Monday, May 20, 2019

Classic Westfall: Where Dreams Meet Reality

First Death

I finished Elwynn Forest and moved on to Westfall, where I had my first death. I got attacked by a Coyote and a Coyote Packleader and foolishly decided to fight when my bubble was on cooldown. It's interesting because if it had been three coyotes, I would ran away right at the start and survived.

I also had a second death a bit later, fighting a Defias Trapper, and not realizing that a Defias Smuggler was throwing knives at me from a distance.

Dreams meet Reality

If Elwynn Forest is the zone where you see all the advantages of Classic, Westfall is where you start to see some of the disadvantages. And you realize that there was a reason Blizzard changed things.

Like one of the first quests is to kill 30 Defias, 15 trappers and 15 smugglers. You have to make a circuit of several camps, killing one Defias at a time. You run away if two of them attack you. You sit and drink after killing three or four. The respawn time is long so you have to find multiple camps.

There are some advantages to this playstyle, though. You explore a lot of the map. You usually end up working on several quests at the same time. For example, kill a couple Defias in camp A, then kill some boars for livers on the way to camp B.

Truthfully, it is kind of boring. Another thing which made it worse is that Westfall chat wasn't working in the Beta. There's a saying that MMOs are glorified chat channels, and that's true to an extent. But the chat channels work with the slow pace. The slow pace gives you time to read chat and respond in between killing a mob or two. And the chat channel makes the slow pace bearable.

Another element is that the way paladins interact with a couple of mechanics pushes solo gameplay to be even less interesting. Mana regen in Classic is governed by something called the "5 second rule". Mana only starts regenerating a full 5 seconds after you last used an ability. For most classes, this isn't an issue, because you have to spend mana to deal damage. For paladins, though, the abilities are all front-loaded. If you Seal, Judge, Seal at the start of the fight, mana regen will kick in after 5 seconds. Then if you just auto-attack, you'll get most of your mana back during the fight. The only damage you are missing out on is Judgement, and it isn't that much. Especially if Judgement gets resisted, which is rage-inducing because you realize that you killed your mana regen for nothing.

Fights are slightly longer, but you don't have to sit and drink. But game-play is atrociously boring. Press three buttons at the start, and then auto-attack for 30 seconds.

Now, obviously, playing any other class might be more interesting.

8 comments:

  1. Hehe, I love how similar your experiences are to some of my own from back when I first tried a Vanilla private server - not exactly the same thing, but close enough. I hope you end up telling us a bit more (though I'd understand if you wanted to save your energy for the actual release).

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    1. I'll probably write a little bit more. It is very surprising how much the chat channel matters, though. It's currently broken on Beta, and without it, the game is extremely lonely.

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  2. I love this! The number of npcs to be killed in Westfall does seem excessive, though I feel like they've required larger numbers like that for recent quests, too.
    As far as the length of the fights, do you think they were trying to encourage people to group up for faster kills? Also if you were grouped killing 15 or 30 wouldn't seem like so much.
    I've never understood Blizzard's design philosophy. One of the things I hope to gain from Classic is seeing how they got from there to here.

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    1. I think it's partly that they didn't really expect you to focus specifically on one quest and location. Like quest mobs are often found in several different spots. So if you wander around exploring, you'll come across mobs you need and slowly progress.

      Grouping does help a lot, though.

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  3. In terms of the slog, it sounds pretty much like Age of Conan. If there's actually other people around who are okay with grouping, I'm up for it. Hyborea, however, is kind of empty and has been for ages.

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    1. Yeah, it's a much stronger game with other people. In many ways, I think modern WoW is a reaction to that, a better game when you're purely solo.

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  4. Hehe, I guess there's a reason I deleted not only one, but two Paladins in Vanilla, both around Level 17.

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    1. True enough. I'm somewhat surprised I was able to level a paladin back in the day. I am currently leaning towards playing a different class if I do play Classic.

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