The Fighter's Schtick

[Crissa]

There are totally puzzle-monsters in WoW and other MMOs... The problem is, people totally know the solution and want to know the solution before they encounter it. Because of that, the game is balanced to keep a challenge up even if you know the solution, so if you don't, you're probably just going to be at the graveyard soon.

You can't do that in D&D. When the party dies, everyone is depressed, and you don't get rezzed at the graveyard or your corpse.

There are totally Dragons in WoW that kick your ass, fly up, and start nuking down on you. The Onyxia Phase Two is an example of such. When you're level 40, you totally get a horse to ride around on. When you're 60, you get to mass up with dozens of people and play siege to dragons and monsters that kick your arse. When you're 70, you get to... Get the point? Anyhow, every ten levels in WoW is a 'level bracket' - you have a series of abilities which you have access to, like flight at 70, rez at 20, mounts at 40, first specials at 10 (like stealth and Bear form), etc, etc. (Wow actually has a 10 level progression that caps at some number like 109, but we've only used it through 60 in the original release, and 70 this year; personally, I hate levelling.)

The Fighter's schtick in WoW has three parts: Focus, Damage, and Interruption.

They keep a target's focus (aggro) and otherwise taunt or interrupt the monster from hitting other characters - in D&D you do this with tactics, bluff, intimidate, attacks of opportunity. WoW doesn't let you physically stop an opponent, you have to yell at it instead.

Damage. In WoW, as in D&D, the one way to get rid of an opponent is to beat them up. So every class has abilities designed to do Damage. No abilities in WoW can permently take an opponent out of combat except Damage.

Interruption. Warriors in WoW have Shield Bash, Kick, and Yell to interrupt another's actions. In D&D we don't really have a way to force a failure on a concentration check. But in WoW, a Warrior can keep an opponent from doing useful actions for a period.

There's other jobs in WoW - Support, to heal other players; CC (which is Interruption that doesn't take of all the character's actions); etc. Interruption is usually considered less optimal than CC, but it is really nasty in PvP.

Druids, for instance, can do Damage in two ways, Tank, or Heal. But these only work 'very well' by devoting Talents (like Feats) to the task. Which makes them 'worse' than someone who hasn't. In D&D we tend to have these tasks determined long ahead.

-Crissa

[MrWaeseL]

(Wow actually has a 10 level progression that caps at some number like 109, but we've only used it through 60 in the original release, and 70 this year; personally, I hate levelling.)

Really? What other abilties are they going to add then?

[Falgund]

Well, next extention may contain Northrend (Ice continent) and Maelstrom (Underwater), so maybe the next thing after flying will be an underwater mount. And, to stay on topic and talk about the fighter shtick, warriors can already charge the enemies, but they maybe able to drag an opponent to them (aka Mortal Combat Scorpion), throw an ally on an opponent (battlefield control shticks), or maybe a shout that steals nearby friends lifeforce to temporarily raise its power.

Another exemple like Onyxia:
In order to temporarily remove C'thun body immunity, you need to let a few players be eaten by it and kill some tentacles in its stomac (don't ask me how they go out of it), all the while many tentacles grow from the ground and try to overwhelm your group. And this is after beating its Giant Eye that shoot lasers !

Youtube movie of Cthun fight

[virgil]

Meh, WoW is hard-coded to be a game of numbers. Hell, one of the developers outright admitted the game is a MUD with graphics. Since your ability to do anything that matters to the world around (can't even move a chair), your sole ability is to fight; and even then, you are only allowed to fight in a manner the developers permit you to fight, and do their best to smite you for even mildly deviating from their exact manner.

You would think with something with these kind of limits, the game would be more balanced, but it's not. To this day, droves of fanboys rail against the developers like they were apathetic gods, howling about how they're completely unbalanced in one way or another. This is despite the fact Blizzard has money piling in, and teams of people whos sole job is to balance 8 classes.

But, like how one WotC employee admits that they don't have to do crap to sell D&D, Blizzard spends its time instead designing the game to be more addictive and how to keep their players only just pissed off enough to whine without actually quitting the game.

[Nerem]

Because fanboys are logical beings.

Seriously though, its an MMORPG. More to the point, its a VIDEO GAME. Unless you have something crazy like Second Life where the players can code anything you want, you can /only play how the designers let you/ because /that's all a video game is/.

[virgil]

I meant it in a more severe manner, as the developers can change their mind as you play the game and come up with new strategies, and their response to the new strategies is to change the game so that you can only use the strategy they originally decided on.

[Falgund]

Well, then you enter the "Creative use of Mechanic vs Bug Exploit !" debate ...

And this is not always what happens. By example, to succeed on phase 1 Razorgore, you have to Mind Control him in order to break all the eggs in the room, while a lot of adds (orcs and drakonids) appears and try to kill him. The strategy initially conceived by the developers was that the players should kill all the orcs while fearing, sleeping or kiting (ie keep running out of reach) the drakonids (you would have just enough players with the needed skills to allow this).
This strategy required (in addition to competence) a lot of equipment from the previous zone to achieve the necessary damage.

This is why the first popular strategy for this phase, was to also kite many of the orcs, using shaman and warrior skills that didn't work against the drakonids. (Youtube video, with Benny Hill music, Youtube video, more serious). When people did reach the needed damage, most of them switched to the intended strategy (less subject to mistakes), but first one was never disabled by the developers.

Many people also used similar technics to solo content normally designed for 5 characters or more ...(Some Long Google Videos and a Youtube one)


PS:
Maybe we should split this thread, it starts to be completly out of topic.

[Crissa]

1184711992[/unixtime]]I meant it in a more severe manner, as the developers can change their mind as you play the game and come up with new strategies, and their response to the new strategies is to change the game so that you can only use the strategy they originally decided on.

While WoW isn't the worst example of this (and the developer quoted as it being a MUD was an EQ developer, and that is based upon MUD coding...

Last month they put in a patch where players couldn't randomly/specifically decide who got 'worthless' items. Why?

...Because apparently they put in a puzzle in a dungeon with a worthless quest item where you had to then move the character with the item to the other end of the dungeon.

Which then meant that any other worthless items could'n' be decided upon by players, and when the game decides to give the item to Joe-can't-be-bothered-to-pay-attention your dungeon group fails. Also, the game doesn't tell you who it assigned the item to, or even if the item exists until it is fetched by that player.

So frustrating.

But if, within the game rules, you decide that having the Mage sit in a block of ice for two seconds is better than a Warrior absorbing the damage - or a Bear, or whatever - that's within the rules.

The idea that strategies that involve standing on a piece of terrain that mobs fall through is within the rules is like saying the PCs win whenever the monster's minature falls off the table!

Some things aren't part of the game.

-Crissa