold, there's a mouth-breather populace of WoW that will go to the Auction House and buy whatever the fuck they see when they need it NOW, because they are too dumb to plan ahead.

How can I tell they are dumb?

You can buy Ice Cold Milk from every inn in the game for 5 silver for 5 milks but they will pay 1 gold for 1 milk because IT'S ON THE AUCTION HOUSE.

Also of note is that they are presumably too dumb to google "WoW + Item Name", which will turn up no less than five data-bases that will tell them how to get the item, comments from others who got the item, etc.

You just keep moving and shaking from here. There are items that are profitable and actually tangible, or ways to milk them.

You get two professions. Alchemists refine shitty gems into epic gems. You can choose an Alchemy Mastery: Potion, Transmute or Elixir. Transmutes affect shitty gems into epic gems. It just gives you a random chance to get 2-5x of your one refined random gem.

i.e. blue piece of shit and elemental fire refines to: FIVE EPIC GEM! That's 400% profit beyond your initial profit, not even adding extra costs!

And so on. But if I really wanted to be ball-bustingly riched by the time Cataclysm launched, I'd organize a firing squad of 2-4 Alchemist Transmuters. It's basically fool-proof.

[Pacobird]

To piggyback on sei's comments, WoW does a better job of playing like an action RPG than most other outings of the genre.  Rotations are fairly tight and very meaningful, so combat does require some thought and reflex in that you want to avoid dying to a given encounter's McGuffin, but you generally can't afford to be so conservative that you lose track of your rotation, because then you'll be doing half as much damage as you would otherwise.  This is especially meaningful in that many bosses have rather short time limits; Festergut is one such fight.

As an aside, many complain the game has become too easy, and I contend this comes from rotations and mechanics becoming so streamlined as to be an afterthought; we're all sort of just playing Mario 64 at this point.

[Brentai]

This thread has inspired me...

To drink a glass of ice cold milk.






Aaaaaaaaaah.  Fatty.

[Norondor]

If there's only three different roles (Tank, Healer, DPS), why have so many different race/class combinations?

There are two answers i'll give here. One is, as other people said, that even with 30 talent specs in the game, you don't really find two that play alike. At least, that's true now -- in legacy WoW, healers were all more or less identical (cast biggest heal, downranked for efficiency, on the MT as fast as possible -- the exception is Paladin who would just spam their quick heal as fast as possible because it was effectively free) and casters just repeatedly cast their big nuke (all three specs of Warlock were just expected, really, to cast Shadow Bolt over and over and over).

These days it's a lot less true, which is sometimes to the game's detriment. Hraedon, who has been a Warrior since launch, rolled a Paladin alt, and has complained about how much simpler it is to tank as a paladin -- you use less buttons, pay attention to less abilities and talents, and have a spell that just makes the floor into Angry Floor and enemies that step on it will pretty much attack you forever.

My second answer: WoW isn't a game like RO, where, as i mentioned, you could often get away with really weird skill choices, stat choices, and gear choices, in the aim of creating a really nonstandard build that worked for you (and often did something strange). My brother's friend was a Ranger in RO, but he didn't bother doing ranged damage with a bow like you expect -- he had a bow that he upgraded to fire about 5 times a second, and apply poison and slow on every hit --and in RO, poison makes you stop regenerating health and HP and become vulnerable to status effects, so when he hit you, you were fucked blind and never got to take another step for the rest of your life. In PVP guild sieges he would just stand guard near the imperium room and if anyone came in to take the castle he would just hold them in place with his bullshit arrows until someone came in to take the intruder off his hands. He didn't bother even using skills, because he could apply his stupid debuffs faster by just autoattacking (plus this left his hands free to trashtalk people).

WoW, quite simply, does not allow this.

In WoW there is more of a rigid canon. If you are a Retribution Paladin your talent build pretty much looks like this. There is a little wiggle room on the third glyph there -- you might also take Avenging Wrath or Corruption -- but that's the canon talent build, and deviating from it is usually a bad idea and you're hurting yourself and your groupmates. You want Strength, and enough crit to maintain around 30% crit chance -- more than that is a waste. Armor Penetration is never good. Agility is never good. Attack Power is sub-optimal. You don't make your own choices.

With what amounts to 30 classes in the game, the feelings of being a total fucking drone and following the blueprints are much less and you can easily change your spec to alter things significantly. Even if you never DO, the option exists.

[sei]

re: "the option exists"

Yes and no.

Gear Limitation

• You often want/need to regear when you switch specs.  Obviously, your physical dps (feral, enhancement) gear won't work for your caster dps (boomkin, elemental) spec.  Hell, even mutilate and combat (the two main dps specs for rogue) want different stats (haste vs armor penetration).
  
  • If you play outside of work, you probably have to spend a bunch of time collecting badges.
  • If you do not play outside of work, and you are functional enough as is, you probably don't get priority on the loot you need for your new* spec.  (*the one you intend to switch to)

Comp Limitation

• A raid is usually interested in trying to maximize its success.
  
  • To that end, good guilds/raids will request that you play a specific spec (or sometimes class) to fill in missing buffs, if it's a raid dps increase.  Ele shaman was pretty shitty until the last mini-patch.  If you already got the buffs it provides from other classes (demonology warlock, etc.) there was no real point having one around.
  • DPS Comp in WoW goes something like "fill in the main raid buffs necessary, then stack the flavor of the month damage class to capacity."